1. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Rob Procter (University of Manchester)
Farida Vis (University of Leicester)
Alexander Voss (University of St Andrews)
[Funded by JISC]
http://www.analysingsocialmedia.org/
#readingtheriots
2. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Overview
• Background
• Methodology
• Infrastructure and tools
• Findings
• Future work
4. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Social Media
• Social media such as Twitter generate vast
quantities of valuable research data:
– How public opinion shapes and is shaped by events
– Who shapes it, how it propagates and changes – in real-time
– Everyday events, behaviour and choices
– Polling, prediction, early warning, tracking social change
• Traditional methods of media analysis are
inadequate in the face of this ‘deluge’ of data.
5. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
The Riots Corpus
• 2.6M tweets harvested from the Twitter ‘fire
hose’ matching specified #tags.
• 700,000 individual accounts.
• What can the corpus tell us about:
– Reactions to events, both general and specific
– How information flows through social media
– Kinds of ‘actors’ involved and how they shape
discourse
– How social media is used to inform, organise, etc
7. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Approach
• Development of computer-based tools for
sentiment and topic analysis of tweets is an
active area of research.
• Our methodology combines computer-based
tools with established content analysis
techniques in ways that are complementary to
their respective strengths.
8. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Information Flows
• Any collection of tweets can be divided into tweets
that are ‘original’ and retweets.
• If we are interested in how Twitter is used to
communicate and share information, only reliable
evidence that a tweet has been read is that it has
been retweeted.
• We used computational tools to group a tweet (the
parent) and its retweets (its children) into
information flows.
9. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Information Flow Analysis
For N = 1, CorpusMax
InformationFlow[N-1] = {}
If Corpus[N] == “RT @”.username.body
(LevenshteinDistance, Parent) = LDMin(N-
1, username, body)
If LevenshteinDistance< 30
InformationFlow[Parent] =
InformationFlow[Parent] + Corpus[N]
10. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Example Information Flows
Riots Corpus
Great sight in my #Birmingham where #Pakistani lads are
2.6M Tweets protecting temples while Sikh lads protecting the mosques: 758
700000 accounts
incitement pls?: 5
Can we have them arrested for
Hackney! Fuck the feds! #hackney
#punchcroft has just posted Go on
someone calling themselves
11. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Coding Frames
• Used established methods of content analysis
to understand how Twitter was being used in
the context of topics we wished to analyse.
• Inductively coded information flows to
develop a ‘code frame’ to categorise topics
and examine relationships in context of a
given topic.
14. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Jenkins
• Provides a generic runtime framework for data
ingestion, annotation and analysis scripts.
• Web front-end to allow researchers to run jobs and
access output data.
• Provenance of data through capture of job execution
history and version-control of analysis scripts.
• Makes use of a set of nodes for work-intensive jobs:
both statically configured computers and cloud
instances.
• Cloud nodes are automatically created and configured
as queue length builds up, then torn down when they
fall idle.
46. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Rumours on Twitter
• Rumours ‘break’ quickly in Twitter.
• Evidence of people acting mischievously (and
perhaps maliciously) to initiate and reinforce
false rumours.
• Trusted sources such as mainstream media
and the Police tend to lag behind crowd-
sourced reports, so false rumours may persist
longer, with potential risks to public order and
safety.
48. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER The Accusers
• David Cameron, Prime Minister
“…whether it would be right to stop people
communicating via these websites and services
when we know they are plotting violence, disorder
and criminality.”
“…struck by how they [the riots] were organised via
social media.”
• Louise Mensch, Conservative MP
“Common sense. If riot info and fear is spreading by
Facebook& Twitter, shut them off for an hour or
two, then restore. World won’t implode.”
49. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER The Defenders
• The Police – social media is a vital
channel of communication:
Twitter allows for “direct reassurance” and “dispel
rumours … in a way that we could never have achieved
previously.” On Use of Twitter: “overwhelmingly
positive.”
Kevin Hoy, web manager, Greater Manchester Police
50. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER The General Public
• Two-thirds support social networking
blackout in future riots:
“A poll of 973 adults carried out for the online security firm Unisys
found 70% of adults supported the shutdown of Twitter, Facebook
and Blackberry Messenger (BBM), while only 27% disagreed.”
• Support strongest among 65+, weakest
among 18-24 year olds.
51. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER Incitement on Twitter?
• Social media was used to incite and/or
organise illegal acts.
• We find very little of this in the Twitter
corpus.
• Pales into insignificance when
compared to evidence that Twitter was
used for more positive purposes.
56. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Who Tweeted the Riots?
Top 200 Twitter accounts by actor type
140000
125768
120000 < mainstream media
100000
79043
80000 < journalists
59193 < riot accounts
60000
51534
45869
40000
30839 32308
25464
22896
16136 18163
20000 13303 14065 <
8285
4607 5757 5962
3196 spoof
4011
1031
0
57. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Who Tweeted the Riots?
• Mainstream media and individual journalists
mentioned most.
• Riotcleanup most mentioned individual account.
• Greater Manchester Police in top 10 individual
accounts.
• Emergency services low overall.
Organise, broadcast and ask for information, voice
opinions – support, ridicule for the
riots, rioters, authorities and commentators
60. READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
READING
THE RIOTS Jonathan Richards
Alastair Dant
ON TWITTER Katie Loweth
Marta Cantijoch
Yana Manyukhina
Rob Procter (University of Manchester) Mike Thelwall
Farida Vis (University of Leicester) Steven Gray
Alexander Voss (University of St Andrews) Rachel Gibson
[Funded by JISC]
Andy Hudson Smith
http://www.analysingsocialmedia.org/
rob.procter@manchester.ac.uk
Notas del editor
The build history gives access to the sequence of analysis jobs that have been run as well as to the output files that each run produced. This data is archived on the server.
The cloud economics argument from Amazon shows how traditional forms of providing computational and storage resources are either wasteful or risk customer dissatisfaction. Using a cloud model, the level of resource provision can be adapted to current demand. The St Andrews Cloud Collaboratory (StACC) is a private cloud (actually, more than one) that allows us to allocate resources to a research project when needed and release them for other uses when not needed for the project. This allows St Andrews to do more research per server room / watt / CO2.
![READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
READING
THE RIOTS
ON TWITTER
Rob Procter (University of Manchester)
Farida Vis (University of Leicester)
Alexander Voss (University of St Andrews)
[Funded by JISC]
http://www.analysingsocialmedia.org/
#readingtheriots](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/sra2012-120525120104-phpapp02/85/Reading-the-Riots-on-Twitter-1-320.jpg)
