Forecasting Civil Unrest Using Social Media and Protest Participation Theory

Activists have used social media during modern civil uprisings, and researchers have found that the generated content is predictive of off-line protest activity. However, questions remain regarding the drivers of this predictive power. In this paper, we begin by deriving predictor variables for individuals' protest decisions from the literature on protest participation theory. We then test these variables on the case of Twitter and the 2011 Egyptian revolution. We find significant positive correlations between the volume of future-protest descriptions on Twitter and protest onsets. We do not find significant correlations between such onsets and the preceding volume of political expressions, individuals' access to news, and connections with political activists. These results locate the predictive power of social media in its function as a protest advertisement and organization mechanism. We then build predictive models using future-protest descriptions and compare these models with baselines informed by daily event counts from the Global Database of Events, Location, and Tone (GDELT). Inspection of the significant variables in our GDELT models reveals that an increased military presence may be predictive of protest onsets in major cities. In sum, this paper highlights the ways in which online activism shapes off-line behavior during civil uprisings.