Evolution of Online User Behavior During a Social Upheaval

Social media represent powerful tools of mass communication and information diffusion. They played a pivotal role during recent social uprisings and political mobilizations across the world. Here we present a study of the Gezi Park movement in Turkey through the lens of Twitter. We analyze over 2.3 million tweets produced during the 25 days of protest occurred between May and June 2013. We first characterize the spatio-temporal nature of the conversation about the Gezi Park demonstrations, showing that similarity in trends of discussion mirrors geographic cues. We then describe the characteristics of the users involved in this conversation and what roles they played. We study how roles and individual influence evolved during the period of the upheaval. This analysis reveals that the conversation becomes more democratic as events unfold, with a redistribution of influence over time in the user population. We conclude by observing how the online and offline worlds are tightly intertwined, showing that exogenous events, such as political speeches or police actions, affect social media conversations and trigger changes in individual behavior.Comment: Best Paper Award at ACM Web Science 201

IDENTIFYING INFLUENCERS FOR PSYOP

Social media has become one of the primary modes of communication throughout the world, especially in developed countries. Nearly every user of social media in its various forms or applications has an audience he or she can influence and a set of influencers from which he or she receives information. U.S. Psychological Operations (PSYOP) personnel focus on influencing foreign target audiences in their audience’s own language but have been slow to adapt to the use of social media as a means of influence. Drawing from principles used in influencer marketing, we ask, How can U.S. PSYOP forces and their partners best identify social media influencers with whom they can partner in their effort to change the behavior of foreign target audiences? Through this study, we identified the main factors for influence on social media using both quantitative and qualitative analysis and developed a decision-making tool to identify the key communicators, in particular social media influencers, who can elicit the desired behavioral change in a target audience. The seven-category influencer scorecard we created provides a low-tech, situationally adaptable method for identifying influencers with whom U.S. PSYOP can partner to execute a PSYOP series.Major, United States ArmyMajor, United States ArmyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited

Youth Activism and Public Space in Egypt

Examines youth activists' use of virtual and physical public spaces before, during, and after the January 25 Revolution. Profiles three organizations and analyzes the power and limitations of social media to spur civic action, as well as the role of art

A Study of Norm Formation Dynamics in Online Crowds

In extreme events such as the Egyptian 2011 uprising, online social media technology enables many people from heterogeneous backgrounds to interact in response to the crisis. This form of collectivity (an online crowd) is usually formed spontaneously with minimum constraints concerning the relationships among the members. Theories of collective behavior suggest that the patterns of behavior in a crowd are not just a set of random acts. Instead they evolve toward a normative stage. Because of the uncertainty of the situations people are more likely to search for norms. Understanding the process of norm formation in online social media is beneficial for any organization that seeks to establish a norm or understand how existing norms emerged. In this study, I propose a longitudinal data-driven approach to investigate the dynamics of norm formation in online crowds. In the research model, the formation of recurrent behaviors (behavior regularities) is recognized as the first step toward norm formation; and the focus of this study is on the first step. The dataset is the tweets posted during the Egyptian 2011 movement. The results show that the social structure has impact on the formation of behavioral regularities, which is the first step of norm formation. Also, the results suggest that accounting for different roles in the crowd will uncover a more detailed view of norm and help to define emergent norm from a new perspective. The outcome indicates that there are significant differences in behavioral regularities between different roles formed over time. For instance, the users of the same role tend to practice more reciprocity inside their role group rather than outside of their role. I contribute to theory first by extending the implications of current relevant theories to the context of online social media, and second by investigating theoretical implications through an analysis of empirical real-life data. In this dissertation, I review prior studies and provide the theoretical foundation for my research. Then I discuss the research method and the preliminary results from the pilot studies. I present the results from the analysis and provide a discussion and conclusion

A Sociotechnical View of Information Diffusion and Social Changes: From Reprint to Retweet

This research in progress study explores the role of Twitter during the 2011 Egypt revolution. Drawing on a research method of historians who investigated the role of print technology during the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe during the early 16th century, we explicate the socio-technical implications of information diffusion through retweeting during radical social changes. Through retweet analysis, we identify inseparable dynamics of (1) existence of a few opinion leaders, (2) a large number of supporting individuals, and (3) the emergence of attendant collective sense-making process as a critical antecedent of radical social changes

#HashtagSolidarities: Twitter debates and networks in the MENA region

During the course of the so-called Arab Spring, observers were quick to refer to the uprisings as »Facebook revolutions« or »Twitter revolutions«. Although the important role of social media in the 2011 upheavals in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is widely acknowledged, its impact on political processes in the region remains contested and contradictory. Rather than looking at social media through a transformation or security lens, the research presented here focused on how debates on three events in the MENA region – the emergence of a video of a rape on Cairo’s Tahrir Square in June 2014, anti-fracking protests in southern Algeria in early 2015, and Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Yemen in March 2015 – unfolded on Twitter. Closely tracing Twitter debates on these incidents shed light on Twitter’s role in important social and political discussions as well as on the scope and patterns of Twitter networks and digital solidarities. In other words, it highlighted the various ways in which Twitter was used by ordinary people, activists, media outlets, and officials, and in doing so, it provides an idea of the political impact such debates can have via Twitter. The research also revealed that the breadth of opinion on Twitter far exceeds that of traditional media in the MENA region, and the more repressive a context, the more important Twitter becomes. Furthermore, Twitter, in forging digital solidarities, contributes to deepening existing social and political cleavages. That is, the platform is not an autonomous digital space following logics different from those in the physical world. Rather, the dynamics of Twitter are strongly driven by local historical experience, social patterns, and national politics. (Autorenreferat

The Egyptian Revolution Goes Viral: Reading Categories of Tweets in the Twitter-created Networked Public Sphere

The expansion of online social media (OSM) and networked information technology (NIT) use has coincided with reinvigorated democratic movements around the world, including the toppling of authoritarian governments in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011. This paper examines the variety of uses for Twitter during the Egyptian revolution, as Hosni Mubarak’s regime collapsed in less than three weeks after 30 years in power. To achieve this analysis, this paper first divided the revolution into Fisk’s four stages of political crisis. Next, the authors extracted 37,634 tweets containing key words from an archive of 16 million tweets collected from January 23-February 8, 2011. It then identified 14 categories of tweets (including Call to Action, Information Sharing, Expression of Support, and Opinion) by manually annotating a randomly selected sample of nearly 6,000 sent during the uprising. This manual annotation allowed the authors to develop category-specific patterns. After entering these patterns into a Java program, the authors ran an Automatic Content Analysis that tallied the number of tweets in each category per stage of political crisis. By correlating the Content Analysis results with the known chronology of the revolution, the results provide the answers to several questions regarding the use of Twitter during the political crisis. Throughout the revolution, Twitter was primarily used as an information-sharing tool, distributing news, updates, and critical information to protesters. As the crisis progressed, however the uses of Twitter adapted to various government policies and developments in the uprising. This examination of Twitter use can also serve as a stepping stone for other political or information scientists interested in studying the networked public sphere (NPS) and how the use of technology affects political movements

Impact of social media on political participation of Egyptian youth

This study aims at examining the role played by social media in empowering and encouraging the Egyptian youth for political participation. Previous studies found that traditional media have not been influential enough to drive youth\u27s political participation. On the other hand, recent studies found that social media have a significant role in this respect. The current study investigates the possible roles of the social media in the transition to democracy in Egypt; questioning the ability of social media to act as a platform where citizens are represented and empowered enough to transform virtual online discussions to real life actions. The study was carried out on a purposive sample of 400 young Egyptians aged 18-30 based on the statistics of social media users in Egypt. A sample of opinion leaders and elites in the field was also studied. The research follows a triangulation by combining two research methodologies; survey as a quantitative method and in-depth interviews as a qualitative one. The theoretical framework is Uses and Gratifications Theory. According to the findings of the study, social media became most prominent among youth in Egypt after January 25th Revolution. The study also found that most Egyptian youth use social media on a daily basis. Egyptian youth consider social media as a platform through which they manage to share their common concerns and possibly turn it into collective real-life actions; which reflects their interest in becoming more politically involved