Forecasting Social Unrest Using Activity Cascades

Abstract

Social unrest is endemic in many societies, and recent news has drawn attention to happenings in Latin America, the Middle East, and Eastern Europe. Civilian populations mobilize, sometimes spontaneously and sometimes in an organized manner, to raise awareness of key issues or to demand changes in governing or other organizational structures. It is of key interest to social scientists and policy makers to forecast civil unrest using indicators observed on media such as Twitter, news, and blogs. We present an event forecasting model using a notion of activity cascades in Twitter (proposed by Gonzalez-Bailon et al., 2011) to predict the occurrence of protests in three countries of Latin America: Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela. The basic assumption is that the emergence of a suitably detected activity cascade is a precursor or a surrogate to a real protest event that will happen “on the ground.” Our model supports the theoretical characterization of large cascades using spectral properties and uses properties of detected cascades to forecast events. Experimental results on many datasets, including the recent June 2013 protests in Brazil, demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.

New online ecology of adversarial aggregates: ISIS and beyond

“…the ISIS-inspired attack in San Bernardino, December 2015) (11). Recent research has used records of attacks to help elucidate group structure in past organizations for which the Internet was not a key component (3,6,12), the nature of attacks by lone-wolf actors (13) and the relationship between general online buzz and real-world events (14)(15)(16). Online buzz created by individuals that casually mention ISIS or protests is insufficient to identify any long-term build up ahead of sudden real-world events (see for example Fig.…”

“…Our datasets consist of detailed second-by-second longitudinal records of online support activity for ISIS from its 2014 development onwards and, for comparison, online civil protestors across multiple countries within the past three years following the U.S. Open Source Indicator (OSI) project (14)(15)(16). The online Supplementary Material (SM) provides a roadmap for the paper, data descriptions and downloads.…”

“…The connection to physical phase transitions again suggests self-organization is a driving factor (20). While such a divergence will not necessarily pre-empt attacks involving only a few individuals, such as in San Bernardino or Paris, it can help indicate an alignment of favorable conditions and has the advantage that it does not rely on any real-world events having yet occurred or likely dates having being circulated through social media in advance (14)(15)(16). The far longer lifetimes for online aggregates of protestors in We now develop a systems level theory of this online aggregate ecology.…”

Open source data reveals connection between online and on-street protest activity

“…Our methodology for building the event dataset evolved from our participation in the 2011-2014 IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) national project on Open Source Indicators (OSI) [32, 33]. Latin America provides an ideal laboratory for this analysis since there is significant variation in search activity across countries, coupled with a substantial number of civil unrest events.…”

Analytical sociology and computational social science

“…For interventions in the social world, e.g., in financial markets or political systems, we lack the corresponding knowledge that would allow us to directly turn predictions into effective interventions. We might be able to predict stock market shifts from Twitter moods [69] or foresee political instability from social media postings [70], but to intervene in these sorts of developments we need to understand how the systems work. Not until we better understand the functioning of social systems and how changes in some of its parameters may change relevant aggregate properties of the system, have we identified potential intervention points and policy levelers.…”