Quantifying Political Self-Organization in Social Media. Fractal patterns in the Spanish 15M movement on Twitter

Abstract

The objective of this work is to better analyse and understand social self-organization in the context of social media and political activism. More specifically, we centre our analysis in the presence of fractal scaling in the form of 1/f noise in different Twitter communication networks related to the Spanish 15M movement. We show how quantitative indexes of brown, white and pink noise correlate with qualitatively different forms of social coordination of protests: rigidly organized protests (brown noise), reactive-spontaneous protests (white noise) and complex genuinely self-organized protests (pink noise). In addition, pink noise processes present correlations that reach much further in time, maintaining a dynamical coherence that last several days, and also show a balance between mean distance and clustering coefficient within the interaction network.

Complexity of a Microblogging Social Network in the Framework of Modern Nonlinear Science

“…The main results of this research were obtained by analyzing a single time series of microposts whose values however constitute a representative sample. Similar results of analysis of an empirical time series of a microblogging network are presented in [24][25][26][27][28][29]. We cannot claim that the time series samples studied by us or other researchers are representative, which would be essential for a generalization of the results onto the entire general population.…”

“…The purpose of the research is a nonlinear dynamical interpretation of the complexity of a microblogging network and the development of an appropriate network model that could explain its complexity using the third paradigm of nonlinear science called the complexity paradigm. Another motivation for the research was the results presented in [26][27][28][29][30][31] where the time series of a number of microposts are characterized by the majority of key signs of the system complexity (a detailed description of the key signs of the system complexity is presented in Section 2).…”

Self‐Organized Criticality on Twitter: Phenomenological Theory and Empirical Investigation Based on Data Analysis Results

“…In order to obtain analytical values for PSD and ACF of a random process (14), it is necessary to obtain an analytical solution p(η t , t) of the corresponding nonstationary Fokker-Planck equation. If it is possible to obtain an exact analytic values for p(η t , t) and, accordingly, an analytical definition of S(f) and ρ(τ), then it will be difficult to interpret.…”

“…erefore, we obtained these dependences as a result of the numerical integration of equation (14). According to the obtained realizations of this random process, the dependences S(f) and ρ(τ) were determined.…”

“…e motivation of our investigation is the following. ere is a number of studies (e.g., see the works [11,[13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]), in which it is established that the observed flows of microposts generated by microblogging social networks (e.g., Twitter) are characterized by avalanche-like behavior. Time series of microposts depicting such streams are the time series with a power-law distribution of probabilities, with 1/f noise and long memory.…”