How to Use Social Media amidst Protests

There have been many organized protests all over the country throughout the past year sparked by controversies and tragedies, such as the Freddie Gray trials in Baltimore, Maryland and the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Some of these initially peaceful protests quickly took a turn for the worse and became violent, wreaking havoc on their communities. The scenario is becoming all too familiar.
Protests are often organized or expanded through social media, and the social conversations surrounding protest activities can provide immediate, valuable insight to public safety and response teams. The amount of social media data available is massive. There are over 500 million daily tweets on Twitter, over 70 million photos and videos shared daily on Instagram, and over one billion monthly active users on YouTube to weed through in order to find relevant chatter. It is critical for the protection of public safety and community members that social media be used to monitor specific areas, users and keywords within the locations of interest. To be most effective, public safety officials need to pair boots on the ground with real-time social media intelligence during riots and protests for real-time monitoring, information discovery and violence prevention.

How to do it

There are multiple locations to consider during a protest—protest routes, officer locations, physical assets and more. Location-based social media monitoring allows public safety agencies to stream social content coming from multiple social channels in areas of interest. Agencies can also record these locations and set alerts based on social media content containing threatening, violent, or instigative language, emojis and images. When supervisors can identify and define this content in real-time they then provide their teams with immediate situational awareness to better prepare for the appropriate response and deployment of resources.

During riots, protesters will often develop secret messages or use certain hashtags to communicate with others in the group. For example, identifying protest locations where “#LootCrew” is trending can indicate potential looting activity. Through such hashtags you might find out where these activities are taking place and respond accordingly.

Discover and analyze crowd sentiment, persons of interest

The social content from key locations during a protest provides insight into who is active and what is being said. After identifying a top user, for example, officials can see where this user has been, who he/she is associating with, and what kind of content the person posts. This information can divulge other protest locations, future meeting times, or other persons of interest so public safety agencies can mitigate danger and prevent future violence.

During the riots in Ferguson and Baltimore, for example, public safety agencies in both cities, as well as other critical locations around the country, identified people that had been in both locations to protest. Social media posts indicated that these users traveled to multiple locations, and that data could then be analyzed further to predict others heavily involved and likely to travel with the protests. In addition, social media posts can be used for situational awareness during high profile trials bringing looters to justice. Agencies across the nation can notify other organizations about these users and their plans to organize protest movements.

Prevent escalation and dispatch resources accordingly

The ability to record and collect social content with social media monitoring technologies improves communication among officials. Important data can easily be exported and shared with other officers, departments and responding teams for improved context surrounding the protests. Mobile applications make it easy for officials on the ground to receive data while en route to a scene or responding to threatening situations. Getting this information quickly and efficiently improves response strategy, reduces risks, and saves time and resources.

During the Baltimore riots, local high school students issued calls for action via social media, encouraging meetings at specific locations where there had been a lot of damage. Monitoring not only protest locations but other critical sites, such as surrounding school districts, can reveal important information for local public safety. In Baltimore, that early knowledge enabled officials to respond quickly and address the issues both at the school and at protest locations.
With multiple assets to consider— command centers, patrol teams, citizens, etc.—public safety organizations must use every strategy and resource available to keep communities safe. Social media monitoring technologies could provide revealing context that might otherwise have been missed. Monitoring key locations, identifying top users, and discovering important content contribute to better situational awareness for responding officials and enhance the response strategies of public safety organizations.

Practical tips: Searching the three layers of social data

Consider searching social media data in three main layers: by location, by user or by keyword. Knowing best practices can help you to mine through data to find what is most relevant. Use these helpful hints when monitoring social media during protests.

By Location: Monitor multiple locations and create perimeters around each area. Using location, you can understand not only what is being said, but where it is being said. Analyze sentiment based on location and identify trends in specific locations, such as the protest route or schools.
By User: Once you find a post of interest in a key location, source the user information and use that data to make connections. See who else the user is interacting with, identify other active user associations, and observe non-geotagged posts as well.
By Keyword: Filter the location-data by keyword or hashtag, and monitor conversations beyond text. You can use emoji combinations to find posts with no written words. Common emoji combinations for protests include the gun, fire and siren emoticons. Also use Boolean Search strategies to source content from other social media channels. For example, searching “protest AND (periscope OR ustream)” in a social media monitoring platform can discover conversations about protests on multiple social channels.

Raw intelligence data points captured from social media allow intelligence analysts to weave a story together to make informed recommendations and decisions. While one post can matter, social media paired with your team’s domain expertise and situational awareness will uncover intelligence that has been hiding in plain sight.

Use these tips as a starting point for your social media monitoring strategy during protests. ■

Phil Harris is the co-founder and CEO of Geofeedia.