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Elites Tweet to Get Feet Off the Streets: Measuring Regime Social Media Strategies During Protest
How do regimes strategically use social media to respond to protests? We analyzed Twitter data from the 2014 anti-Maduro protests in Venezuela and found that the regime’s best strategy when faced with an existential threat was to advance several competing narratives that addressed issues unrelated to the opposition’s criticism.
Citation
Munger, Kevin, Richard Bonneau, Jonathan Nagler, and Joshua A. Tucker. “Elites Tweet to Get Feet off the Streets: Measuring Regime Social Media Strategies during Protest.” Political Science Research and Methods 7, no. 4 (2019): 815–34. https://doi.org/10.1017/psrm.2018.3
Date Posted
Mar 21, 2018
Area of Study
Abstract
As non-democratic regimes have adapted to the proliferation of social media, they have begun actively engaging with Twitter to enhance regime resilience. Using data taken from the Twitter accounts of Venezuelan legislators during the 2014 anti-Maduro protests in Venezuela, we fit a topic model on the text of the tweets and analyze patterns in hashtag use by the two coalitions. We argue that the regime’s best strategy in the face of an existential threat like the narrative developed by La Salida and promoted on Twitter was to advance many competing narratives that addressed issues unrelated to the opposition’s criticism. Our results show that the two coalitions pursued different rhetorical strategies in keeping with our predictions about managing the conflict advanced by the protesters. This article extends the literature on social media use during protests by focusing on active engagement with social media on the part of the regime. This approach corroborates and expands on recent research on inferring regime strategies from propaganda and censorship.
Background
Technologically advanced and capable regimes in Russia and China have been actively and strategically engaging in social media, rather than merely trying to ban its use. By 2016, it’s possible that popular social media use can actually enhance regime resilience. The long-term use of social media by both pro- and anti-regime actors has received a good deal of scholarly attention. Its use by dissidents during acute protests has been even more studied. For the purposes of this paper, we look at the question: How do regimes strategically use social media to respond to protests?
Study
To answer this question, we take data from the 2014 anti-Maduro protests in Venezuela, known as La Salida. This case is particularly appropriate for exploring elite social media response to protests because social media is widely used by both citizens and elites in the country, making Venezuela among the top five countries in terms of Twitter penetration. The “soft censorship” of mainstream media sources makes Twitter’s speech-enabling function especially important and, as is common in Latin America, Venezuelan politicians are more likely to speak their minds directly on Twitter.
Results
After analyzing the tweets, we argue that the regime’s best strategy when faced with an existential threat (like the narrative developed by La Salida and promoted on Twitter) was to advance several competing narratives that addressed issues unrelated to the opposition’s criticism. Our results show that the two coalitions pursued different rhetorical strategies about managing the conflict advanced by the protesters. Our approach corroborates and expands on recent research on inferring regime strategies from propaganda and censorship.