India’s Digital Satyagraha
Exploring the rise and popularity of social media activism in India
#section377 #mu mk in ha i #indiaunhear d #nir bhaya
Media studies: New media and digital culture Master thesis
Supervisor: Dr. Stefania Milan
Second Reader: Dr. Sjoukje Van der Meulen Date of completion: 26 June 2015
University of Amsterdam
Sameena
Student number: 10847154
sameena.mohdali@gmail.com
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 – Introduction ... 4
1.a – Defining Social Media Activism ... 6
1.b – Social Media Activism in India ... 7
Chapter 2 – Research Design & Methodology ... 10
2.a – Introduction to the Research Design ... 10
2.b – Definition of Impact ... 10
2.c – Determining the Case Studies with Impact – Format Matrix ... 11
2.d – Defining the Research Question ... 14
2.e – Building Web Historiography of the Case Studies ... 15
2.e.1 Web Historiography of Incident Driven Campaign -‐ 2012/13 Anti-‐Rape Protests
... 15
2.e.2 Web Historiography of Incident Driven Campaign -‐ 2013 Anti-‐377 Protests ... 24
2.e.3 Web Historiography of Storytelling Based Initiative -‐ Video Volunteers (VV) ... 31
2.e.4 Web Historiography of Storytelling Based Initiative -‐ Satyamev Jayate (SMJ) ... 34
Chapter 3 – Research Findings ... 38
3.a – Findings from Incident Driven, 2012/13 Anti-‐Rape Protests ... 38
3.b – Findings from Incident Driven, 2013 Anti-‐377 Protests ... 44
3.c – Findings from Storytelling Based, Video Volunteers Initiative ... 51
3.d – Findings from Storytelling Based, Satyamev Jayate Initiative ... 55
Chapter 4 – Inference & Conclusion ... 60
4.a – Comparing the Incident Driven Case Studies ... 60
4.b – Comparing Storytelling Based Case Studies ... 62
4.c – Incident Driven vs. Storytelling Based Activism Formats ... 64
4.d – Role of Social Media in Activism Campaigns ... 66
Chapter 5 – Discussion ... 68
5.a – Reflection on Research Methodology & Tools ... 68
5.b – Way Forward for Future Investigations ... 71
Bibliography ... 72
Appendix ... 75
Appendix 1 -‐ Total number of tweets analyzed for anti-‐rape protests ... 76
Appendix 2 -‐ Total number of tweets analyzed for anti-‐rape protests -‐ Jan 2013 ... 76
Appendix 3 -‐ Total number of tweets analyzed for anti-‐rape protests -‐ Feb 2013 ... 76
Appendix 4 -‐ Total number of tweets analyzed for anti-‐rape protests -‐ March 2013 .. 77
Appendix 5 -‐ Total number of tweets analyzed for anti-‐rape protests -‐ Aug 2013 ... 77
Appendix 6 -‐ Total number of tweets analyzed for anti-‐rape protests -‐ Sept 2013 ... 77
Appendix 7 – Lifetime analysis of Delhi for Women’s Safety Group – Facebook ... 78
Appendix 8 – Lifetime analysis of Delhi for Nirbhaya Group – Facebook ... 78
Appendix 9 – Total number of tweets analyzed for anti-‐377 protests -‐ Lifetime ... 78
Appendix 10 – Lifetime analysis of Facebook group 377: Each One Teach One ... 79
Appendix 11 – Analysis of Facebook group 377: Each One Teach One – Dec 2013 ... 79
Appendix 12 – Analysis of Facebook group 377: Each One Teach One – 2014 ... 79
Appendix 13 – Analysis of Facebook group 377: Each One Teach One – 2015 ... 80
Appendix 14 – Analysis of Facebook group WHAQ – Lifetime ... 80
Appendix 15 – Analysis of Facebook group WHAQ – Dec 2013 ... 80
Appendix 16 – Analysis of Facebook group WHAQ – 2014 ... 81
Appendix 17 – Analysis of Facebook group WHAQ – 2015 ... 81
Appendix 18 – Analysis of Facebook group Video Volunteers – Lifetime ... 81
Appendix 19 – Analysis of Facebook vs. Twitter for Video Volunteers – Sample data 82
Appendix 20 – Analysis of Facebook group Satyamev Jayate – Lifetime ... 85
Appendix 21 – Analysis of Facebook vs. Twitter for Satyamev Jayate – Sample data .. 85
Appendix 21 – Hashtag Frequency table for anti-‐rape protests ... 94
Appendix 22 – Hashtag Frequency table for anti-‐377 protests ... 98
Chapter 1 – Introduction
19-‐year old Shambhavi Saxena was arrested for taking part in a peaceful protest in Delhi, India in December 2012. As she was being dragged away along with 15 other women, she furtively took out her cellphone and rapidly fired tweet after tweet, giving the world a first hand account of what was happening to her. Over 200 thousand people saw her tweets. This led to media attention and soon the issue gained national interest. Without any solid justification to detain them an under public pressure, the police had to free the women (Times of India, 2012). Figure 1 below shows a set of tweets Shambhavi sent during this time.
What Shambhavi’s constant tweeting did, was to not just make the public and media aware of the atrocities committed by the police on peaceful protestors, but also mobilize them to take action and stop the injustice. Armed with just a phone, an internet connection, and a free account on a social networking site (SNS); a 19 year old girl was not only able to save herself and 15 other women from police injustice, but she also grasp the nation’s attention to an act of injustice. Using SNS like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube in activism initiatives is increasingly becoming a norm. For e.g. the 2012 anti-‐rape protests in India, 2014 Hong Kong protests, 2011 Arab spring etc. are a few examples.
Since SNS allows for the creation and distribution of user generated content, it becomes increasingly easy for individuals and groups to meet up, collaborate, plan events and protest initiatives. In India, just the trio of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube has over 2 billion active users combined (Statista, 2015). This is a good indication of the kind of reach and popularity the SNS enjoy. Added to this list are the new entrants like the instant messaging application for smartphones Whatsapp and Snapchat that have gathered more than 700 and 200 million followers in India already (Statista, 2015).
In the days of world wars and other historical revolutions, newspapers were the main channels of communication between diverse sets of people. But it was still a public space, which could only carry factual news and editorials. Personal opinions were limited to ‘Letters to the editor’. Social media on the other hand gives individuals a free of cost option to express their opinion about any
Figure 1 -‐ A protestor's live tweets on being wrongfully detained. Source: Twitter.com
topic under the sun, and in any form or manner they desire. Pictures, videos, articles or 140 character tweets – the choice of expression are as diverse as the number of platforms themselves. In its initial years social media was mainly a tool to connect and stay in touch with friends and families scattered around the globe. Then it slowly became a platform for people to express their thoughts, feelings and opinions. It the graduated into a platform that served as a news-‐breaking medium (Rogers, 2013). This has now gone a step further where people have begun to realize the potential of social media to bring together people to take collaborative action on critical social issues (Anwer & Shrinivasan, 2012). Social activism has acquired a new, highly effective and cheap weapon in its armor – social media. As Gerbaudo notes, ‘Social media use must be understood as complementing existing forms of face-‐to-‐face gatherings (rather than substituting for them), but also as a vehicle for the creation of new forms of proximity and face-‐to-‐face interaction’ (Gerbaudo, 2012).
But as vast as the universe of social media networking is, so is its usage and so are the reasons for which it is used. While initiatives do receive attention and are ‘followed’ by people; how many of them actually take part in it? How many just become a part of it on social media to ‘show’ their concern? How many follow up on the issue once the furore around it has ended? These are all the questions one needs to focus on while studying activism that uses social media, or as it is called Social Media Activism. In his book ‘Tweets and the Streets’, Gerbaudo states that it is important to understand ‘how exactly the use of these media reshapes the ‘repertoire of communication’ (Mattoni, 2012) of contemporary movements and affects the experience of participants’ (Gerbaudo, 2012:2). It is imperative to explore how they function as a means of organizing collective action, mobilizing people, creating a desired impact and bringing about change (Lievrouw, 2009). Paul Mason describes the role of social media platforms in social media activism as follows; Facebook is used to form groups and communities, Twitter is used for real-‐ time news dissemination and platforms like YouTube, Flickr etc. provide video and photo evidence of the claims being made on Facebook or Twitter (Mason, 2010 and Gerbaudo, 2012). In this quote Mason describes the ‘online’ effect of these platforms but nothing is spoken about their on-‐ground impact. The tweets shown in figure 1 are a great example of how social media platforms can influence on ground actions and change the course of justice.
Using social media in activism campaigns is a fairly new trend in India. In the next section, I present a brief summary of the history of social media activism in India and how through this research my purpose is to explore this growing trend and study its nuances and impact on the Indian society. In Chapter 2, I have outlined my research objective and a detailed plan using which I select 4 case studies to analyse social media activism in India. Chapter 3 focuses on analyzing the findings of my research. Chapter 4 draws out the conclusion from the research findings and answers the research questions stated in chapter 2. I end this paper with a brief summary of my reflections and experience of conducting this research and how future researchers can take this investigation forward.
1.a – Defining Social Media Activism
In the era of Web 2.0, the embodiment between humans and technology has become so intense that every minute and aspect of our life is dominated by technology – from picking the quickest travel route for work, to high-‐end healthcare facilities. SNS in particular have led this digital tirade from the front, as is evident from the fact that the number of active Facebook users globally have equaled the entire population of China. SNS have fostered the culture of building communities and groups of like-‐minded people across diverse geographies. ‘The emergence of apps and web-‐based user-‐to-‐user services, driven by an explosion of informal dialogues, continuous uploads, and user-‐generated content, have greatly empowered the rise of ‘participatory culture’’ (Lovink & Rasch, 2012). SNS have made it increasingly easy for individuals and communities to share resources, ideas, opinions, attract attention to topics of interest or in some cases even start revolutions. The Arab spring uprising, the occupy campaigns (Los Angeles, Wall Street, Hong Kong), the anti-‐corruption campaign in India are some of the many examples where social media has gone beyond from being just a ‘hang out’ place to being one of the most critical resources for initiating social change. As Diamond and Milan observe, ‘Some observers have come forward with the (contested) notion of ‘liberation technology’, to indicate those technologies enabling citizens to report news, expose wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections, scrutinize government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons of freedom’ (Diamond, 2010 and Milan, 2013).
This phenomenon of initiating collective action for social causes using social media and its infrastructural prowess can be termed as Social Media Activism, which ‘indicates the realm of collective action in cyberspace that (…) exploits the infrastructure’s technical and ontological features for political or social change’ (Milan, 2013). There is no dearth of the number of terms used to describe this phenomenon, all of which are usually used interchangeably – social media activism, digital activism, cyber activism, cyber protests, Internet activism, online activism, cloud protesting and so on. In this paper I have used the term ‘social media activism’ because I am studying the particular influence of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter on activism movements in India.
1.b – Social Media Activism in India
Satyagraha is an Indian tradition, a culture and a way to express public dissatisfaction against the government. Loosely translated as “insistence of truth”, it is a form of non-‐violent, peaceful civil resistance against unjust laws and practices in the country. Under the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi who initiated mass civil movements through his speeches and newspaper articles, Satyagraha became the weapon using which India won its Independence from the British rule in 1947. Fast forward to the 2000s. There are a lot of examples that I can share that indicate the revival of Satyagraha in India.
2009 Pink Chaddi campaign – these protests was sparked off after a few pub going girls were violently attacked by a Hindu fundamentalist organization in Mangalore, India. This incident led to various other attacks on women in different parts of the country. In retaliation a 19-‐year-‐old girl started a Facebook group to condemn and discuss strategies to stop the attacks. The group went viral and eventually came up with the plan of sending pink panties (chaddi in Hindi) to the Hindu organization – a sarcastic albeit peaceful reply to their violent attacks. The Pink Chaddi campaign became a powerful symbol in the fight for women’s rights and liberation (Chattopadhyay, 2011).
2011 anti-‐corruption campaign – A small community leader called Anna Hazare became a national figure with his campaign against rampant corruption in the country and his demand for a strong anti-‐corruption law. This campaign which ran for over an year, saw people from across the nation join in as one force, and peacefully protest against the corrupt regime through hunger strikes and dharnas (sit-‐in protests) in their respective cities in order to build pressure on the government to pass the anti-‐corruption bill. The campaign used Facebook and Twitter mainly to propagate their messages and organize protests. The impact of this campaign led to the passing of an anti-‐corruption bill, albeit not completely as the protestors demanded (The Washington Post, Aug 12, 2011).
2012/13 anti-‐rape campaign -‐ In 2012, a mass protest was launched in reaction to a gruesome rape incident in Delhi. Young people across the country protested against growing crimes on women, and called for harsh punishments to the offenders. Twitter was used as one of the main platform of communication between protestors across the country, to spread messages, condemn the attack, express opinions and to plan protests. The campaign ended a year later when all the accused of this incident were sentenced to death by the court (Economic Times, Dec 24 2012) 2013 anti-‐377 campaign -‐ In 2013 the LGBT community and its supporters initiated a mass protest against a Supreme Court judgment that criminalized homosexual acts, as per Section 377 of the India Penal Code. The protestors’ aim was to secure decriminalization of homosexuality in India, scrape section 377 and transform the orthodox thinking of India by making people aware about homosexuality. The campaign was mostly popular amongst the youth and had a national presence. Campaigners took to Facebook and Twitter, to express their opinions and protest
against this law. But it hasn’t resulted in any change so far, the law remains and the fight continues (Pain, 2014).
Along with these above mentioned campaigns there are also non-‐governmental organizations (NGOs) in India that have been working towards fighting social injustice and helping bring about changes in the Indian law to foster equality in all respects. These organizations work with people on ground, listen to their stories, understand the situation and try to resolve the issues. Before social media swept up the nation, they would try to make these stories heard through newspapers, television, radio and physical campaigns. But all these activities required budgets which most of these organizations lacked. But with the advent of social media, these communities and organizations had access to a ‘free’ platform through which they could share their ideas and opinions to a wider audience, in their own space and in a variety of formats – pictures, videos, audio bytes, petitions etc. Social media became the repository to store and distribute the stories that mattered. Stories which deserved public attention and collective action. Some of the more notable organizations doing this kind of work in India are:
Video Volunteers, an international community media organization that equips people in underdeveloped areas of India with video journalism skills (shooting videos and reporting through mobile phones) and has created a battalion of citizen journalists. These citizen journalists capture videos of the injustices inflicted on the poor and weaker sections of society. They expose under-‐reported stories from their communities and build pressure on authorities to take action against injustices. They publicize them using social media and television to spread awareness and garner support and donations from the general public (PR Newswire, 2010). Satyamev Jayate, is a TV show centered around the social disparities in the country, and has become a nation wide phenomenon since 2012. It discusses various social issues and concerns plaguing India and invites people dealing with these various issues to share their stories. There is also a panel of experts who provide key insights to the possible actions people could take to address these issues. It also uses social media on a large scale to create petitions, garner support, donations and mobilize action to bring in changes for the afflicted groups (Global Voices, 2014). CG Net Swara, is an NGO that has created a voice-‐based portal, freely accessible via mobile phone by the under-‐developed tribal people from central India. The NGO has trained the local tribal people into radio journalists who report about their challenges and concerns and send out a plea to the authorities to take some action (Smith, 2014). The NGO founder Shubhranshu Choudhary was awarded the Digital Activism Award 2014, which is part of the Index on Censorship's Freedom of Expressions Awards given out annually (Chatterjee, 2014).
These social movements and organizations have different objectives, leaders and end goals; but all of them follow the Satyagraha principles of non-‐violent protests and peaceful negotiations. However there is one major difference between Gandhi’s Satyagraha movement and the recent ones – and that is social media. Each of these recent movements was either initiated or fuelled using social media. While Gandhi had to trudge from city to city, giving speeches, writing articles and inciting the desire in people to be a part of his campaigns, these new movements were simply started in a room with the click of a button. The 2009 campaign had more than 500
followers in just a matter of hours and over 17k followers during its lifetime (Chattopadhyay, 2011). The campaigns of 2011, 12 and 13 garnered millions of followers in a matter of a few days and the numbers only kept growing (Jamil, 2013). There was a gradual rise and popularity of using social media to initiate campaigns of social change. Indians began realizing the true potential and power of social media. Each of these protests saw more active users, innovative methods and creative ways to spread their message. Thus was born the new avatar of Satyagraha called, ‘Digital Satyagraha’ – a protest movement that uses the digital technology to fight its oppressors.
2009 were still the initial days when Internet penetration in India was only 5 percent. But by 2012-‐13, this percentage had grown to about 17 percent, and today almost 20 percent of India’s 1.2 billion population has access to Internet and social media. 20 percent may seem too little in such a vast population, but India ranks 3rd globally in Internet usage and penetration (IAMAI,
2015). Social media access in particular has also grown with Internet penetration, with over 108 million active Facebook users till date (Statista, 2015). According to TRAI, India’s telecom regulator, 89 percent of Internet subscribers in India access the Internet through mobile devices. ‘It's these mobile users who make up the majority of India's social media landscape -‐ following Bollywood celebrities and political movements, in that order, and outraging on the issue of the day’ (Roy, 2014). People now have a weapon in their hands through which they direct their messages to the world at the speed of lightening. Anyone and everyone irrespective of their physical disparities and geographical distance can voice their opinions, express outrage and even initiate mass protest movements against social issues. Social activism has now transformed into Social Media Activism, which is ‘…barely a couple of years young in India. It's had a chequered
Chapter 2 – Research Design & Methodology
2.a – Introduction to the Research Design
In order to study the growing popularity and rise of social media activism in India, an analysis of the actual social media movements is necessary. Studying these activism movements will give a fair idea about the features and format that these movements adopt. It becomes easier to divine what are the factors that influence the impact of these movements, and how they have grown over the years. Hence this research paper will adopt the case-‐study approach to conduct its analysis and draw the findings. To select a case study it is important to first clearly define the objective of the research. Keeping this objective in mind, it will then become critical to pick pertinent case studies, which ‘should be selected in such a way to maximize variance of independent variable but minimize variance of controlled variable’ (Porta & Keating, 2008). Below are the definitions of the different variables in consideration for selecting the case studies:
• Dependent Variable (DV) is what is measured during research. This is the variable that is tested to see if this is the effect.
• Independent Variable (IV) – input variable that is tested to see if it is the cause for the desired effect
• Controlled Variable (CV) – this alters both DV and IV and is continuously monitored to check how it is affecting both of them. Not the main focus of the research.
In the next few sections of this chapter, I will elaborate on the different factors or variables that have been crucial in these campaigns, and how they can be classified into any one of these definitions above.
2.b – Definition of Impact
One of the major variables in this study of these campaigns is the ‘impact’ that they have created in the society. Before studying the kind of impact created, it is important to define what exactly is meant by impact. I conducted a study of mission and vision statements of social impact organizations such as UNESCO, HIVOS, Human Rights Watch, World Vision etc. to understand how they define and measure impact. What I have found is that most of their definitions are mostly related to their organizational goals and objectives. However, the definition as defined by Human Rights Watch came closest to describing the kind of impact that the social media activists in India aim for – changing laws, launching investigations, building international pressure and if applicable; bring the perpetrators to court for justice (Human Rights Watch, 2015). To this list I would only add another parameter -‐ ‘on ground mobilization’ -‐ to measure impact. All the campaigns that have been studied in this research have aimed for these above listed goals and objectives. Achieving these goals determines the impact or success rate of these campaigns. And this will be the definition that I will also follow while analyzing the case studies for the impact they have created.
2.c – Determining the Case Studies with Impact – Format Matrix
A close look at the various activism campaigns in India will reveal that there are two very different and unique formats in which these campaigns can be classified. The first kinds of format are the protest campaigns like the 2009 Pink Chaddi campaign, 2011 anti-‐corruption campaign, 2012/13 anti-‐rape campaigns, and 2013 campaign for LGBT rights. These campaigns were sparked off unplanned and mostly in reaction to certain incidents / events that occurred in the country. These kinds of campaigns are mainly triggered off on social media first, and then picked up by traditional media and other approaches. This format can thus be called ‘Incident Driven’. The other format is the one adopted by NGOs or organizations working towards raising awareness on social issues; like Satyamev Jayate, Video Volunteers and CG Net Swara. They pick up and highlight stories around various social causes at regular intervals. This format does not wait for an incident to occur; rather their efforts are more continuous and long term focused. This format uses a mix of traditional and new media to promote their initiatives. This format can thus be called ‘Storytelling Based’.
With impact and format being the two most important variables to be studied and analysed fort these campaign, for this research I have defined the variables as follows:
Dependent Variable Independent Variable Controlled Variable
Impact -‐ On ground
mobilization, laws changed, investigations launched, building international pressure, and perpetrators brought before courts.
Incident driven format
Using social media platforms Country in which the
research is done -‐ India Storytelling based format Geographical reach of the
initiatives -‐ nationwide Table 1 – Defining variables for selecting case studies
Defining the variables has helped resolve the big question of what factors to consider while picking a case study. Since dependent variable (impact) and independent variable (format) are the two most important factors in this study, I will try to group the various campaigns I discussed earlier as shown below in table 2. I have defined the formats and the respective impacts for each in the table below.
Incident Driven Storytelling Based
2009 Pink Chaddi Campaign
IMPACT: Medium impact in terms of bringing about a change in law towards women liberation and freedom. But had a high virality and awareness among the public because of its
Video Volunteers
IMPACT: Quite high. The stories help bring awareness about various issues affecting the under-‐developed citizens of the country and the video stories have resulted in successful
unique nature of protest (Chattopadhyay, 2011).
closures of a lot of cases, has resulted in change of laws and even helped achieve justice for victims of crimes (Rodrigues, 2010).
2011 Anti-‐Corruption Campaign IMPACT: Very high. The campaign was successful in introducing an anti-‐corruption bill in the country, though not completely in line with the protestors’ demands.
Nevertheless it was huge victory for a campaign that spanned 2 years (The Washington Post, August 12, 2011).
Satyamev Jayate
IMPACT: Medium impact in terms of bringing about changes in the law, and helping in justice to victims. But is highly popular and has a wide audience who follow this show, which has resulted in creating a lot of awareness about different social issues. Victims in many cases have received public support and donations. Lots of public votes and change petitions collected for different issues, but any major impact like a change in law, launching investigation, punishing the perpetrators hasn’t been achieved yet (Global Voices, 2014). 2012/13 Anti-‐Rape Campaign
IMPACT: Very high. The campaign resulted in getting the perpetrators of this particular incident sentenced in a record time of less than a year. Also due to the constant pressure built by the public, the government passed a new bill, which outlined stricter punishments for crime against women (BBC News, September 13, 2013).
CG Net Swara
IMPACT: Is quite high, with a lot of relief and changes being put into action by the
authorities to better the state of the tribals in central India (Smith, 2014).
2013 Anti-‐377 Campaign
IMPACT: Mediocre. The campaign raised a lot of awareness about the LGBT rights in a regressive culture like India. But it hasn’t resulted in any change in the law so far. However “transgender” was recently recognized by law as the “other” gender as a result of continued protests by these activists (The Times of India, April 15, 2014).
Table 2 – Defining the format and impact for each case study
Thus based on these above facts, I have created a 2X2 matrix called as the Impact-‐Format Matrix, in which these above campaigns will be grouped according to their formats and the level of impact, as shown below in table 3:
Incident Driven Storytelling Based
High Impact 2011 Anti-‐Corruption Campaign 2012/13 Anti-‐Rape Campaign Video Volunteers CG Net Swara
Low / Medium Impact 2009 Pink Chaddi Campaign
2013 Anti-‐377 Campaign
Satyamev Jayate
Table 3 – Distributing case studies based on impact and format
For this research study, I will consider one campaign from each box in the table above. This is to suit the time and resources at my disposal and also ensure that I have a sample from each category. To shortlist the case studies for this study then, I will only consider the most recent and nation-‐wide campaigns. This eliminates the 2009 pink chaddi campaign, 2011 anti-‐ corruption campaign (in comparison to the more recent 2012 and 13 campaigns) and the CGNet Swara initiative (which is restricted only to a small state in India). This then gives us our final 2X2 matrix of case studies to be considered for this research, as shown below in figure 2:
Figure 2 – Impact Format Matrix
2.d – Defining the Research Question
For any research study, it is important to define the research objective first and foremost before delving deeper into the research. And with that in mind, I have defined my research questions for this study as follows:
1. Social Media activism in India follows two formats: Incident Driven & Storytelling Based. How does the ‘format’ of a social media activism campaign influence the impact (on-‐ ground mobilization of volunteers and achieving the set goal) of that campaign?
2. Does and if so, to what extent has social media influenced the impact (on-‐ground mobilization of volunteers and achieving the set goal) of a social media activism campaign in India?
In the following sections I will elaborate on the method I use to determine the answers to these above questions.
2.e – Building Web Historiography of the Case Studies
After shortlisting the case studies, the next step is to build an event-‐based web historiography for each of them. Event based historiography is a form of web historiography (archiving the history of web), where the history of an offline political/social event can be retraced using web archives and also analyse the social context in which the event took place (Rogers, 2011). These archives can be built using websites, social networking sites, blogs, Wikipedia and so on. When the data is collected, archived and analysed from such a wide sphere of online networks, the process is called Web Sphere Analysis -‐ where the event is studied using a ‘set of dynamically defined digital resources often connected by hyperlinks spanning multiple websites / platforms relevant to the central theme/concept/event and bound temporarily’ (Rogers, 2011). This research paper employs the technique of Web Sphere Analysis to social media platforms of Facebook, Twitter to chart out the course the movements have taken. Following is the methodology to build the web historiography of our 4 case studies.
2.e.1 Web Historiography of Incident Driven Campaign -‐ 2012/13 Anti-‐Rape Protests
2012/13 anti rape protests were held in reaction to a rape incident that occurred in Delhi, India on December 16, 2012. In the days that followed there were nationwide protests demanding that the accused be punished and stricter laws for women safety be launched in the country. 13 days after the incident, the victim of the rape incident died on December 29, 2012 in a hospital she was being treated. The protests escalated after her death, and as a result the government finally introduced fast track courts for the trial of rape cases so the victims of such incidents could get speedy justice. The trial of the 5 people accused in this incident began in January, but the case dragged on for 8 months. Finally on September 13, 2013 the 4 adult accused were sentenced to death while one other accused who was a juvenile was sentenced to 3 years prison term (the maximum sentence for juveniles in India) (The Hindu, September 13, 2013). Figure 3 below shows a snippet of the event timeline.
Figure 3 – Event timeline of anti-‐rape protests
The news of the incident simultaneously broke on traditional media and social media. Figure 4 below depicts the coverage of the incident and its related news in the four main newspapers of India for a period of one month. It can be seen that even though the news broke in only on December 18, 2012; it quickly picked up pace and grabbed attention. This was also the period when the protests against the incident were at their peak and social media was abuzz with the news and organizing of the protests.
Figure 4 – Coverage of anti-‐rape protests across different newspapers. Source: PageOneX
Twitter was the first platform on which the news of the incident was reported. Figure 5 shows the tweet from 18 Dec below.
Figure 5 – One of the first tweets about the incident. Source: Twitter.com
As the protests and the rage escalated, so also the number of tweets. Soon "Rashtrapati Bhavan", and "Raisina Hill" – the main places in Delhi where the protests were taking place -‐ became the top trending tags (Economic Times, 2012). Twitter hashtags like #DelhiGangRape #StopThisShame #DelhiProtests #Amanat #Nirbhaya #Damini emerged as other popular tags for the protest related tweets (Barn, 2013). Within 10 days of the incident, the Facebook groups ‘Gangraped in Delhi’ created on December 20, 2012 and ‘Delhi for Women’s Safety’ created on December 18, 2012 had received 5046 and 4263 ‘likes’ respectively within a week of their creation (Batra, 2013). Figure 6 below shows the community page of one of these groups on Facebook. However the footprints of the campaign on Facebook were far less when compared to that of Twitter. This will be demonstrated in the data collection section.
Figure 6 – Facebook page of Delhi For Women’s Safety. Source: Facebook
Thus it can be seen that Twitter was the primary social media platform with most of the action happening on it, while Facebook was a secondary social media platform to be used. To build the event based web historiography I will focus on collecting the data for the period December 2012 – December 2013 only. This is done in accordance with the incident event timeline shown above in figure 3.
I. The campaign on Twitter:
To build an event historiography using Twitter, I used three free applications to collect tweets related to this campaign.
1. The first one being the Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset (TCAT) -‐ a toolset for capturing and analyzing Twitter data, developed by the Media Studies department at University of Amsterdam. This tool has captured over 1.5 billion tweets on different topics around the world over a few years. In TACT, generally five kinds of data sets are available based on hashtags and keywords, user captures, collections of geo-‐tagged tweets, 1 percent samples, and imports from other sources. All data sets are stored on a common server to be accessed by the students. The most common data set in TCAT is the topical collection. These are captured based on combinations of keywords, some of which are underspecified (wide) while others are very specific (Borra & Rieder, 2014). By selecting the relevant sub-‐texts, and specifying the time periods, one is able to extract the data in various formats and styles. The tool gives a detailed breakdown of data in terms of user specifications, hashtags, URLs, retweets, complete tweet data etc. It also has a facility to export this data as networked graphs for visual analysis. At a meta-‐ level, once the search query has been given, the tool also indicates the percentage of tweets that use external links in them. Also, there are 2 graphs that indicate the spread of the tweets in the data set over a given time period (be it hours, days, months or years). These quick data analysis snapshots indicate a good starting point for users to begin their research and analysis.
In this vast data set, one of the topics covered was the Delhi rape incident. However each of these datasets are monitored and tracked for a specific period of time only, and this topic was tracked only from 15 January 2013 onwards. Hence I have no access to the tweets preceding this point of
will help in collecting data for this missing one month. Another point to mention here is the fact that TCAT has two separate datasets belonging to this topic. One is “delhirape” and the other is “rape”. My reason for not using “rape” dataset for this study is because it captures tweets only from 27, November 2013 onwards, which does not make it a strong base to work with. Hence I made the choice of using “delhirape” as the dataset of this study.
a. Query and parameter definitions for TCAT: It is very important to design the query accurately as it helps in acquiring pertinent information and excludes the non-‐relevant data. While the TCAT tool does not have the option to query hashtags, it does however have the options to key in sub-‐ query terms in the system like, ‘delhi’, ‘delhirape’, ‘gangrape’ and ‘rape’. The keywords ‘rape’ and ‘gangrape’ are highly generic and broad and they lead to the inclusion of tweets outside of this campaign as well. But they are pre-‐set sub-‐queries already keyed in during the time of data collection and hence cannot be avoided. However to streamline the dataset to include only relevant tweets, a user is allowed to key in specific parameters to help them to only extract those tweets from the larger dataset that have those parameters. Thus I re-‐specified ‘delhi’ and ‘india’ as a cautionary measure to ensure I am able to extract the most relevant data only. This cautionary re-‐specification did manage to eliminate some of the unrelated data, but not all of it. This is a limitation of the tool, which if corrected can help produce more accurate results. The next select parameter to be specified was the date range: 01 January 2013 to 31 December 2013, as per the requirement. Defining other parameters mentioned in the tool was not required. A snapshot of the query section is shown below in figure 7:
Figure 7 – Query definition on TCAT. Source: TCAT Tool
For the above specifications, I got a close to 1.4 million tweets with 0.5 million distinct users. 75 percent of all these tweets had no links or URLs to lead the reader onto detailed blogs / articles/ videos / pictures. TCAT tool graph below indicates these figures in figure 8.
Figure 8 – TCAT data on number of tweets available for this dataset. Source: TCAT Tool
The above figures represent the query collected for a yearlong time period. However, as the event timeline indicates in Figure 3, there were significant dates on which specific incidents occurred relating to the campaign. Thus, in order to get a detailed view about how the twitter behaved on these specific time periods, I also collected month-‐wise data for January, February, March, August and September 2013.
b. Collection of data -‐ The TCAT tool as explained earlier, provides data in different formats. Keeping the scope of this study in mind, I have collected the following data formats for the yearly and month-‐wise periods:
a. On a ‘per day’ basis (selection button on the TCAT window)
i. Hashtag frequency: It helps to determine which hashtags are most relevant, popular and used in the campaign.
ii. Tweet Exports – This list contains actual tweets with the message, date of creation, link to the tweet and other important details. I downloaded all the tweets for the mentioned time periods
As mentioned earlier there were over 1.4 million tweets that were downloaded. As the query was quite a broad based one, a lot of unrelated tweets were also included in the downloaded database. Hence the first job was to clean up by filtering out tweets using the hashtags that were used during this campaign. From the database of hashtag frequency that I downloaded from TCAT (refer appendix 22) there were 184 hashtags used during this particular campaign in various formats, spellings and combinations. I picked the top 5 most used, relevant and unique hashtags; and used them to search and filter out the relevant tweets. These hashtags were: #delhigangrape, #delhirape, #nirbhaya, #damini, and #amanat (Since the Delhi rape victim’s name was kept anonymous in the beginning, the public addressed her with different names like nirbhaya, damini and amanat). Through this method I was able to extract over 55 thousand tweets that were related only to this campaign. Studying and analyzing 55 thousand tweets was difficult with the limited resources and time I had at my disposal. Hence I picked out tweets from the most relevant and important months only, as per the event timeline shown in figure 3. This left me with over 11 thousand tweets to study and analyse, and my findings are based on extrapolating the results of the study conducted on these 11 thousand tweets only. Since the TCAT query only began in 2013, there were no tweets pertaining to the crucial month of
