Shahbag movement: The tweeted perspective

Abstract

In recent years, revolutions across the middle-east, mass protests in USA and Spain, and aggregated general discontents in many other countries of the world have lived a cyber life parallel to the streets - mainly in Twitter. Much have been said and believed about Twitter based revolutions. However, there is real dearth of in-depth empirical studies to support those claims. Before the heat of earlier revolutions on Twitter cooled down, a new revolution emerged in the Shahbag Square in Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh. It started by declaration in social networks, quickly gathered huge momentum, and soon got spread all over the country. In this study, we analyzed about a million tweets to study the nature of the movement, the participants and their activities. The results show that the modern revolutions bring together people from all strata of the society around the epicenter and grow in a completely apolitical manner.