Abstract
Social media is increasingly monitored during periods of societal unrest to gauge public response and estimate the duration and severity of related protest events. To this end, we build an agent-based simulation model that accurately describes the shift in posting behavior of users as related to a real historical event. First we define an appropriate indication that an agent has become an “activist”, or someone who disseminates protest-related posts during times of unrest. We then build an agent-based model based on parameters estimated from before and during the protest. We validate our model using a complete collection of Tumblr data from six months prior to the Ferguson protest of 2014, until the state of emergency was lifted. Validation is performed by visual inspection of the similarity of simulated distributions of established emergent metrics to the empirically observed data. Our results show that our model has potential for predicting posting behavior during future protests.
Krishna C. Bathina: This work was conducted while the first author was doing an internship at HRL Laboratories, LLC.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Bruch, E., Atwell, J.: Agent-based models in empirical social research. Sociol. Methods Res. 44(2), 186–221 (2015)
Chung, F., Lu, L.: The average distances in random graphs with given expected degrees. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 99(25), 15879–15882 (2002)
Hodas, N.O.: How limited visibility and divided attention constrain social contagion. In: SocialCom, Citeseer (2012)
Jules, B.: Hashtags of ferguson (2014). https://medium.com/on-archivy/hashtags-of-ferguson-8f52a0aced87.vbia14pwu
Weng, L., et al.: Competition among memes in a world with limited attention. Sci. Rep. 2, 1–8 (2012). doi:10.1038/srep00335
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bathina, K.C., Jammalamadaka, A., Xu, J., Lu, TC. (2017). An Agent-Based Model of Posting Behavior During Times of Societal Unrest. In: Lee, D., Lin, YR., Osgood, N., Thomson, R. (eds) Social, Cultural, and Behavioral Modeling. SBP-BRiMS 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10354. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60240-0_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-60240-0_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-60239-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-60240-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)