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Replication Data for: Elites Tweet to get Feet off the Streets: Measuring Regime Social Media Strategies During Protest

Harvard Dataverse (Africa Rice Center, Bioversity International, CCAFS, CIAT, IFPRI, IRRI and WorldFish)

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Title Replication Data for: Elites Tweet to get Feet off the Streets: Measuring Regime Social Media Strategies During Protest
 
Identifier https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/AMYHNJ
 
Creator Munger, Kevin
Bonneau, Richard
Nagler, Jonathan
Tucker, Joshua A.
 
Publisher Harvard Dataverse
 
Description As non-democratic regimes have adapted to the proliferation of social media,
they have began actively engaging with Twitter to enhance regime resilience.
Using data taken from the Twitter accounts of Venezuelan legislators during
the 2014 anti-Maduro protests in Venezuela, we fit a topic model on the text
of the tweets and analyze patterns in hashtag use by the two coalitions. We
argue that the regime’s best strategy in the face of an existential threat like
the narrative developed by La Salida and promoted on Twitter was to advance
many competing narratives that addressed issues unrelated to the opposition’s
criticism. Our results show that the two coalitions pursue different rhetorical
strategies in keeping with our predictions about managing the conflict advanced
by the protesters. This paper extends the literature on social media use during
protests by focusing on active engagement with social media on the part of the
regime. This approach corroborates and expands on recent research on inferring
regime strategies from propaganda and censorship.
 
Subject Social Sciences
 
Contributor Munger, Kevin