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Debate: The ‘gilets jaunes’ movement is not a Facebook revolution

By on January 17, 2019 in Big Data, Digital Activism, Facebook, Journalism, Social Movements

In less than a month, France’s gilets jaunes (yellow vests) have gone from being a celebrated example of Facebook’s ability to power a spontaneous revolution to a cautionary tale of how social networks can be manipulated by outsiders to provoke outrage and sow dissent. But in both of these extreme scenarios, the central actors lie […]

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The false media focus on violence: If it bleeds it still leads

By on September 14, 2017 in Digital Activism, Facebook, Journalism, Police, Social Movements, Sociology, Twitter

On Sunday, August 27, in downtown Berkeley, I witnessed thousands of protesters raising their voices against a planned white supremacist “Patriot Prayer” rally. In my decades as a documentary filmmaker of activism and now an academic studying movements and media, it was one of the most positive, diverse and unifying gatherings I ever observed. While […]

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Competing Twitter hashtags reflect divided response to Paris attacks

By on February 1, 2016 in Big Data, Social Movements, Twitter

On Friday night, November 13, I had just left a movie theater near my home in Toulouse, France, when I received an e-mail from a friend asking me if I was OK. Curious, I went on Twitter and immediately saw reports from French news agencies that there had been a series of attacks across Paris. […]

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5 reasons why online Big Data is Bad Data for researching social movements

By on February 1, 2016 in Academia, Big Data, Digital Activism, Digital Divide, Facebook, Social Movements, Sociology, Twitter, Uncategorized

I know, I know, it’s digital blasphemy to say that using Internet data is a terrible way to study social movements. What about all of those Twitter and Facebook revolutions of the Arab Spring? And Occupy Wall Street? #Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter spread like wildfire, for God’s sake. You may think that I’m a luddite who […]

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