City Research Online

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the relationship between the geographic location of protestors attending demonstrations in the 2013 Vinegar protests in Brazil and the geographic location of users that tweeted the protests. We explored the overlap between different sources of geographic information from Twitter — namely geocode, hashtag, and user profile — provided by multiple samples drawn from a population of three million tweets related to the events and compared the data to the location of protestors attending the street demonstrations. We adjusted the data for the uneven distribution of the population and performed geospatial and spatial clustering analysis over sets of spatial locations. We found evidence for the hypotheses that users tweeting the protests are geographically distant from the street protests and that users from geographically isolated areas rely on Twitter hashtags to remotely engage in the demonstrations.

Publication Type:	Article
Publisher Keywords:	Twitter; Activism; Spatial analysis; Protest; Vinegar; Brazil
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HE Transportation and Communications Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs > Sociology & Criminology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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