Analyzing large-scale public campaigns on Twitter

Abstract

Social media has become an important instrument for running various types of public campaigns and mobilizing people. Yet, the dynamics of public campaigns on social networking platforms still remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis of over one hundred large-scale campaigns on social media platforms covering more than 6 years. In particular, we focus on campaigns related to climate change on Twitter, which promote online activism to encourage, educate, and motivate people to react to the various issues raised by climate change. We propose a generic framework to identify both the type of a given campaign as well as the various actions undertaken throughout its lifespan: official meetings, physical actions, calls for action, publications on climate related research, etc. We study whether the type of a campaign is correlated to the actions undertaken and how these actions influence the flow of the campaign. Leveraging more than one hundred different campaigns, we build a model capable of accurately predicting the presence of individual actions in tweets. Finally, we explore the influence of active users on the overall campaign flow.