Mapping, Methods, Politics & Government, Social Data Science

Mapping collective public opinion in the Russian blogosphere

by Olessia Koltsova 10/02/2014

The Russian language blogosphere counts about 85 million blogs—an amount far beyond the capacities of any government to control—and is thereby able to function as a mass medium of “public opinion” and also to exercise influence.

by Olessia Koltsova 10/02/2014

Widely reported as fraudulent, the 2011 Russian Parliamentary elections provoked mass street protest action by tens of thousands of people in Moscow and cities and towns across Russia. Image by Nikolai Vassiliev.

Blogs are becoming increasingly important for agenda setting and formation of collective public opinion on a wide range of issues. In countries like Russia where the Internet is not technically filtered, but where the traditional media is tightly controlled by the state, they may be particularly important. The Russian language blogosphere counts about 85 million blogs—an amount far beyond the capacities of any government to control—and the Russian search engine Yandex, with its blog rating service, serves as an important reference point for Russia’s educated public in its search of authoritative and independent sources of information. The blogosphere is thereby able to function as a mass medium of “public opinion” and also to exercise influence. One topic that was particularly salient over the period we studied concerned the Russian Parliamentary elections of December 2011. Widely reported as fraudulent, they provoked immediate and mass street protest action by tens of thousands of people in Moscow and cities and towns across Russia, as well as corresponding activity in the blogosphere. Protesters made effective use of the Internet to organise a movement that demanded cancellation of the parliamentary election results, and the holding of new and fair elections. These protests continued until the following summer, gaining widespread national and international attention. Most of the political and social discussion blogged in Russia is hosted on the blog platform LiveJournal. Some of these bloggers can claim a certain amount of influence; the top thirty bloggers have over 20,000 “friends” each, representing a good circulation for the average Russian newspaper. Part of the blogosphere may thereby resemble the traditional media; the deeper into the long tail of average bloggers, however, the more it functions as more as pure public opinion. This “top list” effect may be particularly important in societies (like Russia’s) where popularity lists exert a visible influence on bloggers’ competitive behaviour and on public perceptions of their significance. Given the influence of these top…

Methods, Social Data Science

The physics of social science: using big data for real-time predictive modelling

by taha yasseri 21/11/2013

There are very interesting examples of using big data to make predictions about disease outbreaks, financial moves in the markets, social interactions based on human mobility patterns, election results, etc.

by taha yasseri 21/11/2013

Ed: You are interested in analysis of big data to understand human dynamics; how much work is being done in terms of real-time predictive modelling using these data? Taha: The socially generated transactional data that we call “big data” have been available only very recently; the amount of data we now produce about human activities in a year is comparable to the amount that used to be produced in decades (or centuries). And this is all due to recent advancements in ICTs. Despite the short period of availability of big data, the use of them in different sectors including academia and business has been significant. However, in many cases, the use of big data is limited to monitoring and post hoc analysis of different patterns. Predictive models have been rarely used in combination with big data. Nevertheless, there are very interesting examples of using big data to make predictions about disease outbreaks, financial moves in the markets, social interactions based on human mobility patterns, election results, etc. Ed: What were the advantages of using Wikipedia as a data source for your study—as opposed to Twitter, blogs, Facebook or traditional media, etc.? Taha: Our results have shown that the predictive power of Wikipedia page view and edit data outperforms similar box office-prediction models based on Twitter data. This can partially be explained by considering the different nature of Wikipedia compared to social media sites. Wikipedia is now the number one source of online information, and Wikipedia article page view statistics show how much Internet users have been interested in knowing about a specific movie. And the edit counts—even more importantly—indicate the level of interest of the editors in sharing their knowledge about the movies with others. Both indicators are much stronger than what you could measure on Twitter, which is mainly the reaction of the users after watching or reading about the movie. The cost of participation in Wikipedia’s editorial process…

Social Data Science

Verification of crowd-sourced information: is this ‘crowd wisdom’ or machine wisdom?

by Heather Ford 19/11/2013

The problem with computer code is that it is invisible, and that it makes it easy to regulate people’s behaviour directly and often without recourse.

by Heather Ford 19/11/2013

‘Code’ or ‘law’? Image from an Ushahidi development meetup by afropicmusing.

In ‘Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace’, Lawrence Lessig (2006) writes that computer code (or what he calls ‘West Coast code’) can have the same regulatory effect as the laws and legal code developed in Washington D.C., so-called ‘East Coast code’. Computer code impacts on a person’s behaviour by virtue of its essentially restrictive architecture: on some websites you must enter a password before you gain access, in other places you can enter unidentified. The problem with computer code, Lessig argues, is that it is invisible, and that it makes it easy to regulate people’s behaviour directly and often without recourse. For example, fair use provisions in US copyright law enable certain uses of copyrighted works, such as copying for research or teaching purposes. However the architecture of many online publishing systems heavily regulates what one can do with an e-book: how many times it can be transferred to another device, how many times it can be printed, whether it can be moved to a different format—activities that have been unregulated until now, or that are enabled by the law but effectively ‘closed off’ by code. In this case code works to reshape behaviour, upsetting the balance between the rights of copyright holders and the rights of the public to access works to support values like education and innovation. Working as an ethnographic researcher for Ushahidi, the non-profit technology company that makes tools for people to crowdsource crisis information, has made me acutely aware of the many ways in which ‘code’ can become ‘law’. During my time at Ushahidi, I studied the practices that people were using to verify reports by people affected by a variety of events—from earthquakes to elections, from floods to bomb blasts. I then compared these processes with those followed by Wikipedians when editing articles about breaking news events. In order to understand how to best design architecture to enable particular behaviour, it becomes important to…

Child Safety, Governance & Security, Interviews

Exploring variation in parental concerns about online safety issues

by David Sutcliffe 14/11/2013

Parents have different and often conflicting views about what’s best for their children. What’s helpful to one group of parents may not actually benefit parents or youth as a whole.

by David Sutcliffe 14/11/2013

Ed: You’ve spent a great deal of time studying the way that children and young people use the Internet, much of which focuses on the positive experiences that result. Why do you think this is so under-represented in public debate? boyd/Hargittai: The public has many myths about young people’s use of technology. This is often perpetuated by media coverage that focuses on the extremes. Salacious negative headlines often capture people’s attention, even if the practices or incidents described are outliers and do not represent the majority’s experiences. While focusing on extremely negative and horrific incidents is a great way to attract attention and get readers, it does a disservice to young people, their parents, and ultimately society as a whole. As researchers, we believe that it’s important to understand the nuances of what people experience when they engage with technology. Thus, we are interested in gaining a better understanding of their everyday practices—both the good and the bad. Our goal is to introduce research that can help contextualise socio-technical practices and provide insight into the diversity of viewpoints and perspectives that shape young people’s use of technology. Ed: Your paper suggests we need a more granular understanding of how parental concerns relating to the Internet can vary across different groups. Why is this important? What are the main policy implications of this research? boyd/Hargittai: Parents are often seen as the target of policy interventions. Many lawmakers imagine that they’re designing laws to help empower parents, but when you ask them to explain which parents they are empowering, it becomes clear that there’s an imagined parent that is not always representative of the diverse views and perspectives of all parents. We’re not opposed to laws that enable parents to protect their children, but we’re concerned whenever a class of people, especially a class as large as “parents,” is viewed as homogenous. Parents have different and often conflicting views about what’s best…

Health, Methods, Social Data Science

Can Twitter provide an early warning function for the next pandemic?

by Patty Kostkova 14/10/2013

While traditional surveillance systems will remain the pillars of public health, online media monitoring has added an important early-warning function, with social media bringing additional benefits to epidemic intelligence.

by Patty Kostkova 14/10/2013

Communication of risk in any public health emergency is a complex task for healthcare agencies; a task made more challenging when citizens are bombarded with online information. Mexico City, 2009. Image by Eneas.

Ed: Could you briefly outline your study? Patty: We investigated the role of Twitter during the 2009 swine flu pandemics from two perspectives. Firstly, we demonstrated the role of the social network to detect an upcoming spike in an epidemic before the official surveillance systems—up to week in the UK and up to 2-3 weeks in the US—by investigating users who “self-diagnosed” themselves posting tweets such as “I have flu/swine flu.” Secondly, we illustrated how online resources reporting the WHO declaration of “pandemics” on 11 June 2009 were propagated through Twitter during the 24 hours after the official announcement [1,2,3]. Ed: Disease control agencies already routinely follow media sources; are public health agencies aware of social media as another valuable source of information? Patty: Social media are providing an invaluable real-time data signal complementing well-established epidemic intelligence (EI) systems monitoring online media, such as MedISys and GPHIN. While traditional surveillance systems will remain the pillars of public health, online media monitoring has added an important early-warning function, with social media bringing additional benefits to epidemic intelligence: virtually real-time information available in the public domain that is contributed by users themselves, thus not relying on the editorial policies of media agencies. Public health agencies (such as the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control) are interested in social media early warning systems, but more research is required to develop robust social media monitoring solutions that are ready to be integrated with agencies’ EI services. Ed: How difficult is this data to process? E.g.: is this a full sample, processed in real-time? Patty: No, obtaining all Twitter search query results is not possible. In our 2009 pilot study we were accessing data from Twitter using a search API interface querying the database every minute (the number of results was limited to 100 tweets). Currently, only 1% of the ‘Firehose’ (massive real-time stream of all public tweets) is made available using the streaming API. The searches have…

Methods, Politics & Government

Predicting elections on Twitter: a different way of thinking about the data

by Nick Anstead 04/08/2013

Social media monitoring, which in theory can extract information from tweets and Facebook posts and quantify positive and negative public reactions to people, policies and events has an obvious utility for politicians seeking office.

by Nick Anstead 04/08/2013

GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, centre, waving to crowd, after delivering his acceptance speech on the final night of the 2012 Republican National Convention. Image by NewsHour.

Recently, there has been a lot of interest in the potential of social media as a means to understand public opinion. Driven by an interest in the potential of so-called “big data”, this development has been fuelled by a number of trends. Governments have been keen to create techniques for what they term “horizon scanning”, which broadly means searching for the indications of emerging crises (such as runs on banks or emerging natural disasters) online, and reacting before the problem really develops. Governments around the world are already committing massive resources to developing these techniques. In the private sector, big companies’ interest in brand management has fitted neatly with the potential of social media monitoring. A number of specialised consultancies now claim to be able to monitor and quantify reactions to products, interactions or bad publicity in real time. It should therefore come as little surprise that, like other research methods before, these new techniques are now crossing over into the competitive political space. Social media monitoring, which in theory can extract information from tweets and Facebook posts and quantify positive and negative public reactions to people, policies and events has an obvious utility for politicians seeking office. Broadly, the process works like this: vast datasets relating to an election, often running into millions of items, are gathered from social media sites such as Twitter. These data are then analysed using natural language processing software, which automatically identifies qualities relating to candidates or policies and attributes a positive or negative sentiment to each item. Finally, these sentiments and other properties mined from the text are totalised, to produce an overall figure for public reaction on social media. These techniques have already been employed by the mainstream media to report on the 2010 British general election (when the country had its first leaders debate, an event ripe for this kind of research) and also in the 2012 US presidential election. This…

Collective Action, Methods, Politics & Government

Investigating the structure and connectivity of online global protest networks

by Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon 10/06/2013

The new networks of political protest, which harness these new online technologies are often described in theoretical terms as being ‘fluid’ and ‘horizontal’, in contrast to the rigid and hierarchical structure of earlier protest organisation.

by Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon 10/06/2013

How have online technologies reconfigured collective action? It is often assumed that the rise of social networking tools, accompanied by the mass adoption of mobile devices, have strengthened the impact and broadened the reach of today’s political protests. Enabling massive self-communication allows protesters to write their own interpretation of events—free from a mass media often seen as adversarial—and emerging protests may also benefit from the cheaper, faster transmission of information and more effective mobilisation made possible by online tools such as Twitter. The new networks of political protest, which harness these new online technologies are often described in theoretical terms as being ‘fluid’ and ‘horizontal’, in contrast to the rigid and hierarchical structure of earlier protest organisation. Yet such theoretical assumptions have seldom been tested empirically. This new language of networks may be useful as a shorthand to describe protest dynamics, but does it accurately reflect how protest networks mediate communication and coordinate support? The global protests against austerity and inequality which took place on May 12, 2012 provide an interesting case study to test the structure and strength of a transnational online protest movement. The ‘indignados’ movement emerged as a response to the Spanish government’s politics of austerity in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The movement flared in May 2011, when hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in Spanish cities, and many set up camps ahead of municipal elections a week later. These protests contributed to the emergence of the worldwide Occupy movement. After the original plan to occupy New York City’s financial district mobilised thousands of protesters in September 2011, the movement spread to other cities in the US and worldwide, including London and Frankfurt, before winding down as the camp sites were dismantled weeks later. Interest in these movements was revived, however, as the first anniversary of the ‘indignados’ protests approached in May 2012. To test whether the fluidity, horizontality and connectivity often claimed for…

Development, Mapping

Crowdsourcing translation during crisis situations: are ‘real voices’ being excluded from the decisions and policies it supports?

by Gwyneth Sutherlin 07/05/2013

If you have ever worried about media bias then you should really worry about the impact of translation.

by Gwyneth Sutherlin 07/05/2013

As revolution spread across North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, participants and observers of the events were keen to engage via social media. However, saturation by Arab-language content demanded a new translation strategy for those outside the region to follow the information flows—and for those inside to reach beyond their domestic audience. Crowdsourcing was seen as the most efficient strategy in terms of cost and time to meet the demand, and translation applications that harnessed volunteers across the internet were integrated with nearly every type of ICT project. For example, as Steve Stottlemyre has already mentioned on this blog, translation played a part in tools like the Libya Crisis Map, and was essential for harnessing tweets from the region’s ‘voices on the ground.’ If you have ever worried about media bias then you should really worry about the impact of translation. Before the revolutions, the translation software for Egyptian Arabic was almost non-existent. Few translation applications were able to handle the different Arabic dialects or supply coding labor and capital to build something that could contend with internet blackouts. Google’s Speak to Tweet became the dominant application used in the Egyptian uprisings, delivering one homogenised source of information that fed the other sources. In 2011, this collaboration helped circumvent the problem of Internet connectivity in Egypt by allowing cellphone users to call their tweet into a voicemail to be transcribed and translated. A crowd of volunteers working for Twitter enhanced translation of Egyptian Arabic after the Tweets were first transcribed by a Mechanical Turk application trained from an initial 10 hours of speech. The unintended consequence of these crowdsourcing applications was that when the material crossed the language barrier into English, it often became inaccessible to the original contributors. Individuals on the ground essentially ceded authorship to crowds of untrained volunteer translators who stripped the information of context, and then plotted it in categories and on maps without feedback from…

Collective Action, Politics & Government

Why do (some) political protest mobilisations succeed?

by Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon 19/04/2013

Mobilisation paths are difficult to predict because they depend on the right alignment of conditions on different levels.

by Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon 19/04/2013

The communication technologies once used by rebels and protesters to gain global visibility now look burdensome and dated: much separates the once-futuristic-looking image of Subcomandante Marcos posing in the Chiapas jungle draped in electronic gear (1994) from the uprisings of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. While the only practical platform for amplifying a message was once provided by organisations, the rise of the Internet means that cross-national networks are now reachable by individuals—who are able to bypass organisations, ditch membership dues, and embrace self-organisation. As social media and mobile applications increasingly blur the distinction between public and private, ordinary citizens are becoming crucial nodes in the contemporary protest network. The personal networks that are the main channels of information flow in sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn mean that we don’t need to actively seek out particular information; it can be served to us with no more effort than that of maintaining a connection with our contacts. News, opinions, and calls for justice are now shared and forwarded by our friends—and their friends—in a constant churn of information, all attached to familiar names and faces. Given we are more likely to pass on information if the source belongs to our social circle, this has had an important impact on the information environment within which protest movements are initiated and develop. Mobile connectivity is also important for understanding contemporary protest, given that the ubiquitous streams of synchronous information we access anywhere are shortening our reaction times. This is important, as the evolution of mass recruitments—whether they result in flash mobilisations, slow burns, or simply damp squibs—can only be properly understood if we have a handle on the distribution of reaction times within a population. The increasing integration of the mainstream media into our personal networks is also important, given that online networks (and independent platforms like Indymedia) are not the clear-cut alternative to corporate media they once were. We can now…

Collective Action, Politics & Government, Publications

Online collective action and policy change: new special issue from Policy and Internet

by Anastasia Kavada 18/03/2013

The internet has provided citizens with a greater capacity for coordination and mobilisation, which can strengthen their voice and representation in the policy agenda.

by Anastasia Kavada 18/03/2013

The Internet has multiplied the platforms available to influence public opinion and policy making. It has also provided citizens with a greater capacity for coordination and mobilisation, which can strengthen their voice and representation in the policy agenda. As waves of protest sweep both authoritarian regimes and liberal democracies, this rapidly developing field calls for more detailed enquiry. However, research exploring the relationship between online mobilisation and policy change is still limited. This special issue of ‘Policy and Internet’ addresses this gap through a variety of perspectives. Contributions to this issue view the Internet both as a tool that allows citizens to influence policy making, and as an object of new policies and regulations, such as data retention, privacy, and copyright laws, around which citizens are mobilising. Together, these articles offer a comprehensive empirical account of the interface between online collective action and policy making. Within this framework, the first article in this issue, “Networked Collective Action and the Institutionalized Policy Debate: Bringing Cyberactivism to the Policy Arena?” by Stefania Milan and Arne Hintz (2013), looks at the Internet as both a tool of collective action and an object of policy. The authors provide a comprehensive overview of how computer-mediated communication creates not only new forms of organisational structure for collective action, but also new contentious policy fields. By focusing on what the authors define as ‘techie activists,’ Milan and Hintz explore how new grassroots actors participate in policy debates around the governance of the Internet at different levels. This article provides empirical evidence to what Kriesi et al. (1995) defines as “windows of opportunities” for collective action to contribute to the policy debate around this new space of contentious politics. Milan and Hintz demonstrate how this has happened from the first World Summit of Information Society (WSIS) in 2003 to more recent debates about Internet regulation. Yana Breindl and François Briatte’s (2013) article “Digital Protest Skills and Online Activism Against…