Twitter Revolution Research Articles

Collective Action, Memories of 1989, and Social Media

How does social media facilitate deliberation and collective remembering of past revolutions amid protests in democratizing contexts? To explore this question, I performed a qualitative and quantitative analysis of a unique archive of tweets posted during Moldova’s Twitter Revolution in 2009. The research revealed that Twitter enabled users living in Moldova and Romania to connect online, share information, and chat about the meanings of revolution, civil society activism, and resistance to state oppression, all while providing updates to Western media and warning the public about human rights abuses. Also, the research uncovered that the #pman audiences from Moldova and Romania framed the protest differently. Whereas the Moldovans regarded it as a demonstration against election fraud, the Romanian twitterers framed the events as an anti-communist uprising analogous to the 1989 Revolution, which they mythologized to extract useful strategies for action communicated to the Moldovan activists. Moreover, twitterers from both countries engaged in a transborder conversation about unionism and national identity. Despite Twitter’s documented positive impact on political engagement and Western media reporting, it simultaneously contributed to misinformation through the circulation of rumors, conspiracy theories, and calls for violence.

Five Hundred Days of Farsi Twitter

International media was quick to dub the Iranian Green Movement a “Twitter revolution” when it erupted in the summer of 2009. State violence against protestors was captured in real time and broadcast worldwide on social media, providing an early example of a regime's helplessness at locking down a narrative in the face of ubiquitous smart phones. Over a decade later, nearly all foreign social media remain officially blocked in Iran, yet Iranians evade state suppression and remain connected to the global community. This article introduces a new dataset of all Farsi-language tweets since September 2019. To date, this amounts to the full text and associated metadata of over 500 million tweets and the evidence shows that the overwhelming majority of this content originates from within the borders of Iran. The study describes the scope of Iran's continued connection to the global community via Twitter, descriptively explores the content of that social media, evaluates what this means for Iranian politics and society, and explores its broader implications for researchers in the age of social media. In particular, we argue that the demonstrated ability to collect the voices of citizens, even from one of the most repressive digital regimes in the world, provides an invaluable framework for scholars with even minimal resources to undertake large-scale digital ethnography.

Communicative Capitalism and Neo-Feudalism: An Interview with Jodi Dean

Communicative Capitalism and Neo-Feudalism: An Interview with Jodi Dean

“Everyone Had to be Part of This:” Social Media and Uprising Participation Decisions

Ten years after the Arab Spring there remains much that we do not understand about the role of social media in uprisings. An enthusiastic western news media was quick to label the 2009 Iranian uprising ‘The Twitter Revolution’ despite the marginal level of Twitter penetration in Iran at the time. The same news media in 2021 immediately attributed the US Capitol uprising to the proliferation of disinformation on social media, despite many additional complicated social factors. While scholars of different fields have attempted to explain the role of social media in uprisings since 2011, there is little more we understand about the role of social media in the January 2021 US Capitol uprising than the 2009 Green uprising in Iran. The objective of this project is to develop a framework for better understanding the relationship between social media and citizen decisions to participate in uprisings that persists through the many different examples we have seen since 2009. This study contributes to the literature by providing a game theoretic structure based on the strategic interdependence of individual behavior to better understand uprising activity in oppressive states and democracies. We explore the role of social media in uprisings by considering uprisings as a multi-player game, using Schelling’s (1978) critical mass game to model uprisings and consider the potential impact of social media on behavior. We then apply this model to the February 2011 revolution in Egypt and the 2009 Green Movement protests in Iran, testing it with data from in-depth interviews on participation decisions. If we understand uprisings as such a critical mass game, then we see that social media impacts behavior (and thus outcomes) if it can change either individuals’ underlying feelings and participation thresholds (i.e. the shape of the population’s participation curve), or their perception of the number of others who will join the uprising (i.e. the population’s position along the curve). We analyze data from interviews with Egyptians and Iranians about their decisions to join the protests or not to test the applicability of the critical mass model and to better understand the specific effects of social media use. We find in many ways individuals do make their participation decisions largely consistent with the critical mass model. The support for the role of social media in these decisions is less strong, but suggests it can impact participation by providing information regarding participation levels, assessing the benefits and costs of participating, and triggering emotions, sometimes changing opinions of the government.

ПРОТИВОБОРСТВО СФЕР СИЛЫ В ВОПРОСАХ УПРАВЛЕНИЯ В ИНФОРМАЦИОННОМ ПРОСТРАНСТВЕ

The article deals with the problem of Internet governance in the context of international information security, which is quite new for political theory and international law, on a systematic basis. The advanced development of the technical base of the Internet, the attitude of the absolute majority of users to it as to new, powerful means of communication, without taking into account the conceptually inherent threats and risks, including political and even military ones, sharply complicate the creation of an international system of control over its use. Considered as a generalized concept, the Internet still does not have a clear definition. At the same time, even "advanced" Internet users rarely go beyond the knowledge that these resources, being included in open information networks and using the capabilities of public global communication networks, allow the storage, processing and exchange of information in a telecommunication mode. The question of who and how controls this process is not of interest to many. This uncertainty of the Internet environment is actively used by a number of states and IT corporations to solve their problems at the expense of the common good and public safety. Moreover, attempts to build a system of law in the Internet space as the development of the existing system of international security meets with resistance. As a result of the analysis of the practice of building an Internet governance system based on the principle of multistakeholderism, the presented article shows that this component of global communication in its current form, although it is caused by natural social and technical processes, acts in the interests of the United States and carries the potential of threats to peoples and countries. whose government policy does not allow Washington to classify them as "democratic" and "friendly". The recent Twitter revolutions are examples of this. Among the goals of their organizers today are the states of the Caspian region and the South of Russia. Accompanying and facilitating globalization, the Internet creates new opportunities and new, including strategic, risks. There are still no international legal mechanisms to prevent them. The development of the latter is an urgent task of modern law and diplomacy.

#BlackProtest from the web to the streets and back: Feminist digital activism in Poland and narrative potential of the hashtag

In this article, I would like to take a somewhat closer look at the politics of hashtags surrounding wave of street actions known as Black Protest (Czarny Protest), held nation-wide in Poland on October 2016. Analysing the use of social media as the form of digital activism, I strive at both mitigating the fallacy of digital dualism and demystifying the notion of ‘Twitter revolutions’. The term was popularized by over-enthusiastic accounts of the social movements between 2009 and 2011. I propose to see the employment of social media platforms as the form of weak opposition and to some extent, to explain its efficiency by the ability to reclaim and mobilize the narrative power of hashtags. ‘Weak’ here means everyday, often mundane, and hence under-recognized acts as opposed to activity considered ‘heroic’ and placed in the spotlight, with all gender-based ideological and interpretative undercurrents associated with such a juxtaposition.

Twitter diplomacy as an instrument of foreign policy communication

Currently, social networks are increasingly being used as an effective medium for public diplomacy. The article is devoted to the consideration of the phenomenon of Twitter diplomacy and its role in the foreign policy of most countries of the world. The events of recent years show that Twitter has not only become a new tool in diplomatic activity, but also changed the way the diplomatic processes themselves are perceived. Diplomats and world political leaders have begun to understand the benefits of some of Twitter's services and capabilities to maintain the most favorable relationships in a networked public space. Thanks to Twitter, the relationship between social networks and diplomacy began to transform into a dynamically developing modern phenomenon, showing that social networks can play both negative (Twitter revolutions, social instability, the formation of negative public opinion, etc.), and a positive important role in building favorable relations and ensuring peace between peoples. Therefore, Twitter today remains the most popular social network for world political leaders and foreign ministries of several countries.

‘Mobile Phones and the Internet, Mate’: (Social) Media, Art, and Revolution in Omar Robert Hamilton’s The City Always Wins

In his novel about the Egyptian Revolution, The City Always Wins (2017), Omar Robert Hamilton shows that the alternative media possess mass engagement and global reach, while threatening power. However, over the course of his novel Hamilton traces the crushing of the ‘Twitter revolution’ and the rise of a disillusionment and despair among the revolutionaries. This downward trajectory is typified both in the appellative journey from Hamilton’s non-profit media collective Mosireen—‘those who insist’—to the novel’s similar group, portentously named Chaos; and in the text’s reverse-chronological structure of ‘Tomorrow’, ‘Today’, and ‘Yesterday’. The author uses Twitter as an archive of an alternative, resistant history of revolutionary struggle; he embeds Tweets in the fabric of this experimental novel; and social media posts interrupt and punctuate the narrative as in the real life of his millennial characters. In this article I explore the novel’s representations of (social) media and the impact these have both on everyday lives and modes of protest. Despite promising beginnings, the internet ultimately turns ‘toxic’ and is depicted as a Pandora’s box of dis- and misinformation, conspiracy theories, fake news, and the manipulations of state media lackeys. A more lasting alternative to media may be ‘creative insurgency’. As such, I conclude this article by discussing what art can achieve that (citizen) journalism cannot, and how this applies to the novel’s portrayals of art, particularly music.

Secretive organisations: anarchism after platform capitalism

Geert Lovink and Ned Rossiter's Organization After Social Media interrogate what our relation to the Internet in general, social media platforms, and organised networks in particular should be after botched Twitter revolutions, NSA counter-insurgencies and a rising disillusionment with "platform capitalism." Seeking to find a way for activists to operate in secret networks the authors suggest a future between what they see as the double pitfalls of crises-ridden conventional organisations and offline romanticism.

Mapping the political landscape of Persian Twitter: The case of 2013 presidential election

The fallacy of premature designations such as “Iran's Twitter Revolution” can be attributed to the empirical gap in our knowledge about such sociotechnical phenomena in non-Western societies. To fill this gap, we need in-depth analyses of social media use in those contexts and to create detailed maps of online public environments in such societies. This paper aims to present such cartography of the political landscape of Persian Twitter by studying the case of Iran's 2013 presidential election. The objective of this study is twofold: first, to fill the empirical gap in our knowledge about Twitter use in Iran, and second, to develop computational methods for studying Persian Twitter (e.g., effective methods for analyzing Persian text) and identify the best methods for addressing different issues (e.g., topic detection and sentiment analysis). During Iran's 2013 presidential election, three million tweets were collected and analyzed using social network analysis and machine learning. The findings provide a more nuanced view of the political landscape of Persian Twitter and identify patterns in accordance with or in contrast to those identified in the English-speaking Twittersphere around the 2013 presidential election. Persian Twitter was dominated by micro-celebrities, whereas institutional elites dominated English discourse about Iran on Twitter. The results also illustrate that Persian Twitter in 2013 was predominantly in favor of reformists. Finally, this study demonstrates that sentiment analysis toward political name entities can be used efficiently for mapping the political landscape of conversation on Twitter.

The #Rhetoric of Waleed Aly’s “Send Forgiveness Viral”: Is Rogerian argumentation an appropriate response to racism?

In 2016, Waleed Aly, a prominent Muslim Australian academic and media personality, made an argument using the Twitter hashtag “Send Forgiveness Viral” that asked for empathy in the face of Islamophobia. While initially appealing, deeper consideration of his use of and appeal to his audience to use Rogerian strategies to combat racism presents problems. Can Rogerian argumentation strategies be utilized to combat racism? Using Aly’s #SendForgivenessViral argument as a case study, this article evaluates Rogerian argumentation and empathic response in therapeutic situations compared to arguments about discrimination, particularly those taking place through social media. While scholarly writing by Lassner (1990) and Ede (1984) is dated, they provide pertinent and influential ideas to consider. More recent scholarship used to evaluate #SendForgivenessViral includes arguments on race, rhetoric, and Twitter revolutions by Brock (2012), D’Cruz (2017), Gerbaudo (2012), Margolin (2017), and Roose (2016). Other sources will be drawn from contemporary social media responses to Aly’s segment. This article concludes that Aly’s use of Rogerian argumentation is flawed because it places the onus of combatting racism onto victims. Furthermore, Rogerian argumentation models have underlying problems with power relations.

The ruling coalitions in the Republic of Moldova after the “Twitter Revolution” – the policy of integration or desintegration?

The ruling coalitions in the Republic of Moldova after the “Twitter Revolution” – the policy of integration or desintegration?

Strategie persuasive in rete. Note per un’analisi semiotica della “rivoluzione Twitter” in Iran come media event

Il saggio offre un’analisi semiologica della funzione discorsiva e narrativa manifestata da alcuni elementi (con particolare riguardo a immagini e hashtags) del racconto mediatico degli eventi occorsi in Iran durante quella che nel 2009 fu appellata “rivoluzione Twitter”.

Can The Subaltern Tweet? Reflections on Twitter as a Space of Appearance and Inequality in Accessing Visibility

Defining contemporary social movements as ‘Twitter revolutions’ has become increasingly common. A wide array of studies, however, suggest that social media and political participation have a comple...

Politics and the Twitter Revolution: A Brief Literature Review and Implications for Future Research

This study conducted a review of the literature on Twitter and politics. The review is summarized under three inter-related themes: 1) does social media help politicians to be elected? 2) who benefits from social media? and 3) political polarization on Twitter. Regarding the first theme, some studies find a strong support for the argument that politicians may create electoral benefits from adopting this new technology, while others fail to find such evidence. Evidence regarding the second query is also mixed. Many have believed that underdogs may benefit the most from social media uses, but several studies challenge this claim by showing that the already established and popular politicians may be those who gain most from their Twitter uses. Taken altogether, previous evidence regarding the first and second queries is mixed. However, previous studies still find strong evidence of increasingly polarizing public opinions on Twitter and of social media’s contribution to this trend.

Online radicalization and social media: A case study of Daesh

Abstract The importance of the Internet and social media in politics has been demonstrated in previous years, when terms such as ‘Twitter revolution’ and ‘Facebook revolution’ were used repeatedly for several movements, and now new terms such as ‘digital threat’ and ‘digital Jihad’ are being used by many in similar fashion. In the age of the Internet, the advantages often associated with the democratizing effect of the Internet are creating an atmosphere for different users, such as Daesh. Global propaganda is an important part of Daesh’s activities, and radicalization is one of the realities of our era. Although the impact of the Internet and social media on processes of people’s radicalization remains a highly contested subject and has been one of the most controversial topics during the last decade, the main question is whether the Internet is the main factor in the radicalization of civilians, considering that some politicians and pundits have been discussing this issue over the past few years, or it is more of a communication tool, facilitator and catalyst, pushing people towards radicalization. In this article, I discuss two different approaches to the relationship between technology (online activities in different platforms) and radicalization. This article is part of an ongoing research project.

A revolutionary crowd model: Implemented to contrast oscillating to consistent media influence on crowd behavior

Since Le Bon introduced his profound theory about the crowd in 1895, the phenomenon has been investigated across a range of scientific disciplines. Nevertheless, the mystery of the popular mind seems so far unrevealed, especially with the emergence of unfamiliar crowd movements, such as Twitter revolutions, which are triggered by novel types of media and interpersonal communication. Such original collective behavior, along with the current turbulent sociopolitical global environment, has necessitated the development of explanatory contemporary models. This research introduces a new revolutionary crowd model with a unique set of internal and external factors that can fit the modern uprisings in order to enable the understanding of the conditions that could lead to or prohibit the formation of revolutionary crowds. The model is implemented to examine the effectiveness of oscillating intensified mass media on the crowd pattern and dynamics. Among several emergent behaviors, the model shows an insignificant impact of disrupted intensified media on the crowd, in contrast with consistent low-intensity media, the failure of contagion theory in sustaining a revolution without a persistent stimulus, and the refutation of current claims of the insignificancy of leaders’ roles in igniting and maintaining modern crowds.

Satellite TV and the Iranian Green Movement: The impact of foreign-based Farsi-speaking news channels on the Iranian protests of 2009

In 2009, Iranian people came to the streets in opposition to suspected elections manipulation that led to the victory of the conservative presidential candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over his reformist challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi. Throughout this wave of protests, the protesters could not rely on Iranian domestic media or the internet. Filtering, censorship and technological manipulation made mass communication very difficult. However, Iranians were left with an alternative option, namely the foreign-based Persian news channels – these had less limitations and easier accessibility. As a result, and contrary to the international view of the protest movement as a “Twitter Revolution,” this article argues that the foreign-based channels took advantage of the situation. By offering protesters a more transparent and open platform, they also achieved the strategic goal of trust building with audiences in Iran.

Notes on Digital Community and Revolution

This essay addresses the forms of utopian imagination that are produced when concepts such as society, community, and revolution are rendered using computational and communicational metaphors. By connecting recent phenomena such as the notion of “Twitter revolution” and Sheryl Sandberg's ongoing Lean In project to a longer genealogy of cybernetic imaginaries, capitalist economism, and governmentality, the author questions the assumptions and occlusions that result when sociality and digitality are conflated.

Tweeting India’s Nirbhaya protest: a study of emotional dynamics in an online social movement

Previous research has recognized the role of emotions in protests and social movements in the offline world. Despite the current scenario of ubiquitous social media and ‘Twitter revolutions,’ our knowledge about the connections between emotions and online protests still remains limited. In this study, we examine whether online protest actions follow the same emotional groundwork for supporting and nurturing a social movement as in the offline world, and how these emotions vary across various stages of the social movement. Through a computer-assisted emotion analysis of 65,613 Twitter posts (tweets), posted during the Nirbhaya social movement (movement against the Delhi gang-rape incident) in India, we identified a strong resemblance between online emotional patterns and offline protest emotions as discussed in literature. Formal statistical testing of a range of emotions (negativity, positivity, anger, sadness, anxiety, certainty, individualism, collectivism, and achievement) demonstrates that they significantly differed across stages of the social movement; as such, they influenced the course of the online protest, resonating parallels with offline events. The findings highlight the importance of anger and anxiety in stirring the collective conscience, and identify that positive emotion was pervasive during the protest event. Implications of these findings are discussed.