#EndSARS Protest: Discourse and Mobilisation on Twitter

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2301.06176v1
• Date: Sun, 15 Jan 2023 20:11:25 GMT
• Title: #EndSARS Protest: Discourse and Mobilisation on Twitter
• Authors: Bello Shehu Bello, Muhammad Abubakar Alhassan, Isa Inuwa-Dutse
• Abstract summary: Using the @NGRPresident Twitter handle, the Government of Nigeria issued a special directive banning Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) with immediate effect. The unit has been accused of waves of human rights abuse across the nation. The #EndSARS hashtag was widely used by the protesters to amplify their messages and reach out to wider communities on Twitter.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Using the @NGRPresident Twitter handle, the Government of Nigeria issued a special directive banning Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS) with immediate effect. The SARS is a special police unit under the Nigeria Police Force tasked with the responsibility of fighting violent crimes. However, the unit has been accused of waves of human rights abuse across the nation. According to a report by Amnesty International, between January 2017 and May 2020, 82 cases of police brutality have been committed. This has led to one of the major protests demanding more measures to be taken. The #EndSARS hashtag was widely used by the protesters to amplify their messages and reach out to wider communities on Twitter. In this study, we present a critical analysis of how the online protest unfolded. Essentially, we examine how the protest evolves on Twitter, the nature of engagement with the protest themes, the factors influencing the protest and public perceptions about the online movement. We found that the mobilisation strategies include direct and indirect engagements with influential users, sharing direct stories and vicarious experiences. Also, there is evidence that suggests the deployment of automated accounts to promote the course of the protest. In terms of participation, over 70% of the protest is confined within a few states in Nigeria, and the diaspora communities also lent their voices to the movement. The most active users are not those with high followership, and the majority of the protesters utilised mobile devices, accounting for 88% to mobilise and report on the protest. We also examined how social media users interact with the movement and the response from the wider online communities. Needless to say, the themes in the online discourse are mostly about #EndSARS and vicarious experiences with the police, however, there are topics around police reform and demand for regime change.

Related papers

• An Investigation into Protestware [3.236198583140341]
  Protestware is software that can be used to organize protests. Recent events in the Russo-Ukrainian war has sparked a new wave of protestware.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-09-30T01:17:16Z)
• Russo-Ukrainian War: Prediction and explanation of Twitter suspension [47.61306219245444]
  This study focuses on the Twitter suspension mechanism and the analysis of shared content and features of user accounts that may lead to this. We have obtained a dataset containing 107.7M tweets, originating from 9.8 million users, using Twitter API. Our results reveal scam campaigns taking advantage of trending topics regarding the Russia-Ukrainian conflict for Bitcoin fraud, spam, and advertisement campaigns.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-06-06T08:41:02Z)
• Out of the Shadows: Analyzing Anonymous' Twitter Resurgence during the 2020 Black Lives Matter Protests [6.510061176722249]
  Recently, there had been little notable activity from the once prominent hacktivist group, Anonymous. The group, responsible for activist-based cyber attacks on major businesses and governments, appeared to have fragmented after key members were arrested in 2013. In response to the major Black Lives Matter protests, however, reports indicated that the group was back.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-07-22T10:18:32Z)
• Analyzing the "Sleeping Giants" Activism Model in Brazil [1.549278866004654]
  Sleeping Giants Brasil (SGB) campaigned against media outlets using Twitter to ask companies to remove ads from the targeted outlets. This work presents a thorough quantitative characterization of this activism model, analyzing the three campaigns carried out by SGB between May and September 2020.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-05-16T21:47:30Z)
• On spatial variation in the detectability and density of social media user protest supporters [52.77024349608834]
  The research reported here uses spatial capture-recapture methods to determine the influence of the built environment, physical proximity to protest location, and collective posting rhythm on variations in users' spatial detectability and density during a protest in Mexico City.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2021-03-10T14:08:08Z)
• Demographic Representation and Collective Storytelling in the Me Too Twitter Hashtag Activism Movement [17.672730162091526]
  The # movement on Twitter has drawn attention to the pervasive nature of sexual harassment and violence. We examine online # conversations across gender and racial/ethnic identities. We find that tweets authored by white women were overrepresented in the movement compared to other demographics.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-10-13T15:25:33Z)
• Black Lives Matter discourse on US social media during COVID: polarised positions enacted in a new event [0.0]
  The largest protests in US history occurred in late May and early June 2020, following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. The protests were notable not only for their size but also that they occurred at a time the US was still struggling to control the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic. Social media data suggest that this was not the case, with discussion of the BLM movement replacing discussion of COVID on US social media.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-09-08T09:56:16Z)
• Racism is a Virus: Anti-Asian Hate and Counterspeech in Social Media during the COVID-19 Crisis [51.39895377836919]
  COVID-19 has sparked racism and hate on social media targeted towards Asian communities. We study the evolution and spread of anti-Asian hate speech through the lens of Twitter. We create COVID-HATE, the largest dataset of anti-Asian hate and counterspeech spanning 14 months.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-25T21:58:09Z)
• Russian trolls speaking Russian: Regional Twitter operations and MH17 [68.8204255655161]
  In 2018, Twitter released data on accounts identified as Russian trolls. We analyze the Russian-language operations of these trolls. We find that trolls' information campaign on the MH17 crash was the largest in terms of tweet count.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-05-13T19:48:12Z)
• The Ivory Tower Lost: How College Students Respond Differently than the General Public to the COVID-19 Pandemic [66.80677233314002]
  Pandemic of the novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) has presented governments with ultimate challenges. In the United States, the country with the highest confirmed COVID-19 infection cases, a nationwide social distancing protocol has been implemented by the President. This paper aims to discover the social implications of this unprecedented disruption in our interactive society by mining people's opinions on social media.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-04-21T13:02:38Z)
• Whose Tweets are Surveilled for the Police: An Audit of Social-Media Monitoring Tool via Log Files [69.02688684221265]
  We obtained log files from the Corvallis (Oregon) Police Department's use of social media monitoring software called DigitalStakeout. These log files include the results of proprietary searches by DigitalStakeout that were running over a period of 13 months and include 7240 social media posts. We observe differences in the demographics of the users whose Tweets are flagged by DigitalStakeout compared to the demographics of the Twitter users in the region.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2020-01-23T19:35:12Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.