{"id":247,"date":"2013-12-02T07:52:43","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T12:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/andresmh\/?p=247"},"modified":"2013-12-08T02:57:29","modified_gmt":"2013-12-08T07:57:29","slug":"yosoy132-a-year-later","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/andresmh\/2013\/12\/yosoy132-a-year-later\/","title":{"rendered":"#YoSoy132, a year later"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last year,\u00a0Gilad Lotan<\/a>\u00a0and I spent some time analyzing the\u00a0#YoSoy132<\/a>\u00a0protests in Mexico using data from Twitter. Several articles and even books about #YoSoy132 have come out since. For example,\u00a0De Maule\u00f3n wrote an excellent piece for Nexos\u00a0<\/a>(in Spanish) that resembled some of our own analysis. \u00a0Sadly,\u00a0Gilad and I got busy and abandoned the project, but after\u00a0this recent conversation<\/a>,\u00a0we decided to dig out our notes and post them here\u00a0in the event that they might be useful for others.<\/em><\/p>\n

The rise and fall of the “Mexican Spring”\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Exactly a year ago, in December 2012, the newly elected Mexican President Pe\u00f1a Nieto\u00a0took office amid violent protests<\/a>. As early as May 2012, a number of massive student protests against the then candidate Pe\u00f1a gained a lot of attention on social media, both inside and outside Mexico. The Occupy movement and\u00a0the international press<\/a>\u00a0called these protests the\u00a0Mexican Spring<\/a>\u00a0for its similarities with other “hashtagged” protests. In our analysis, we only focused on the first few months of the protests. Today, #YoSoy132 is only a shadow of what it was, but during the election it was able to accomplish several important victories, including the organization of an online presidential debate (broadcast on YouTube), and the introduction of the issue of media monopolies and media bias to the forefront of the political discussion.<\/p>\n

We focused on the origin and spread of the #YoSoy132 student protests by lookign at Twitter trending topics, follower connections, and the content of the tweets. We found that despite the common assumption that the movement appeared “out of the blue,” after an incident involving a candidate’s visit to a university, we can actually trace the movement’s gestation to several months before the trigger incident. Additionally, we found that despite the attempts to link the movement to traditional political groups, i.e. a political party, the movement actually activated typically disconnected groups of people across the political and class spectrum.<\/p>\n

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\"\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
Poster in support of #YoSoy132 posted on the Occupy website<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

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The birth of #YoSoy132<\/strong><\/p>\n

The incident that marked the movement\u2019s birth was the May 11 visit of leading presidential candidate Enrique Pe\u00f1a Nieto (EPN) to\u00a0Univesidad Iberoamericana<\/a>\u00a0(known as “Ibero”), an elite private university in Mexico City. The university was not traditionally associated with political protests, however, that day, hundreds of student protesters forced Pe\u00f1a to literally run away from the campus. As Pe\u00f1a was leaving the university, he told reporters that the protesters were “not genuine<\/a>.” Likewise, members of his party spun the story, claiming that the protesters were “intolerant,” too old to be students, and possibly planted by Pe\u00f1a’s political opponents. Several news outlets played down the incident, and some even reported it in ways that differed the students\u2019 recollections of events. Most notably, students were angered over a newspaper headline that referred to Pe\u00f1a’s visit to Ibero as a “triumph,” and implying that the protesters were part of an “orchestrated boycott attempt.”<\/p>\n

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\"Image\"<\/a><\/dt>\n
Newspaper front page that angered the students and contributed to the initial #YoSoy132 protests<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Angered by the accusations and what the perceived was yet another example of the unfair media coverage, students replied with a YouTube video titled \u201c131 students of Ibero respond<\/a>.\u201d The video showed short clips of 131 students stating their name while holding their student ID card. After the video exploded in popularity on social media, the movement grew and spread to several cities in Mexico and throughout the Mexican diaspora around the world. The protests were called\u00a0#YoSoy132<\/a>, Spanish for \u201cI am 132,\u201d in honor of those 131 students in the YouTube video.<\/p>\n

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\"Support<\/a><\/dt>\n
Support for #YoSoy132 spread<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Visibility through Twitter trending topics<\/strong><\/p>\n

By the time the protests started, Twitter had been quite visible throughout the campaigns. For example, the media and the candidates have been using Twitter follower counts as a measure of their popularity. This only helped incentivize the candidates’ desire to manipulate Twitter’s trending topics and other online presence markets. For example, Pe\u00f1a was accused of acquiring\u00a0armies of twitterers<\/a>\u00a0to manipulate Twitter trending topics, as evidenced by a\u00a0leaked video<\/a>\u00a0showing members of Pe\u00f1a\u2019s campaign using this tactic during one of the debates.<\/p>\n

Twitter trends give insight into popular topics in locations across the world. When a new hashtag, word or phrase is used enough times in Tweets originating in a certain geographic region, it is highlighted in the trending topics list. We use Twitter trending topics across geographic locations to put together a timeline of the major events, understand when events hit a certain tipping point.<\/p>\n

During Pe\u00f1a\u2019s visit to Ibero University on May 11 the term \u2018ibero<\/a>\u2019 trended across cities of Mexico, the United States and Canada. Although the term\u00a0ibero<\/em>\u00a0had not been mentioned as often before the May 11 spike, we found that the discontent against Pe\u00f1a\u2019s campaign on social media predates this event. \u00a0In the list of trending topics, we can see how Pe\u00f1a\u2019s conflicts with the Mexican twittersphere date back to December 2011 when he had an\u00a0embarrassing slip<\/a>\u00a0as he was unable to list the books that had influenced him the most during his own book presentation. To make matters worse, after the incident exploded on Twitter with the hashtag\u00a0#LibreriaPenaNieto<\/a>\u00a0(Pe\u00f1a Nieto\u2019s bookstore in English), his daughter retweeted a message calling her father’s critics “a bunch of proletariat a**holes,” leading to the meme\u00a0#SoyProle<\/a>\u00a0(I am proletariat).<\/p>\n

More specifically with regards to the term\u00a0ibero<\/em>, we noticed that it had trended a couple of times before May 11 suggesting that Ibero students were already sufficiently engaged on Twitter. Also, the dates on which\u00a0ibero<\/em>\u00a0trends match events related to the elections. For example, the term trended from March 14 to 16, matching both the visit the leftist candidates to the Puebla campus of the university and a gaffe by\u00a0Vazquez Mota<\/a>, the conservative candidate, who implied that being an Ibero alum herself made her “imperfect.” Furthermore, we see\u00a0ibero\u00a0<\/em>trend on Apr 21, the day after\u00a0EPN rescheduled his visit<\/a>\u00a0to the university, and again on April 23 when\u00a0L\u00f3pez Obrador<\/a>, the candidate from the left, visited the university. We see\u00a0ibero<\/em>\u00a0trend again on May 8 after\u00a0EPN cancelled<\/a>\u00a0 his visit to the university a second time.\u00a0The timing and frequency of ibero in the trending topics suggests a high level of political engagement by Ibero affiliates on Twitter before the May 11 incident.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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\"Timeline<\/a><\/dt>\n
Timeline of Trending Topics related to the #YoSoy132 protests<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Activating Typically Disconnected Groups<\/strong><\/p>\n

One of the most striking things about the #Yosoy132 protests was how its message activated groups that are traditionally disconnected, both\u00a0across socioeconomic class and political affiliation<\/em>. The movement was started by students at Ibero, one of the most exclusive universities in Mexico, but quickly gained traction among students from public universities, often positioned in ideological antagonism with private schools. We can see this in the network graph of entity co-occurrence that highlights the relationships between words. Whenever a word is used along with another word in a Tweet, they are said to \u201cco-occur\u201d, hence the edge that connects between the two nodes that represents the words becomes stronger. We see the names of other private universities (e.g., #itam, #tec, #itesm, #lasalle, #uvm) as well as public ones (e.g., #unam, #poli, #uam, #uaem, #uanl) appear in messages related to the #YoSoy132 protests.<\/p>\n

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\"Zooming<\/a><\/dt>\n
Zooming in to the co-occurring university names in the tweets related to the massive march of the #YoSoy132 movement<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Furthermore, while the movement seems to activate more leftist groups, it also activated right-wing ones.\u00a0 For example, we observe a cluster from the right-leaning twitterers at the top-right corner of the plot, and left-wing ones on the mid left and right areas.<\/p>\n

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\"Twitterers<\/a><\/dt>\n
Twitter accounts associated with Pe\u00f1a’svisit to Ibero.<\/dd>\n<\/dl>\n<\/div>\n

Reflections<\/strong><\/p>\n

The #YoSoy132 movement was a movement of the middle class youth, markedly outward-looking. It was not surprising then that the aesthetics of the #YoSoy132 movement, at least at first, resembled the international hashtagged movements, such as Occupy, Indignados, and the Arab Spring, more so than local movements like the Zapatistas. Unlike the Arab Spring, it seemed that #YoSoy132 was much more about a struggle against old media, TV in particular.\u00a0 The Arab Spring might have used social media to gain international recognition and to help people organize themselves at first, but it continued even when social media was censored. In contrast, #YoSoy132 existed primarily through social media. Social media were as much the medium as they were the message.<\/p>\n

The movement rallied young people against the alleged manipulation by large media networks, in an apparent effort to determine the next president. Despite the movement\u2019s antagonism with mainstream media, it was able to gain visibility and respect from a wide-range of political actors. The movement\u2019s visibility was propelled by public-facing social media platforms such as YouTube and Twitter, while also relying on pre-existing offline networks that organized themselves using a combination of face-to-face interactions and private Facebook groups. The challenges and benefits of decentralization that included a disparate set of social media outlets, some of which were taken over by opponents of the movement and later recovered by the hacker collective Anonymous. The official results of the election, suggest that despite the strong social media presence of the #YoSoy132 movement, the election results highlight the limitations of social media in reaching beyond those who were already networked.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year,\u00a0Gilad Lotan\u00a0and I spent some time analyzing the\u00a0#YoSoy132\u00a0protests in Mexico using data from Twitter. Several articles and even books about #YoSoy132 have come out since. For example,\u00a0De Maule\u00f3n wrote an excellent piece for Nexos\u00a0(in Spanish) that resembled some of our own analysis. \u00a0Sadly,\u00a0Gilad and I got busy and abandoned the project, but after\u00a0this recent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3887,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53290],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civic-computing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/andresmh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/andresmh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/andresmh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/andresmh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3887"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/andresmh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/andresmh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":261,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/andresmh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247\/revisions\/261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/andresmh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/andresmh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/andresmh\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}