Structural and Dynamical Patterns on Online Social Networks: the Spanish May 15th Movement as a case study (original) (raw)
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Introduction. The 15-M movement (also referred to as the Anti-austerity Movement, the Indignados Movement, and Take the Square), marked a turning point in the way of understanding politics at all levels in Spain. Even today, political party Podemos is considered to be the direct heir of this movement, which occupied the front-pages of newspapers around the world in the weeks following the demonstrations of 15 May 2011 and sent aftershocks across the globe. The power of the Spanish civil society was manifested in full force, turning aside from political parties and politicised groups. This revolution was made possible by online social networks, which allowed previous movements to unify into one. Thanks to today's technology, social networks can be monitored to capture their importance in the genesis, development and maintenance of this popular movement. Methods and results. The study is based on the review of Twitter's key indicators, such as the trending topics and hashtags, as well as the review of the birth of the movement and its main lines of work, based on the dissemination of its activity, rather than on a sociological or content analysis perspective. The conclusions are in line with those drew in previous research works, which have served as the statistical corpus to frame the data obtained through empirical methods that are not commonly used in the social sciences.
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Recent grassroots movements have suggested that online social networks might play a key role in their organization, as adherents have a fast, many-to-many, communication channel to help coordinate their mobilization. The structure and dynamics of the networks constructed from the digital traces of protesters have been analyzed to some extent recently. However, less effort has been devoted to the analysis of the semantic content of messages exchanged during the protest. Using the data obtained from a microblogging service during the brewing and active phases of the 15M movement in Spain, we perform the first large scale test of theories on collective emotions and social interaction in collective actions. Our findings show that activity and information cascades in the movement are larger in the presence of negative collective emotions and when users express themselves in terms related to social content. At the level of individual participants, our results show that their social integration in the movement, as measured through social network metrics, increases with their level of engagement and of expression of negativity. Our findings show that non-rational factors play a role in the formation and activity of social movements through online media, having important consequences for viral spreading.
Understanding Social Dynamics in Online Social Network
Social network systems are significant platform for political, economic, and socio cultural change. The understanding and modelling of social dynamics in a complex and unpredictable world, appeared as a research target of particular importance. Success in this direction can produce valuable knowledge as to how social phenomena form and evolve in varying socioeconomic contexts comprising economic crises, societal disasters, cultural differences and security threats among others. The study of social dynamics occurring in the aforementioned contexts with the methodological tools originating from the self organized criticality principle, is the research approach we propose in this paper. In addition, considering the fact that online social media serve as platforms of individual expression and public dialogue, we anticipate that the study related to the consideration of social equilibrium, will significantly contribute to understanding, predicting and monitoring social phenomena taking place on both online social networks.