IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/osf/socarx/ueds4.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

“No Central Stage”: Telegram-based activity during the 2019 protests in Hong Kong

Author

Listed:
  • Urman, Aleksandra
  • Ho, Justin Chun-ting
  • Katz, Stefan

Abstract

We examine Telegram-based activities related to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong thus presenting the first study of a large Telegram-aided protest movement. We contribute to both - scholarship on Hong Kongese protests and research on social media-based protest mobilization. For that, we rely on the data collected through Telegram’s API and a combination of network analysis and computational text analysis. We find that the Telegram-based network was cohesive ensuring the efficient spread of protest-related information. Content spread through Telegram predominantly concerned discussions of future actions and protest-related on-site information (i.e., police presence in certain areas). We find that the Telegram network was dominated by different actors each month of the observation suggesting the absence of one single leader. Further, traditional protest leaders - those prominent during the 2014 Umbrella Movement, - such as media and civic organisations were less prominent in the network than local communities. Finally, we observe a cooldown in the level of Telegram activity after the enactment of the harsh National Security Law in July 2020. Further investigation is necessary to assess the persistence of this effect in a long-term perspective.

Suggested Citation

  • Urman, Aleksandra & Ho, Justin Chun-ting & Katz, Stefan, 2020. "“No Central Stage”: Telegram-based activity during the 2019 protests in Hong Kong," SocArXiv ueds4, Center for Open Science.
  • Handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:ueds4
    DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/ueds4
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://osf.io/download/5fb290ad77aa650111949643/
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.31219/osf.io/ueds4?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Morales, A.J. & Losada, J.C. & Benito, R.M., 2012. "Users structure and behavior on an online social network during a political protest," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 391(21), pages 5244-5253.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Walk,Erin Elizabeth & Garimella,Kiran & Christia,Fotini, 2022. "Displacement and Return in the Internet Era : How Social Media Captures Migration Decisionsin Northern Syria," Policy Research Working Paper Series 10024, The World Bank.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Borondo, J. & Morales, A.J. & Benito, R.M. & Losada, J.C., 2014. "Mapping the online communication patterns of political conversations," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 414(C), pages 403-413.
    2. Borondo, J. & Morales, A.J. & Benito, R.M. & Losada, J.C., 2015. "Multiple leaders on a multilayer social media," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 72(C), pages 90-98.
    3. Liu, Xiaoyang & He, Daobing & Liu, Chao, 2018. "Modeling information dissemination and evolution in time-varying online social network based on thermal diffusion motion," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 510(C), pages 456-476.
    4. G. Olivares & J. P. Cárdenas & J. C. Losada & J. Borondo, 2019. "Opinion Polarization during a Dichotomous Electoral Process," Complexity, Hindawi, vol. 2019, pages 1-9, February.

    More about this item

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:osf:socarx:ueds4. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: OSF (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://arabixiv.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.