Tracking Protests Using Geotagged Flickr Photographs

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.

Modelling the distance impedance of protest attendance

“…Finally, protests are not necessarily confined to a single location, and more complex mass movements are not captured by our current approach. It would therefore be good if these spatial patterns would be corroborated through other approaches such as social media [31,32] and traditional approaches (e.g. surveys).…”

“…Other research has relied on online service such as social media. Twitter has for example been used to study the attendance of protests [31] while Flickr has been used to study the occurrence of protests [32]. The penetration rate of such services is quite low in African countries [33], thus precluding their use for our study.…”

The science of contemporary street protest: New efforts in the United States

“…Steinert-Threlkeld built a list of protest events and a network of protest participants using events data from the Integrated Conflict Early Warning System and individual communications data from Twitter during the Arab Spring protests in 2010 and 2011 to study the differences in influence between well-connected actors versus those at the edges of a social network [as discussed in ( 52 )]. Similarly, Alanyali and colleagues ( 53 ) used tags on Flickr images to estimate global protest trends in 2013. This approach, while sharing some of the previously documented coverage challenges for event counting, provides an orthogonal technique for estimating attendee counts and incorporating the heterogeneity of individual participants for studying protest.…”

Exploring snake occurrence records: Spatial biases and marginal gains from accessible social media

“…Novel supplementary data sources could help fill biodiversity database gaps (Toivonen et al, 2019). With the proliferation of GPS enabled devices, the public is generating huge datasets on Web 2.0 platforms that can describe and/or predict a variety of phenomena including: protests (Alanyali, Preis & Moat, 2016), land-use (Antoniou et al, 2016), tourism (García-Palomares, Gutiérrez & Mínguez, 2015; Chua et al, 2016), hurricane damage (Preis et al, 2013) and protected area use (Orsi & Geneletti, 2013; Hausmann et al, 2018). Some Web 2.0 data, in the form of geo-tagged images, can communicate the identity and location of species (Barve, 2014).…”