Replication Data for: Social Networks and Protest Participation: Evidence from 130 Million Twitter Users

Pinning down the role of social ties in the decision to protest has been notoriously elusive, largely due to data limitations. Social media and their global use by protesters offer an unprecedented opportunity to observe real-time social ties and online behavior, though often without an attendant measure of real-world behavior. We collect data on Twitter activity during the 2015 Charlie Hebdo protest in Paris which, unusually, record real-world protest attendance and network structure measured beyond egocentric networks. We devise a test of social theories of protest that hold that participation depends on exposure to others’ intentions and network position determines exposure. Our findings are strongly consistent with these theories, showing that protesters are significantly more connected to one another via direct, indirect, triadic, and reciprocated ties than comparable non-protesters. These results offer the first large-scale empirical support for the claim that social network structure has consequences for protest participation. The data were collected by the NYU Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) laboratory (https://wp.nyu.edu/smapp/), of which Nagler and Tucker are co-Directors along with Richard Bonneau and John T. Jost. The SMaPP lab is supported by the INSPIRE program of the National Science Foundation (Award SES-1248077), the New York University Global Institute for Advanced Study, the Moore-Sloan Data Science Environment, and Dean Thomas Carew’s Research Investment Fund at New York University. In order to run the replication end-to-end, we recommend downloading the comprehensive archive (charlie-hebdo-replication.tar.gz). The archive contains all the files with the appropriate directory structure. Once the archive is expanded, the full replication pipeline may be executed by running the script run-all.sh in the scripts directory.