Event-Driven Analysis of Crowd Dynamics in the Black Lives Matter Online Social Movement Hao Peng Ceren Budak Daniel M
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Event-Driven Analysis of Crowd Dynamics in the Black Lives Matter Online Social Movement Hao Peng Ceren Budak Daniel M. Romero University of Michigan University of Michigan University of Michigan [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT Previous research studied various OSMs such as the 2010 Arab Online social movements (OSMs) play a key role in promoting Spring [28], the 2011 Egyptian Revolution [41, 50], the 2011 Occupy democracy in modern society. Most online activism is largely driven Wall Street [9, 20], through the lens of social media, mainly Twit- by critical offline events. Among many studies investigating collec- ter [2, 3, 22, 32, 40]. Topics they investigated range from participant tive behavior in OSMs, few has explored the interaction between motivation [44], movement framing [24, 43], informal learning [20], crowd dynamics and their offline context. Here, focusing on the to information diffusion [22, 28, 41]. There are also studies focus- Black Lives Matter OSM and utilizing an event-driven approach ing on crowd behavior in OSMs. Subjects they examined include on a dataset of 36 million tweets and thousands of offline events, recruitment process [23], user engagement [6, 9, 40], and online we study how different types of offline events—police violence and interactions [34], as well as the temporal evolution of crowd be- heightened protests—influence crowd behavior over time. We find havior [2, 4, 9, 11, 48]. Although these studies focus on different that police violence events and protests play important roles in the OSMs that were driven by very different political agendas, most of recruitment process. Moreover, by analyzing the re-participation them convey the same message: the unique characteristics of crowd dynamics and patterns of social interactions, we find that, in the behavior are often associated with critical offline events. Yet, there long term, users who joined the movement during police violence is limited research on investigating how different types of offline events and protests show significantly more commitment than events influence the behavior of online crowds and affect their those who joined during other times. However, users recruited interactions with the movement over time. during other times are more committed to the movement than the An event helps a person think about how the world diverges other two groups in the short term. Furthermore, we observe that from his basic values [25]. On one hand, exogenous shocking events social ties formed during police violence events are more likely such as police shootings can contribute to the recruitment into the to be sustained over time than those formed during other times. Black Lives Matter movement by creating “moral shocks” that can Contrarily, ties formed during protests are the least likely to be transform the public emotion from dread to outrage [17, 18, 25]. maintained. Altogether, our results shed light on the impact of These complex emotional processes usually generate broader im- bursting events on the recruitment, retention, and communication pact on the public sphere and can suddenly cause wide-scale un- patterns of collective behavior in the Black Lives Matter OSM. planned movement participation of peripheral users in online social networks [8, 27, 31]. On the other hand, endogenous events such KEYWORDS as self-organized protests can have an effect on crowd behavior with the help of movement networks in two stages. First, planned online social movement, social media, black lives matter protests in physical locations are likely to be preceded by consid- ACM Reference Format: erable communication and coordination among highly involved Hao Peng, Ceren Budak, and Daniel M. Romero. 2019. Event-Driven Analysis activists. Second, participants in offline protests often interact with of Crowd Dynamics in the Black Lives Matter Online Social Movement. the movement on social media to gain awareness, articulate their In Proceedings of the 2019 World Wide Web Conference (WWW ’19), May core beliefs, and offer a frame to the public [24]. As a result, offline 13–17, 2019, San Francisco, CA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 7 pages. events can generate massive participation in OSMs and are thus cru- https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313673 cial to the emergence, growth, and decline of online activism [13]. In this paper, we analyze crowd dynamics in the Black Lives 1 INTRODUCTION Matter (BLM) online movement using a combination of 36 million Social movements often signify social change [5, 30, 35]. They help tweets and thousands of compiled offline events. We focus our transform what have been considered radical ideas of one genera- analysis on crowd dynamics around three types of time periods: tion to the common sense of the next [14]. Social media has become cases of police violence, large-scale offline protests, and periods instrumental in driving and facilitating politically contentious on- of neither police violence or protests referred to as "other times". line social movements (OSMs) throughout the world [12, 20, 36, 44]. Our event-driven investigation provides two major contributions. First, we find that police violence events and protests not onlyact as magnets to mobilize people around the movement, but they also This paper is published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC-BY 4.0) license. Authors reserve their rights to disseminate the work on their greatly encourage user commitment in the long term. Second, we personal and corporate Web sites with the appropriate attribution. reveal that police violence events and protests have significantly WWW ’19, May 13–17, 2019, San Francisco, CA, USA different impact on the maintenance of social interactions estab- © 2019 IW3C2 (International World Wide Web Conference Committee), published lished during these events. Altogether, our results shed light on under Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 License. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-6674-8/19/05. how online crowds behave during bursting events. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308558.3313673 WWW ’19, May 13–17, 2019, San Francisco, CA, USA Hao Peng, Ceren Budak, and Daniel M. Romero 2 RELATED WORK in 2014, the movement has generated thousands of on-site protests Online Social Movements, Crowds, and Events. Social media and demonstrations globally. Over time, the BLM movement gained is now used as an organizing tool for collective action and has worldwide recognition and the general public began to participate enabled the proliferation of online low-risk activism [31], which in the movement using a variety of hashtags on Twitter [24]. may indeed have been a productive component of recent political Several studies have analyzed the BLM online movement. In [33], uprisings [41]. In addition, studies have revealed that social media Olteanu et al. provided a demographic characterization of users largely promotes social movements by means of influencing indi- involved in this movement. Stewart et al. examined the frame pro- vidual decisions about participation [20], providing new sources cess between competing online communities in the BLM movement of information beyond the control of authorities, and shaping the through the use of related hashtags [43]. Ince et al. investigated how discourse, logistics, and outcomes of protests [44]. This suggests Twitter users interact with the BLM movement through hashtags that social media facilitates the emergence of massive offline mobi- and thus modify its framing [24]. A recent work [16] studied the lization and can serve as a good proxy of studying OSMs. divergent discourse between the #BlackLivesMatter protest and the Several studies in OSMs have been conducted through the lens #AllLivesMatter counter-protest on Twitter. Twyman et al. studied of Twitter [2, 6, 22, 28, 32, 41, 48]. Existing work tends to focus the dynamics of attention and knowledge production related to on the characteristics of information generated during the course the BLM movement using Wikipedia [45]. However, as far as we of various online movements. They are interested in analyzing know, there is limited work focusing on crowd dynamics in the movements along dimensions including the variation of the amount BLM online movement and its relationship to offline events. of information produced, the way how information spreads [22, 28, Most related to our work, De Choudhury et al. investigated the 41], and the contribution from different social actors involved in participation in the BLM online movement over time in different the movement [2, 6, 32, 48]. geographical locations and explored its relationship with protests Other research examines crowd behavior and its dynamics in unfolded on the ground [11]. Our work differs in that we systemat- OSMs. Topics covered range from online social interactions [34], ically investigate the dynamics of user participation and patterns the recruitment dynamics [23], and community polarization [50], to of social interactions, and explore how different types of offline opinion evolution [4]. There are also studies exploring the connec- events affect these dynamics in the BLM online movement. tions between the dynamics of OSMs and relevant offline events [7, 52]. In [42], Steinert et al. studied the relationship between online 3 DATA AND BACKGROUND activities and the volume of protests on the ground. The work in [3] Twitter Dataset. Research indicates that the public use hashtags explored the possibility of forecasting onsite protests using social to interact with BLM to promote their messages, articulate core media stream data. Spiro et al. found that key time points with beliefs, and offer political solutions11 [ , 24, 33]. Here, we use data unique online social structure often map to exogenous events in collected by [6] which includes tweets that are tagged with 53 BLM physical locations [40]. These studies inform us about the rela- related hashtags. These race-related hashtags cover the stream of tionship between the movement dynamics and relevant protests demonstrations and riots against the systemic racism and police unfolded on the ground. However, to our knowledge, there is lit- violence toward African Americans [6].