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Social Media Hype Tracking

The Moldova “Twitter Revolution” Hype Curve

How quickly excitement about a new social media tool evolves into charges of “hype.”    On Monday April 6th, a small flash mob collected in central Chisinau, Moldova, to protest the recent elections.  The following day a much larger and rowdier crowd gathered and the Twitter hashtag #pman appeared, referring the location of the protest, a square called Piata Marii Adunari Nationale.

The world took notice of two things: 1) People are rioting in the capital of Moldova. 2) They seem to be using Twitter to organize the protests.  The second observation, being the more unusual, became the headline.  On the 7th and 8th both the traditional media and the bloggers were harolding the “Twitter Revolution“.

In a few hours the backlash came.  Evgeny Morozov, responsible for one of the first Twitter Revoltion posts,  wrote a new post with caveats.  Turns out there are too few twitters in Moldova for it to be an effective organizing tool.  Blogger Daniel Bennett pointed to evidence that there was no cell phone coverage in the square, making live twittering impossible, and called the revolution meme a myth.

But that cynical view, just like the enthusiastic one first put forth, was not the end of the story.  The final version of events, promoted by such writers as Evgeny Morozov, Ethan Zuckerman, and Kate Brodock of DigiActive, was that Twitter played a role, though one of increasing international awareness rather than for organizing, that Twitter was only one of several social media tools used, and that journalists’ (and bloggers’) fascination with Twitter was also a large contributing factor to the popularity of that narrative.

The hype curve had moderated itself.  Moving from enthusiasm to backlash to cautious optimism.  Final verdict: Twitter is useful for activists but not game-changing and the enthusiasts and cynics were both over-reaching.

Hype Tracking for other Social Media

Twitter as a tool for digital activism came out of this a bit bruised, and unfairly so.   Too much was attributed to it during the “revolution” phase.   It was unfairly criticized during the backlash and was made out to be less useful than it is.   This got me thinking, has this hype curve occurred with regard to other digital activism tools and, if so, can we expect similar patterns in their rise and fall from glory?

“Hype” is a difficult thing to measure and by necessity requires a proxy variable.  I chose Google Trends, which ranks a term relative to all Google searches over a given time period.  (Please let me know if you can think of a better proxy.)  I tracked searches for four prominent (and much-hyped) social media tools used for activism: blogs, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. All data is from today, April 16, 2009.

The blog data is the most useful because it goes back the furthest.  Searches for “blog” (our hype proxy) grew steadily from early 2004 to mid-2007 and then plateaued.    I interpret this plateau to mean that the hype around blogging has “died,” although blogging has not.  There has been a backlash to the blogging hype and the “post-blog” meme, referring to the popularity of new social media tools like Facebook and Twitter, has had some traction.  Yet blogging continues to be extremely popular to a general audience and useful to many digital activism campaigns.   It seems to have passed successfully through the hype where it is not longer the answer to every advocacy question, yet has been shown to have lasting value of an accessible means of creating alternative narratives.

YouTube is a little different.  It seems to be following the blog hype trend, with increased interest since early 2006, yet, beginning in 2008, it seems to plateau.  However, its Search Volume Index is still pretty high, which means that the hype around YouTube may not yet have peaked, so it’s unclear whether it will follow the hype-backlash-normalization trend.

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Moldovan Protests: Was it really a “Twitter Revolution”?

source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/creepysleepy/3429118253/

Since Tuesday’s protests and riots in the Moldovan capital Chisinau, there has been much analysis on how this group of protesters was formed.  Initial reports focused primarily on the use of Twitter, while paying scant reference to other social media tools, let alone the still relevant power of human mobilization.  The extent to which Twitter has been connected to the event has even led to unfortunate outcomes such as the charging of Natalia Morar, a Moldovan activist blamed for starting the “revolution” using the application.

The analysis on the technological aspects of this event in the past few days have revealed a different story.  It still involves Twitter, but Twitter has a different role.  While Twitter had a part in the pre-protest mobilization in and around Chisinau on Monday night, it may not have necessarily turned the protests into mobs or rioters, nor did it necessarily invoke the violence that occurred on Tuesday, as some believe.

As Evegeny Morozov, a fellow at the Open Society Institute, pointed out, Twitter’s more important role was getting the information out to the world, bringing it international attention and keeping the story alive and buzzing, as well as acting as a channel to push out user-generated content from on the ground.  After some great immediate analysis of the Twitter scene in Moldova (which was a follow up to his initial, but still quite insightful assessment on Tuesday), Morozov found that there were actually very few registered Twitter users in the country, and he suspects that most of the Tweets on #pman were not on the ground and were elsewhere in the world, taking information and pushing it along.

Aside from the fact that the government of Moldova quickly shut down cell phone service for the square where the riots took place, it seems there is limited use for Twitter in terms of mobilization efforts once you already have people in the square.  The violence was somewhat self-contained and more of a product of human beings being human beings than a technologically enhanced provocation.  As you might predict, the use of a megaphone became more useful than using Twitter.

However, the broader set of social media tools beyond Twitter seems to have played a greater part in the process of mobilization than originally thought, as Daniel Bennett hints at in his blog post discussing the events.  One commenter to Bennet’s blog, Julien, stated that “If it were social media, I’d say it were rather social networks like Facebook. I saw messages from Moldovan contacts the evening before asking to gather for the first meetings on Monday.”  Even more telling was this comment by zerolab:

“As evisoft stated, Twitter was used for the initial organization and consequent spread of information. Add facebook statuses tied to twitter updates and a few other means like SMSes, word of mouth, LiveJournal.

There is no doubt about Twitter’s role on starting/organizing the protests, but they’ve evolved into something bigger and way too hard to coordinate anything.”

There’s no doubt that there was a complex system of social media tools that were being used prior to and during the event, but they went beyond Twitter, and included blog aggregators like blogosfera.md, Facebook, and regionally-specific social networks such as Odnoklassniki.

The use of Twitter cannot, however, be discounted.  This is a very interesting case of more sophisticated tactics for activism.  People have realized the ability of the tool not only to draw people to your cause, mobilize efforts or provide information, but they were able to harness it’s ability to spread information with the explicit goal of attracting attention to a particular event that otherwise may have gone largely unnoticed.  For them, personally, this means international pressure on a government and an election that determines their very well-being.

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