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Elites Tweet to Get Feet Off the Streets: Measuring Regime Social Media Strategies During Protest

  • Kevin Munger, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler and Joshua A. Tucker
Abstract

As non-democratic regimes have adapted to the proliferation of social media, they have began actively engaging with Twitter to enhance regime resilience. Using data taken from the Twitter accounts of Venezuelan legislators during the 2014 anti-Maduro protests in Venezuela, we fit a topic model on the text of the tweets and analyze patterns in hashtag use by the two coalitions. We argue that the regime’s best strategy in the face of an existential threat like the narrative developed by La Salida and promoted on Twitter was to advance many competing narratives that addressed issues unrelated to the opposition’s criticism. Our results show that the two coalitions pursued different rhetorical strategies in keeping with our predictions about managing the conflict advanced by the protesters. This article extends the literature on social media use during protests by focusing on active engagement with social media on the part of the regime. This approach corroborates and expands on recent research on inferring regime strategies from propaganda and censorship.

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Copyright
© The European Political Science Association 2018
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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Kevin Munger, PhD student, Department of Politics, New York University, New York, NY 10012 (km2713@nyu.edu). Richard Bonneau is the Professor of Biology and Computer Science; Director at the NYU Center for Data Science and Co-Director at the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab, Center for Genomics and Systems Biology, 12 Waverly Place, New York, NY 10003 (bonneau@nyu.edu). Jonathan Nagler is the Professor of Politics; Co-Director at the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab and Affiliated Professor of Data Science, Department of Politics, New York University, 19 W. 4th Street, New York, NY 10012 (jonathan.nagler@nyu.edu). Joshua Tucker is the Professor of Politics; Director at the Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia; Co-Director at the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab and Affiliated Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies and of Data Science, Department of Politics, New York University, 19 W. 4th Street, New York, NY 10012 (joshua.tucker@nyu.edu). The writing of this article was supported by the Social Media and Political Participation Lab at NYU, which is funded in part by the INSPIRE program of the National Science Foundation (Award SES-1248077), and New York University’s Dean Thomas Carew’s Research Investment Fund. This article was written in conjunction with NYU’s Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab. We would like to thank Dorothy Kronick, Livio di Lonardo, Pedro Rodriguez, Andy Guess, Neal Beck, Chris Lucas, Alex Scacco, Duncan Penfold-Brown, Jonathan Ronen, Yvan Scher, and Adam Przeworksi, along with two anonymous reviewers; participants at the 2016 Society for Institutional & Organizational Economics Conference, the NYU Graduate Political Economy Seminar, and the 2015 Midwest Political Science Association meeting; seminar attendees at the Universidad del Desarollo (Chile) and the Universidad del Rosario (Colombia); and members of the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) Lab, for their valuable feedback on earlier versions of this project. K.M. is a PhD student member and the remaining authors are Co-Directors. Munger conducted all of the statistical analyses and wrote the first draft of the manuscript. All of the authors contributed to the research design, data collection, and revisions of the manuscript. To view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2018.3

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