What can Social Media teach us about protests? Analyzing the Chilean 2011-12 Student Movement's Network evolution through Twitter data

Abstract

Using social media data -specially twitter -of the Chilean 2011-12 student movement, we study their social network evolution over time to analyze how leaders and participants self-organize and spread information. Based on a few key events of the student movement's timeline, we visualize the student network trajectory and analyze their structural and semantic properties. Therefore, in this paper we: i) describe the basic network topology of the 2011-12 Chilean massive student movement; ii) explore how the 180 key central nodes of the movement are connected, self-organize and spread information. We contend that this social media enabled massive movement is yet another manifestation of the network era, which leverages agents' socio-technical networks, and thus accelerates how agents coordinate, mobilize resources and enact collective intelligence.