Anatomy of a Protest: Spatial Information, Social Media, and Urban Space

Abstract

Black Lives Matter, like many modern movements in the age of information, makes significant use of social media as well as public space to demand justice. In this article, we study the protests in response to the shooting of Keith Lamont Scott by police in Charlotte, North Carolina, on September 2016. Our goal is to measure the significance of urban space within the virtual and physical network of protesters. Using a mixed-methods approach, we identify and study urban space and social media generated by these protests. We conducted interviews with protesters who were among the first to join the Keith Lamont Scott shooting demonstrations. From the interviews, we identify places that were significant in our interviewees’ narratives. Using a combination of natural language processing and social network analysis, we analyze social media data related to the Charlotte protests retrieved from Twitter. We found that social media, local community, and public space work together to organize and motivate protests and that public events such as protests cause a discernible increase in social media activity. Finally, we find that there are two distinct communities who engage social media in different ways; one group involved with social media, local community and urban space, and a second group connected almost exclusively through social media.

‘Refugees are not welcome’: Digital racism, online place-making and the evolving categorization of Syrians in Turkey

“…Today, interaction has moved from streets to cyberspace, where digital urbanism, deep mapping, neogeography, and e-government converge to create interactive online spaces. Digital place-making also involves the production of place through its representations on the Internet (see Bork-Hüffer, 2016;Karduni and Sauda, 2020).…”

Social Activism through the Use of Social Media: A Case Study of the Gerakan Kesejahteraan Tuna Rungu Indonesia (GERKATIN)

“…It consists of four stages, namely: the emergence stage, the coalescence stage, the formalization stage (Bureaucratization), and finally the decline stage. The use of social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and websites is analyzed through each stage of social activism based on Macionis (2014) [14]. Where, the whole of this study uses a precursor to Roger Fidler's (1997) theory of media morphosis.…”

“…Based on the explanation above, the main focus of this research is to see as a whole how the use of social media, especially Instagram, in social activism in the form of inclusion of the welfare of the deaf in Indonesia which was initiated by the Indonesian Deaf and Deaf Welfare Movement (GERKATIN). In this study, using the concept of stages in a social movement according to Macionis (2014) [14]. Where, divided into four stages of the social movement process which consists of: ( 1…”

On spatial variation in the detectability and density of social media user protest supporters

“…at the protest meeting location) number of individuals participating in a protest can be interpreted as an indicator of the event's magnitude (Biggs, 2016;Sobolev et al, 2020;Opp, 2009). For example, some studies on social media have adopted a quasi-experimental approach and difference-in-differences analysis for comparing a group of users exposed to a protest event with a group not so exposed based on their physical distance to the event (Zhang, 2016;Karduni and Sauda, 2020). Other investigations assume that physical distance is an impedance to participation in a protest (Traag et al, 2017;Biggs, 2016).…”