Signs of criticality in social explosions

Abstract

The success of an on-line movement could be defined in terms of the shift to large-scale and the later off-line massive street actions of protests. The role of social media in this process is to facilitate the transformation from small or local feelings of disagreement into large-scale social actions. The way how social media achieves that effect is by growing clusters of people and groups with similar effervescent feelings, which otherwise would not be in touch with each other. It is natural to think that these kinds of macro social actions, as a consequence of the spontaneous and massive interactions, will attain the growth and divergence of those clusters, like the correlation length of statistical physics, giving rise to important simplifications on several statistics. In this work, we report the presence of signs of criticality in social demonstrations. Namely, similar power-law exponents are found whenever the distributions are calculated either considering time windows of the same length or with the same number of hashtag usages. In particular, the exponents for the distributions during the event were found to be smaller than before the event, and this is also observed either if we count the hashtags only once per user or if all their usages are considered. By means of network representations, we show that the systems present two kinds of high connectedness, characterised by either high or low values of modularity. The importance of analysing systems near a critical point is that any small disturbance can escalate and induce large-scale—nationwide—chain reactions.