Hawkes Processes on Social and Mass Media: A Causal Study of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement in the Summer of 2020

Alfred Lindström, Alfred Lindström, Simon Lindgren, Raazesh Sainudiin, Raazesh Sainudiin

2023

Abstract

In this work we study interactions in social media and the reports in mass media during the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests following the death of George Floyd. We implement open-source pipelines to process the data at scale and employ the self-exciting counting process known as Hawkes process to address our main question: is there a causal relation between interactions in social media and reports of street protests in mass media? Specifically, we use distributed label propagation to identify such interactions in Twitter, that supported the BLM movement, and compared the timing of these interaction to those of news reports of street protests mentioning George Floyd, via the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone (GDELT) Project. The comparison was made through a Bivariate Hawkes process model for a formal hypothesis test of Granger-causality. We show that interactions in social media that supported the BLM movement, at the beginning of nationwide protests, caused the global mass media reports of street protests in solidarity with the movement. This suggests that BLM activists have harnessed social media to mobilise street protests across the planet.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Lindström A., Lindgren S. and Sainudiin R. (2023). Hawkes Processes on Social and Mass Media: A Causal Study of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement in the Summer of 2020. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA; ISBN 978-989-758-664-4, SciTePress, pages 77-88. DOI: 10.5220/0012089500003541

in Bibtex Style

@conference{data23,
author={Alfred Lindström and Simon Lindgren and Raazesh Sainudiin},
title={Hawkes Processes on Social and Mass Media: A Causal Study of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement in the Summer of 2020},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA},
year={2023},
pages={77-88},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0012089500003541},
isbn={978-989-758-664-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Data Science, Technology and Applications - Volume 1: DATA
TI - Hawkes Processes on Social and Mass Media: A Causal Study of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement in the Summer of 2020
SN - 978-989-758-664-4
AU - Lindström A.
AU - Lindgren S.
AU - Sainudiin R.
PY - 2023
SP - 77
EP - 88
DO - 10.5220/0012089500003541
PB - SciTePress