Time, place, technology: Twitter as an information source in the Wisconsin labor protests

Recently, Twitter has become a prominent part of social protest movement communication. This study examines Twitter as a new kind of citizen journalism platform emerging at the aggregate in the context of such “crisis” situations by undertaking a case study of the use of Twitter in the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests. A corpus of more than 775,000 tweets tagged with #wiunion during the first 3 weeks of the protests provides the source of the analyses. Findings suggest that significant differences exist between users who tweet via mobile devices, and thus may be present at protests, and those who tweet from computers. Mobile users post fewer URLs overall; however, when they do, they are more likely to link to traditional news sources and to provide additional hashtags for context. Over time, all link-posting declines, as users become better able to convey first-hand information. Notably, results for most analyses significantly change when restricted to original tweets only, rather than including retweets.