Tracking Protests Using Geotagged Flickr Photographs.
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 26930654.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1371/journal.pone.0150466 and PMC identifier 4773018.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
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.
Medical subject headings
- Dissent and Disputes
- Geographic Information Systems
- Photography
- Social Media