A Breakout Role for Twitter? The Role of Social Media in the Turkish Protests

SMaPP Data Reports, June 2013

Social Media and Political Participation Lab * (New York University)

As part of our broad aim of understanding the role that social media can play in initiating, promoting, and spreading political participation, we have been collecting and analyzing tweets related to the Turkish protests since they started on May 31st. Our dataset now comprises more than 22 million tweets (see Figure 1), with #direngezipark and #occupygezi, the two main hashtags associated to the demonstrators, having been mentioned more than 4 million times and 1.9 million times, respectively. Below we oer the three blog posts with preliminary findings from our study that we have published at The Monkey Cage.

* The SMaPP team is working on an interdisciplinary research project that has been funded by the NYU Research Investment Fund and the INSPIRE program of the National Science Foundation (Award #1248055). The project is entitled “Computer Learning of Dynamical Systems to Investigate Cognitive and Motivational Effects of Social Media Use on Political Participation.”

Download full text (Format Pdf)