Abstract
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.
Highlights
The Occupy and M movements are recent examples of self-organized social movements that appeared in developed countries in response to a widespread perception of social and economical inequality [, ]
We address how emotional interaction supports the creation of social movements and how emotional expressions lead to the involvement of the participants of the movement
We quantify emotions in the tweets related to the M movement through sentiment analysis on a dataset of tweets selected by the hashtags related to the M movement, as explained in the Materials and Methods section
Summary
The Occupy and M movements are recent examples of self-organized social movements that appeared in developed countries in response to a widespread perception of social and economical inequality [ , ]. While these movements address a wide range of problems in different countries, they share a common factor, their usage of social media to communicate, organize, and deliberate about the purpose of the movement and its actions [ , ]. The existence of collective actions and social movements requires considerations beyond rational decisions, including emotions [ ] and social influence [ ] between the participants of a social movement.
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