Case studies of the role of corporate social media in social uprisings

In the context of the question:
What is the relationship between corporations and government surveillance?

Undoubtedly, there is a high level of “interest” in collecting and analysing the content contributed by social network users.

#OccupyGezi
Regarding the possible uses of the developing tools for analysis, I will refer to a publication in the context of SocialSencor, where the case study example was the revolt of Turkish youth in the summer of 2013. A wave of demonstrations started at Istanbul's Taksim Square, to prevent the destruction of Gezi Park. Here are some extracted pieces of the publication, which displays the role and service of analysis tools in large-scale events, such as a social rebellion.

...the described framework supports configurable targeted crawling and indexing of social multimedia content in tandem with real-time analysis and summarisation. The framework is based on a real-time distributed architecture, including very efficient image indexing and clustering implementations. We evaluate the framework on a large-scale case study around the #OccupyGezi events…

...We started the crawling exercise on June 4th and continued until July 17th. The crawling was conducted around a set of hand-picked keywords and a small number of selected accounts on Facebook and YouTube…

...A total of 16,785,785 Items and 319,095 Media Items were collected respectively, spanning the interval (Jun 1, Jul 17)… ...The Figure provides a map-based view of the event at different zoom levels (based on the subset of images that are geotagged). From the figure, it becomes apparent that although the events were highly intense on Istanbul (and the Gezi park in particular), there was considerable activity in major Turkish cities (Ankara, Bursa, Izmir, Antalya, Eskisehir, Bodrum), and even in large European (London, Berlin, Paris) and American (New York, San Francisco, Boston, Toronto) cities…

...The evaluation of the crawler in the context of the #OccupyGezi events demonstrated that it is an effective tool for collecting diverse content from social networks and for browsing and searching it in multiple ways...

Arab Spring
Another typical case for analysis is the so-called Arab Spring, in which the western world contends that social media played a central role. Over the past few years, a lot of research projects have been done by academic and state institutions to study the use of social media in the uprisings of the Arab world. Many westerners have described the Arab Spring as a Twitter or Facebook revolution. An article on the website of the University of Washington with the title “New study quantifies the use of Social Media in the Arab Spring” begins as follows;

“In the 21st century, the revolution may not be televised – but it likely will be tweeted, blogged, texted and organised on Facebook, recent experience suggests.”

My thoughts...
The rebels in the Arab world did not expect to rely on Facebook to decide their actions, nor Twitter to learn about the weapons and tanks that they were facing. The fact that they used tools like that, mainly to open up and speak to the rest of the world about what was happening, doesn’t mean that without them they would be unable to coordinate their efforts. It seems that westerners are possibly more interested in the use of social media, instead of the very fact of the uprising. They repeatedly talk about the way it supposedly happened; through social media. When the medium is identified as the message, the message may lose its meaning.

The reproduction of a hasty conclusion that social rebellions in the 21st century take place on the servers of one or more corporations is a specific media translation of reality. The reality, however, is much more complex. The developers of mechanisms for social control are the ones who advocate for more of such ideologies; that corporate social media can be an alternative or independent means of communication and organisation. I do not argue that it was a mistake from the side of the people who protested in the Arab countries to use corporate social media, phones, emails or blogs amid a social uprising. Nonetheless, the next time I hear that a social uprising is happening through social media, I will certainly have to be more suspicious of which side supports such a claim. Are they the same ones who develop and use tools to analyse social movements? If the relationship between social media and Arab Spring rebels or other social outbreaks have been examined already hundreds of times, the goal, as shown in projects like SocialSensor, is ultimately the real-time analysis of similar situations. The next time something like that happens, it could be managed more efficiently by the organisations that have the appropriate machines and means to do it.

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