Tweets from the Flock: A Proposal for a Holistic Analysis of Social Movements via Twitter

• In Event: 1545 - Media Influences on Social Movements

Abstract

Newspaper data in social movements research is often plagued with concerns of a selection bias in what the newspapers report. Despite these critiques, the use of alternative sources for news
data has been limited to mixed-methods of interviewing or surveying participants. However, the use of alternative media sources that place newspapers on the same level as other possible reporters of social movement activity is available. Social media, such as Twitter, contains accounts from traditional news sources such as newspapers and television stations, in addition to accounts from social movement entities themselves. Thus, through placing the various aforementioned groups’ Twitter accounts under analysis to examine the tweets that each group posts in relation to social movement activities, the biases of each respective organization are checked. As such, this study conducted an analysis on a local Black Lives Matter (BLM) chapter in Norfolk, Virginia and analyzed 30 twitter accounts from various originations in Norfolk from the years of 2013 to 2018 to monitor the references of BLM’s related activity in the city. My findings demonstrate that there is a difference in how BLM events are covered by organizations. Moreover, through the use of multiple accounts from a variety of different participants, the biases in reporting information on the social movement that each organization might have are counteracted by the other accounts that are analyzed. Future applications for this work include using it with other methods for analyzing movements such as interviews and surveys or to provide an alternative to newspaper analysis.

Author

• Kevin Hans Waitkuweit, University of Illinois at Chicago