Abstract
This study offers a comprehensive approach towards analyzing and explaining the role of Twitter in shaping and facilitating social movements especially during protests. It presents automatic and manual analyses of the tweet themes, usage characteristics and major Twitter users during a public outcry against a gangrape incident in Delhi, the capital city of India. Our results identified Twitter as an important channel for the diffusion of ideas and news among a vast set of adopters in defiance of geographical boundaries. Results of the content analyses highlight the prominent use of social media resources in disseminating information on Twitter, and the remarkable role of Twitter users as citizen journalists during the days of the protest. Results of the social network analysis suggest that major role players on Twitter were the offline protest leaders.
Highlights
IntroductionIn India, the Indian urban population is a force to reckon with at middle class is a force to reckon with at 420 million strong, of which more than half belong to the upcoming middle class
JeDEM 1(5): 28-58, 2013 inefficacies of their government
Our findings are consistent with previous research on use of social media and protests which recognizes the fact that tweeting is most common during the days of major protest as compared to other days (Bajpai & Jaiswal, 2011; Eart et al, 2013)
Summary
In India, the Indian urban population is a force to reckon with at middle class is a force to reckon with at 420 million strong, of which more than half belong to the upcoming middle class In both protests, social media was widely used by the activists and the general public who participated in the protest. The Delhi gangrape protests make an interesting case study to analyze the use of Twitter because for the first time in India’s new information communication technologies (ICTs) environment Twitter was extensively used during major protests, allowing a small, but growing part of the Indian public to transform India’s ‘public sphere’ thereby triggering India’s Arab Spring. There have been number of studies exploring the usage of Twitter in social movements such as the Arab uprisings; as with protest and ICT research, few of them have focused on Twitter use during protest events (Earl et al, 2013)
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