Abstract
Recent years have witnessed waves of protests sweeping across countries and continents, in some cases resulting in political and governmental change. Much media attention has been focused on the increasing usage of social media to coordinate and provide instantly available reports on these protests. Here, we investigate whether it is possible to identify protest outbreaks through quantitative analysis of activity on the photo sharing site Flickr. We analyse 25 million photos uploaded to Flickr in 2013 across 244 countries and regions, and determine for each week in each country and region what proportion of the photographs are tagged with the word “protest” in 34 different languages. We find that higher proportions of “protest”-tagged photographs in a given country and region in a given week correspond to greater numbers of reports of protests in that country and region and week in the newspaper The Guardian. Our findings underline the potential value of photographs uploaded to the Internet as a source of global, cheap and rapidly available measurements of human behaviour in the real world.
Highlights
Smartphones and computers are becoming an indispensible part of everyday life in many countries around the globe
We examine to which extent data on the number of photographs tagged with the word “protest” and uploaded to Flickr reflect the ground truth data extracted from The Guardian
We investigate whether data on photographs uploaded to the photo sharing website Flickr may be of use in identifying protest outbreaks
Summary
Smartphones and computers are becoming an indispensible part of everyday life in many countries around the globe. Usage of these devices and the online services they connect us to is generating fast and cheap measurements of human behaviour at a global scale. Studies to date have demonstrated that appropriate analyses of these online datasets can offer estimates of key economic and health indicators before official figures are released [10, 27,28,29,30] and in some cases, improve forecasts of real world economic decision making [13,14,15, 17,18,19]. Much media attention has been focused on the increasing usage of social media to coordinate and provide instantly
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