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.