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The past several months have seen protest movements take place in Ukraine and Bosnia and Herzegovina as well as in many other places around the world. As these movements have arisen it has been an ongoing question as to whether it was possible to utlize the Internet to determine the scale and scope of these movements. Both countries experienced some form of protest movement that resulted in on the ground action in their respective capitals. Is it possible to identify how successful a protest movement is just by looking at the publicly available online flow of information? When trying to assess the importance of technology in a democracy there are dozens of questions that need answering. This hints at the broader processes of understanding how technology and society interact. Furthermore, it allows us to grasp in real terms how citizens of a country are using technology to discuss, mobilize and engage around political issues in a way other than formal polling.
Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) and Ukraine are very different in many respects. Although both have ethnic divisions the depth of these ethnic divisions, at least on the surface, appears to be significantly different. BiH has approximately 65% Internet penetration while Ukraine has just under 40% penetration. Ukraine has 3.2 million active users of Facebook while BiH has 1.54 million. Ukraine has approximately 10 times as many people as BiH and covers a significantly larger geographic area. Both sets of protests achieved international media attention, but if we look behind the sheen of the international media and we examine what people in the country were talking about can derive we a non-scientific assessment of the scale of these two different movements?
Below are time series of global and geolocated public conversations on protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ukraine. The key words for each set of protests was defined by those words most closely associated with each movement. The Ukrainian data was scaled by 10 to provide a proportional representation by population. The content comes from Public Facebook, Twitter, News, Blogs, Forums, Comments, and YouTube using Forsight by Crimson Hexagon. Figure 1 represents the those pieces of content that were publicly geo-tagged and specific to the country. Figure 2 represents global content associated with the protest movements. All content is brought in in relevant local lanugages. Although not scientifically measured, the data provide us strong anecdotal evidence on which to judge the scale of the protest movements both nationally and internationally among Internet connected individuals.
Figure 1: Geo-tagged conversations relevant to national protests in BiH and Ukraine
Figure 2: Global online conversations relevant to the protests in BiH and Ukraine.
What both the geo-tagged and global content volume illustrate, even when scalled by 10 to approximate population size, is that the protest movements in Ukraine garnered significantly more interest than those in Bosnia and Herizgovina nationally. Internationally the BiH protests spiked for a single day in February, yet did not come close to approximating the lull in the volume of relative global content being posted about Ukraine. This is less important in terms of influencing change than understanding how networks are used to mobilize. At its most basic the data highlight the fact that mass social movements do have a discernable presence online and that the larger a movement the higher the relative volume of online content in relation to that movement. This should also illustrate is that there is more to mass mobilization than Internet penetration rates alone. Social mobilizations appear to have a cyber side; a measure of volume, impact, and coversations which can be assessed to provide a richer understanding of on the ground actions.