Faces in the crowd: Twitter as alternative to protest surveys

Who goes to protests? To answer this question, existing research has relied either on retrospective surveys of populations or in-protest surveys of participants. Both techniques are prohibitively costly and face logistical and methodological constraints. In this article, we investigate the possibili...

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Autores principales:	Christopher Barrie, Arun Frey
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN
Publicado:	Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2021
Materias:	Medicine R Science Q
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/000b6f03a7da47c899e72dab66d10383
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:000b6f03a7da47c899e72dab66d103832021-11-25T06:19:43ZFaces in the crowd: Twitter as alternative to protest surveys1932-6203https://doaj.org/article/000b6f03a7da47c899e72dab66d103832021-01-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8601430/?tool=EBIhttps://doaj.org/toc/1932-6203Who goes to protests? To answer this question, existing research has relied either on retrospective surveys of populations or in-protest surveys of participants. Both techniques are prohibitively costly and face logistical and methodological constraints. In this article, we investigate the possibility of surveying protests using Twitter. We propose two techniques for sampling protestors on the ground from digital traces and estimate the demographic and ideological composition of ten protestor crowds using multidimensional scaling and machine-learning techniques. We test the accuracy of our estimates by comparing to two in-protest surveys from the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. Results show that our Twitter sampling techniques are superior to hashtag sampling alone. They also approximate the ideology and gender distributions derived from on-the-ground surveys, albeit with some bias, but fail to retrieve accurate age group estimates. We conclude that online samples are yet unable to provide reliable representative samples of offline protest.Christopher BarrieArun FreyPublic Library of Science (PLoS)articleMedicineRScienceQENPLoS ONE, Vol 16, Iss 11 (2021)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN
topic	Medicine R Science Q
spellingShingle	Medicine R Science Q Christopher Barrie Arun Frey Faces in the crowd: Twitter as alternative to protest surveys
description	Who goes to protests? To answer this question, existing research has relied either on retrospective surveys of populations or in-protest surveys of participants. Both techniques are prohibitively costly and face logistical and methodological constraints. In this article, we investigate the possibility of surveying protests using Twitter. We propose two techniques for sampling protestors on the ground from digital traces and estimate the demographic and ideological composition of ten protestor crowds using multidimensional scaling and machine-learning techniques. We test the accuracy of our estimates by comparing to two in-protest surveys from the 2017 Women’s March in Washington, D.C. Results show that our Twitter sampling techniques are superior to hashtag sampling alone. They also approximate the ideology and gender distributions derived from on-the-ground surveys, albeit with some bias, but fail to retrieve accurate age group estimates. We conclude that online samples are yet unable to provide reliable representative samples of offline protest.
format	article
author	Christopher Barrie Arun Frey
author_facet	Christopher Barrie Arun Frey
author_sort	Christopher Barrie
title	Faces in the crowd: Twitter as alternative to protest surveys
title_short	Faces in the crowd: Twitter as alternative to protest surveys
title_full	Faces in the crowd: Twitter as alternative to protest surveys
title_fullStr	Faces in the crowd: Twitter as alternative to protest surveys
title_full_unstemmed	Faces in the crowd: Twitter as alternative to protest surveys
title_sort	faces in the crowd: twitter as alternative to protest surveys
publisher	Public Library of Science (PLoS)
publishDate	2021
url	https://doaj.org/article/000b6f03a7da47c899e72dab66d10383
work_keys_str_mv	AT christopherbarrie facesinthecrowdtwitterasalternativetoprotestsurveys AT arunfrey facesinthecrowdtwitterasalternativetoprotestsurveys
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Faces in the crowd: Twitter as alternative to protest surveys

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