Media and Mobs: Mass Mobilization on Social Media Platforms

In many cases, political movements involving mass mobilization over a short period of time — e.g. Occupy Wall Street, early civil rights activism, and antiwar protests — have failed to produce their desired results immediately. However, the ideas they bring into public discourse can lead to sweeping reforms as they gain traction over time. In recent years, much of this discourse, as well as organizing for these advocacy movements, has taken place online. Social media in particular now serves as a "public square" for discussing policy ideals, spreading information to the public, and fostering group unity and division alike.

The aim of this project is to shine a spotlight on the conversations and organizing efforts occurring via social media, particularly in the context of decarceration and prison abolition movements. One one hand, we consider existing literature and on-the-ground perspectives to get a qualitative sense of how organizers utilize social media. On the other, we analyze data from Google Trends, C-Span, and the GDelt event database to produce visualizations and quantitative evidence illustrating these ideas at a larger scale. Ultimately, we hope our findings will promote an understanding of what might be to come in the wake of recent mass mobilization movements, especially those pertaining to prison abolition.

A graph of the ties between keywords related to prison abolition (as well as a couple of unrelated terms for testing). Tie strength is determined by the correlation in (Google) search volume over time for a given pair.