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Tracking Protests Using Geotagged Flickr Photographs

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  • Merve Alanyali
  • Tobias Preis
  • Helen Susannah Moat

Abstract

Recent years have witnessed waves of protests sweeping across countries and continents, in some cases resulting in political and governmental change. Much media attention has been focused on the increasing usage of social media to coordinate and provide instantly available reports on these protests. Here, we investigate whether it is possible to identify protest outbreaks through quantitative analysis of activity on the photo sharing site Flickr. We analyse 25 million photos uploaded to Flickr in 2013 across 244 countries and regions, and determine for each week in each country and region what proportion of the photographs are tagged with the word “protest” in 34 different languages. We find that higher proportions of “protest”-tagged photographs in a given country and region in a given week correspond to greater numbers of reports of protests in that country and region and week in the newspaper The Guardian. Our findings underline the potential value of photographs uploaded to the Internet as a source of global, cheap and rapidly available measurements of human behaviour in the real world.

Suggested Citation

  • Merve Alanyali & Tobias Preis & Helen Susannah Moat, 2016. "Tracking Protests Using Geotagged Flickr Photographs," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(3), pages 1-8, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0150466
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0150466
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Federico Botta & Helen Susannah Moat & Tobias Preis, 2020. "Measuring the size of a crowd using Instagram," Environment and Planning B, , vol. 47(9), pages 1690-1703, November.
    2. Traag, V.A. & Quax, R. & Sloot, P.M.A., 2017. "Modelling the distance impedance of protest attendance," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 468(C), pages 171-182.

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