Abstract
The recent wave of mobilizations in the Arab world and across Western
countries has generated much discussion on how digital media is connected to
the diffusion of protests. We examine that connection using data from the surge
of mobilizations that took place in Spain in May 2011. We study recruitment
patterns in the Twitter network and find evidence of social influence and
complex contagion. We identify the network position of early participants (i.e.
the leaders of the recruitment process) and of the users who acted as seeds of
message cascades (i.e. the spreaders of information). We find that early
participants cannot be characterized by a typical topological position but
spreaders tend to me more central to the network. These findings shed light on
the connection between online networks, social contagion, and collective
dynamics, and offer an empirical test to the recruitment mechanisms theorized
in formal models of collective action.
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