Int. J. Organisational Design and Engineering, Vol. 3, Nos.

3/4, 2014 317

What can Twitter tell us about social movements’

network topology and centrality? Analysing the case
of the 2011–2013 Chilean student movement

Cristóbal García*
School of Business Administration,
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile,
Campus San Joaquin,
Av. Vicuna Mackenna 4860, Macul,
C.P. 7820436, Santiago, Chile
E-mail: cgarciah@uc.cl
*Corresponding author

Marisa von Bülow

Political Science Institute,
University of Brasilia,
Campus Darcy Ribeiro – Asa Norte,
Instituto de Ciência Política da UnB,
Brasília, D.F. CEP 70904-970, Brazil
E-mail: marisavonbulow@gmail.com

Javier Ledezma
Facultad de Ciencias Físicas y Matemáticas,
Instituto de Sistemas Complejos de Ingeniería,
Universidad de Chile,
Domeyko 2338, Zip Code: 8370438, Santiago, Chile
E-mail: javier.ledezma@ing.uchile.cl

Paul Chauveau
School of Engineering,
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile,
Campus San Joaquin,
Av. Vicuna Mackenna 4860, Macul,
C.P. 7820436, Santiago, Chile
E-mail: pkchauve@uc.cl

Abstract: We analyse the Chilean student movement by looking at Twitter

data from 26 protests, distributed between May of 2011 and November of 2013.
Using a mixed methods approach, based on social network analysis and
qualitative methods, this article uncovers specific Twitter-based protest patterns
and changing centrality of actors over time. It finds that the student movement
has increasingly used Twitter, especially during days of protest. It also

Copyright © 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

318 C. García et al.

identifies a process of Twitter institutionalisation, whereby official accounts of

organisations have become more central through time, in comparison with
individual leaders’ accounts. This article contributes to the literature that
analyses how existing social movement organisations adapt to emerging
environments of digital activism.

Keywords: social movements; students; protest; social network analysis; SNA;

collective action; social media; Twitter; Chile.

Reference to this paper should be made as follows: García, C., von Bülow, M.,
Ledezma, J. and Chauveau, P. (2014) ‘What can Twitter tell us about social
movements’ network topology and centrality? Analysing the case of the
2011–2013 Chilean student movement’, Int. J. Organisational Design and
Engineering, Vol. 3, Nos. 3/4, pp.317–337.

Biographical notes: Cristóbal García is the Director of the iLab and Assistant
Professor of Business Innovation and Design at Pontificia Universidad Catolica
of Chile. He is the Founder of the Jump Chile Entrepreneurship Academy and
co-investigator of the Web in Movement Project. He is an external faculty at
Columbia’s Center on Organizational Innovation and a Visiting Scholar at
MIT.

Marisa von Bülow is a Professor of Political Science at the Political Science

Institute, University of Brasilia, Brazil, and Researcher at the Political Science
Institute, Catholic University, Chile. She holds a PhD in Political Science
and is the author of Building Transnational Networks (Cambridge University
Press, 2010). She studies social movements, transnational networks and online
activism.

Javier Ledezma is a PhD student at the University of Chile’s Systems

Engineering Program and a research member of the Web in Movement project.
His research interests comprise macroeconomics, political economy, innovation
and organisational networks. He is a Civil Engineer and holds a Master in
Applied Economics.

Paul Chauveau is a Research Assistant of the Web in Movement project and an

Engineering student at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile.

This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled ‘What can
Twitter teach us about protests? Analyzing the Chilean student movement’s
leadership and network evolution through social media use’ presented at the
4th International Conference on Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs),
Santiago, Chile, 11–14 August 2013. An even earlier version with this same
title was presented at the LINKS Conference, MIT Media Lab in Cambridge,
Mass., 22 July 2013.

1 Introduction

In the last ten years, there has been a wide scholarly debate on the relationship between
social movements and digital technologies, from disciplines such as computer and
information sciences to political and social sciences. However, most of this recent
research has focused either on cases coming from the Northern hemisphere, such as the
 What can Twitter tell us about social movements’ network topology 319

Indignados movement in Spain, Occupy Wall Street (OWS) and Occupy London (OL),
or on the revolutionary movements of the Arab Spring.
This article seeks to contribute to this emerging and burgeoning literature, by
focusing on a different kind of social movement, coming from Latin America: the
Chilean student movement (2011–2013). Our general goal is to understand the
relationship between this social movement and emerging social media tools. In contrast
with the cases the literature has focused mostly on, this is a preexisting movement based
on longstanding organisations, which has traditionally participated in national politics.
This case allows us to better understand how social movement organisations adapt to the
availability of new digital platforms, and the interactions between online and offline
tactics.
More specifically, we analyse how student organisations and student leaders have
used Twitter to advance their goals. Our findings are based on 39 semi-structured
interviews undertaken between March and November of 2013,1 two focus groups,2 and,
most importantly for the goals of this article, on Twitter data gathered during 26 weeks in
which protests were organised, between May of 2011 and October of 2013 (see the list of
dates in Appendix). This is the total number of street protests called by national student
organisations during this period. We analyse the topology of the networks created among
a predefined list of users, the density of these networks as well as the centrality of actors
and their changes over time.
By focusing on the relationship between street protests and the use of Twitter, this
article contributes to the ongoing debate about the impacts of internet-based tools on
offline collective action. Although social movements have emerged for centuries under
different circumstances and contexts, the so-called information age and its related tools
have at least facilitated the coordination of collective action, information diffusion, and
protest organisation (Van Aelst and Walgrave, 2006; Segerberg and Bennett, 2012; Vegh,
2003; Tilly et al., 2001). However, society shapes technology according to the needs,
values, and interests of the people who use the technology: “Technology does not
determine society: it expresses it. But society does not determine technological
innovation: it uses it” [Castells, (1996/2000), p.15]. Technology appears as a key tool in
social processes, but “it is people’s usage of technology – not technology itself – that can
change social process” [Earl and Kimport, (2011), p.14]. Furthermore, information and
communication technologies are particularly sensitive to the effects of social uses.
Internet has evolved “from organizational business tool and communication medium to a
lever of social transformation as well” [Castells, (2001), p.143]. Thus, in this article, the
internet and social media are not only understood as a set of communication and
coordination tools, but also as an arena of power struggles, which happen both among
students and between the movement and other actors.
Our empirical analysis shows that Twitter was increasingly used by students and
leaders during weeks of protests in the period studied. More interestingly, though, we
argue that the way in which Twitter was used changed in this period changed in
important ways. It went from being a tool that in the first semester of 2011 was used
mostly by a few individual leaders, to a tool that became part of the strategic repertoire of
the students’ organisations. This process of institutionalisation of Twitter is shown
through our analysis of changes in the centrality of leaders and organisational accounts in
networks of retweets. This finding is also supported by our qualitative research.
In the next section, we present the main characteristics of the Chilean student
movement, its main demands and repertoire of action. We briefly explain the functioning
320 C. García et al.

of the educational system in Chile, so that readers may understand the context in which
mobilisations have occurred. We then present data on internet, social media and Twitter
penetration in Chile, and show how student leaders have changed their use of digital
platforms, coming to recognise Twitter as a key political tool. We analyse Twitter
activity during weeks of protest, and offer an analysis of the meanings of the networks
uncovered and the changes they have undergone through time. In the concluding remarks
we summarise the main findings and offer guidelines for further work.

2 The student movement in Chile: what is this a case of?

In the beginning of 2011, a wave of protests was triggered by the delay in the payment of
public grants and by the outcry of students of a private university, who mobilised against
a reform that would, in practice, legalise profitmaking practices in that institution
(according to Chilean law, profitmaking in tertiary education is illegal). During the
following months, protests gathered an increasing number of participants. According to
some analysts, these have been the largest demonstrations in Chile since the transition to
democracy in 1990 (Segovia and Gamboa, 2012; Somma, 2012). Between May of 2011
and September of 2013, a total of 26 massive protests were held in Santiago and in
several other major cities throughout the country. An unknown number of universities
and schools were paralyzed by students who occupied dozens of buildings for long
periods of time all around Chile. Although the peak of this movement was in
July–August of 2011, mobilisations continued throughout 2012 and 2013.
We argue that this case is different from the so-called ‘networked social movements’
that most of the literature on collective action and digital technologies has focused on.
According to Castells (2012), these movements are triggered by a massive crisis of
institutional trust prompted by a sense of indignation, frustration and injustice. Moreover,
these networked movements are fuelled by a desire of autonomy, which is facilitated by
digital networks. Their main characteristics are:
1 they are networked on multiple levels, operating both online and offline
2 they are rooted in urban space
3 they have a decentralised structure, so as to avoid excessive bureaucracy and
hierarchies
4 they are difficult to repress
5 anyone can participate and join
6 they are local and global at the same time
7 they are self-generative (idem).
We contend that the Chilean Student Movement presents substantial differences with
respect to these characteristics. To understand this, it is important to consider how
students are organised and what their key demands are. The movement’s organisation is a
hierarchical one, whereby students elect representatives at various levels. In most
universities, students elect representatives of their career and/or their faculty, and also
elect leaders of federations at the university level. In turn, these federations meet
regularly in a national assembly: the Confederation of Chilean Students (Confederación
 What can Twitter tell us about social movements’ network topology 321

de Estudiantes de Chile, CONFECH). Although each university federation is

autonomous, the CONFECH is an articulating space for strategic decision making of the
movement as a whole. The street protests we analyse were coordinated by CONFECH.3
The traditional repertoire of collective action includes street protests and the
occupation of public buildings and schools. In fact, these continued to be the movement’s
most visible actions between the years 2011–2013. Some high school students also went
on hunger strikes, a radical tactic that was not supported by the whole leadership. In the
period we studied, these offline tactics were accompanied by a strong web presence of
various sorts and through different digital platforms.
As Earl and Kimport (2011) have argued, there is great variation in the relationship
between activism and the uses of digital tools. The authors identify “three instances that
represent a continuum of the web protest”:

“In e-mobilizations, online tools are used to facilitate the sharing of information
in the service of an offline protest action, to bring people into the streets for
face-to-face protest. In e-movements, organization of and participation in the
movement occurs entirely online. Finally, e-tactics may include both off and
online components.” (p.12)

According to this typology, the Chilean student movement is a case of ‘e-tactics’. It is not
merely ‘e-mobilisation’, because digital tools are used for much more than simply
sharing information, but it is also not a case of an ‘e-movement’. Digital activism occurs
in close connection to offline tactics.
What are the movement’s main demands? As the movement gained momentum and
public opinion support, throughout the first months of 2011, it broadened its collective
action frame, going from specific criticisms of the delay in payment of public grants to
focusing on an overall restructuring of the educational system (as well as on criticisms of
the electoral system and on calls for a fiscal reform and for a new Constitution).4
In order to understand these grievances, it is important to explain, briefly, the main
characteristics of the Chilean educational system. The current educational system was
established in the 1980s, during the military dictatorship (1973–1990). Following an
economically liberal credo, the military regime made deep changes to the traditional
educational system, one of the main goals of which was to promote a greater participation
of the private sector in the provision of educational services. After the democratic
transition, the governments led by the centre-left coalition Concertación de Partidos por
la Democracia (hereafter Concertación) invested more state resources in the educational
system, aiming at improving the quality of the education as well as extending its
coverage (Arellano, 2005; Donoso Díaz, 2005). However, the basic structure set by the
dictatorship, which privileged market provision and private funding, was maintained
[Cox, (2003), p.16]
The changes made during the democratic period have yielded mixed results. On the
one hand, they have been highly successful in terms of coverage. In 1990, only 52% of
the population between 20 and 24 years old had completed high school. As of 2006, this
percentage had risen to 80% [OECD and IBRD, (2009), p.76]. With respect to tertiary
education (universities, technical colleges and post high school training), the enrolment
numbers are impressive as well: while in 1980 there were less than 120 thousand students
(OECD and IBRD, 2009), by 2011 there were over one million (OECD, 2013). On the
other hand, the country has persistently failed to diminish the inequality in access to
high-quality education, and it has one of the lowest average public expenditure for
322 C. García et al.

tertiary institutions in the OECD (2013). Accordingly, it is the OECD country in which
private funds account for the highest share of expenditures in tertiary institutions. In
2010, 70.12% of expenditures in tertiary institutions came from households, 22.11% was
public expenditure, and 7.78% came from other private entities.5 These data reflect the
fact that, since the reforms of the 1980s, there is no free tertiary education in Chile. The
2013 OECD Education at a Glance Report proposes a taxonomy that takes into account
the cost of the tuition fees and the financial support available for the students in different
countries of the world. Chile is classified as part of the group of “countries with high
tuition fees but less-developed student support systems” [OECD, (2013), p.228].
The new upsurge of popular unrest came 18 months after a centre-right president,
Sebastián Piñera, took office. At first, President Piñera’s reaction was to ‘wait and see’,
betting that the movement would wear out eventually. However, as the President’s
approval rates plummeted and support for the movement rose in public opinion polls,6 the
Executive power tried to adjust its strategy to a ‘carrot and stick’ one. In July of 2011, in
a speech on national television, the President acknowledged the need to improve quality,
access and funding, three cornerstones of the movement’s agenda. At the same time,
repressive tactics against protestors were used intensively, reaching their height in August
of that year.
In 2012, student leaders recognised that “we have not been strong enough”7 to
achieve the movement’s goals. In fact, the overall evaluation was a very pessimistic one,
as well as the prospects for the future of the movement. Although the movement had been
able to put education in the centre of the political debate and had even led to the fall of
Education Ministers, the only concrete change in public policy was the diminishing of
interest rates charged in one type of student loan. Although this change has not been
considered by the student organisations as an important victory, it should be noted that
the variation in the loan conditions had important consequences for the 365,000 indebted
students that benefited from this specific loan. The law promulgated on September 2012
reduced the interest rates from 6% to 2%, and conditioned the reimbursement of the loan
on the salary of the indebted students. While before the indebted people had to pay a
fixed payment, according to the new law the monthly payment of the debtors could not
exceed 10% of their salary.8 Without any doubt, this law, a direct consequence of the
student movement, benefited an important number of low and middle-income Chilean
families.

3 Internet and social media in Chile

According to the World Bank, the percentage of the population with access to the internet
in Chile in 2012 was far higher than in other countries of the region, such as Mexico or
Brazil. While in 2009 41.6% had access, in 2012 the number had risen to 61.4%.9 Data
from the third edition of the World Internet Project International Report confirms “Chile
is one of the most technologically advanced countries in South America, occupying an
intermediate position between the most advanced economies of the world and other
developing countries” [World Internet Project, (2012), p.26]. The same source estimates
that internet usage in Chile is, on average, of about 3.4 hours per day, and, most
importantly to this article, that the youth is likely to spend even more time online.
Furthermore, 83% of people between 12 and 17 years old are internet users. Social
 What can Twitter tell us about social movements’ network topology 323

networking sites (SNS) have, in turn, high penetration in Chile. For instance, Facebook
occupies the highest penetration rate in Chile, accessed by 89.1% of the internet users in
the country (ComScore, 2013). And, as of Twitter, Chile was in 17th place worldwide,
with 4.8 million Twitter accounts by 2012 (idem).
Internet technology is not fixed, but rather in flux and co-created with users
(Oudshoorn and Pinch, 2005), who in turn change their media uses and practices as they
learn and adapt to emerging socio-technical scenarios. In fact, we found that in a
relatively short period of time there was an important shift in the use of social media by
the student movement in Chile. During the previous wave of massive student protests, in
2006, the predominant social media platforms used to diffuse information and coordinate
action were blogs and Fotologs (García et al., 2010). Although internet access was
rapidly increasing along with these new social media tools, at that time it was not a
spread-out phenomenon. The so-called Web 2.0 (O’Reilly, 2005) platforms were still
gaining momentum in Chile. However, the contrast with the 2010 media context is
noticeable, not only with higher internet penetration, but also massive use of SNS as well
as more intensive use of smartphones with direct access to these sites.10
More specifically, in 2011–2013 the fotologs and blogs that were so relevant only a
few years earlier gave way to Facebook and, less importantly but growing, to Twitter as
the main public platforms for movement coordination and information diffusion. This
finding is supported by the qualitative interviews undertaken with key student leaders.
With respect to Twitter, its increased relevance is readily acknowledged, even though
most interviewees have difficulties explaining the reasons behind this change. Why is it
so important to have a Twitter account is not obvious to many, but while in the beginning
of 2011 only a few leaders were active in this platform, by the end of 2013 all those in
charge of student organisations had a Twitter account. Furthermore, at that point most
student organisations also had created an official account. As one leader explained,
“Twitter has become a political tool, and not simply a communication tool... it is a
medium for political strategy...”11 As a ‘political tool’, it was a site of power struggles, of
attempts at manipulation and domination, as well as of enhancing transparency and
accountability.
When asked to compare Twitter and Facebook, interviewees emphasised the
differences between these two SNS in the period studied. They argued that the social
networks created and cultivated in these two platforms were different, because Twitter’s
ties were more diverse and potentially spread more rapidly to other actors. Furthermore,
Twitter allowed for a more direct and quick communication with the mainstream media,
which often used Tweets as a source of information. Finally, Twitter was more ‘open’, in
the sense that you do not have to send a friendship request to be able to know what
someone else is writing. On the other hand, Facebook was the preferred medium for
internal communication with the students. Facebook was also the preferred medium to
share photos and other visual information. In a sense, Twitter was a social networking
site for weak ties (Granovetter, 1973) and even latent ties (Haythornthwaite, 2002),
which allowed participants to communicate across boundaries and, thus, to reach to new
constituencies, by interacting with the media as well as confronting government officials
and politicians. Facebook, in turn, was a medium to coordinate and cultivate stronger ties
among members of the movement.
In sum, Twitter was at the same time a political tool and a political arena, in which
actors were constantly struggling to shape the framing of the messages12 as well as
enhancing the visibility of their own ideas.
324 C. García et al.

4 The Twitter mirror: observing the protest activity on the web

The increased relevance of social network platforms such as Twitter opens up

unprecedented opportunities to better understand activists’ strategies and their
interactions, and, most importantly to the goals of this article, to understand how
longstanding social movement organisations such as the Chilean student federations
adapt to this new environment. It also opens up the opportunity to use digital data
analytics and mining to help illuminate and maybe uncover collective action patterns. As
mentioned above, our data set consists of Twitter activity during weeks in which street
protests were organised, in the years 2011, 2012 and 2013. We identified a total of 26
events spread throughout this period. In each case, we collected tweets sent during seven
days (from three days before to three days after each analysed protest).
The protocol followed to filter information on Twitter for each protest event is the
following: first, we made a list of the official leaders´ accounts (including all accounts
available of Presidents, Vice-Presidents and General Secretaries of student federations
and spokespersons for high school organisations). Because student leaders face elections
after a one-year mandate (and many are not reelected), this list of personal accounts
followed changed accordingly through time. Second, we made a list of the official
accounts used by organisations (including federations, national high school student
organisations, civic groups, and student associations). The dataset included 29 leaders’
Twitter accounts in 2011, 30 in 2012, and 51 in 2013. With respect to the number of
organisations’ accounts, the dataset included 46 twitter accounts in 2011. This number
grew to 55 in 2012 and to 59 in 2013, as more organisations began to use Twitter. While
the leadership of organisations changed routinely, as so did our dataset of leaders’
accounts, the names of the organisations’ official accounts remained the same throughout
the period studied.
The growth in the number of accounts per year shows the more widespread use of
Twitter by these actors in this period. Third, we generated a timeline of events and then
we focused on the weeks during which street protests were called by the CONFECH.
Thus, we identified 13 events in 2011, 5 in 2012 and 8 in 2013. Fourth, to collect the
information on Twitter we used Topsy ProAnalytics,13 and we tracked all mentions of the
selected accounts made in this social networking site during the 26 analysed weeks.14 For
this article, we analysed a total of 255,910 retweets, sent during 26 weeks between 2011
and 2013.
Based on this information, we constructed 26 retweet networks, that is, the networks
that result from direct communication between two accounts or nodes. To do this, we
identified all messages that correspond to a retweet, i.e., a re-posting of someone else’s
tweet, by filtering for all messages that include in their text body the initials ‘…RT
@user_name:...’. Then, we separated the sender of the original messages from those who
forwarded the message. All these steps were performed using R, and as an output we got
a csv file with two columns: an original sender (those being retweeted) and a re-sender
(those who made the retweet). We used Gephi,15 a social network analysis (SNA) and
graph visualisation software (Bastian et al., 2009), to generate a direct graph connecting
the retweeted node to the node that made the retweet.
 What can Twitter tell us about social movements’ network topology 325

4.1 Structural properties of the retweet networks

As shown in Figure 1, the number of retweets from leaders’ and organisations’ accounts
varied significantly throughout the period studied. During the first protests, our data
shows that Twitter was still not being used intensively. The peak in volume, which occurs
during weeks eight through ten (see Appendix for exact dates), coincides with the peak in
mobilisation of the movement. These three protests were held during the month of
August, and were characterised by massive participation as well as high levels of
repression.16

Figure 1 Number of retweets of selected accounts during protest weeks (2011–2013)

Source: Topsy filtered extract count of retweets based on list of leaders and
institutional Twitter’s accounts. Authors’ own elaboration
In the next figures, we use standard SNA metrics to describe the network of retweets’
topology, centrality and related dynamics over time.
Figure 2 shows the number of nodes and edges for each of the 26 networks under
study. These measures have the same shape as the number of retweets in Figure 1 but on
a smaller scale. This is not surprising because the network is structured so that a node can
have more than one edge to another node. In fact, it is common to find an account that
retweets another account more than once. Another interesting feature of Figure 2 is that
from week one through week seventh, the curve corresponding to the number of nodes
fits the curve of the number of edges. From week 8th onwards they begin to distance
themselves. This fact is captured by the average degree (edges to node ratio in the
secondary vertical axis), which tells us that there are a little over 1.4 edges per node, a
measure of the degree of connectivity for each network. In spite of the drop after the 10th
week in the number of retweets, nodes and edges, the average degree shows that those
who remain participative in Twitter are more – not less – active and connected through
time.
326 C. García et al.

Figure 2 Properties of the retweet networks: nodes, edges and average degree

Source: Topsy filtered extract count of retweets based on list of leaders and
institutional Twitter’s accounts. Authors’ own elaboration

To better understand these dynamics of the distribution of retweets, we describe the

network behaviour by day, instead of comparing the full weeks. As mentioned before, our
analysis is based on data from three days before the protest, the protest day, and three
days after the protest. In Figure 3, we can observe the distribution of the number of
retweets per week for each of the protests analysed in 2011. We found that, in almost all
weeks, the highest volume actually took place during the day of the protest, except for
August 4th and July 14th of 2011, with peaks one day and three days after the protest,
respectively. These two exceptions are explained by the specific circumstances
surrounding these dates. For example, after the protest organised during the day on
August 4, the high levels of police repression led student leaders to call a ‘cacerolazo’17
that same evening. The volume of retweets on August 5 reflects this specific context of
continued mobilisation.
As for 2012 and 2013, we found a similar pattern of distribution of retweets, which in
fact is even more pronounced in the 2012 protests (see Figure 4). Three days, i.e.,
April 25th, May 16th and August 8th, concentrate almost one third (33%) of the re-
tweeting activity of the entire week.
Secondly, through our week-long protest data we validate another instantiation of
what has been termed the Twitter rhythm (Lomborg, 2014), that is, the individual daily
pattern of use or, as in our case, the weekly collective Twitter use pattern. For our
selected 26 weeks of protests, it is clearly evident that the peak of use is the day of the
protest, as can be observed in Figures 3 (2011), 4 (2012) 5 (2013). We can also observe
the high re-tweeting activity one day prior and after the protest.
During 2011, the year of the ‘explosion’ of the movement, we can also observe that,
for the days of the protests in each week analysed, the higher peaks of Twitter activity did
not happen the first protests in that year but rather happened in the 6th protest
(June 23rd), the 10th protest (August 24th and 25th) and 13th one (Oct. 18th and
19th). Interestingly, enough that is not the case for 2012, where we can observe in
Figure 4 that re-tweeting activity is higher during the protest days between April 25th and
August 8th.
 What can Twitter tell us about social movements’ network topology 327

Figure 3 Distribution of retweets over 13 protest-week periods in 2011 (%)

Source: Authors’ own elaboration, based on Topsy filtered extract count of

retweets of list of leaders’ and organisations’ accounts

Figure 4 Distribution of retweets over five protest-week periods in 2012 (%)

Source: Topsy filtered extract count of retweets based on list of leaders and
institutional Twitter’s accounts. Authors’ own elaboration
A similar pattern can be observed in our 2013 data (see Figure 5), with highest peaks of
retweet activity during the very day of the protests, but more importantly followed by an
interesting high volume observed just one day after the protests. In fact, the day and the
day after the protest (especially June 13th and 26th) concentrate more than 60% of the
re-tweeting activity during the week analysed in 2013. That could be related with the
increasing connectivity of this Twitter network as well as its average degree, as shown in
Figure 2. We will come back to this later in the article.
328 C. García et al.

Figure 5 Distribution of retweets over eight protest-week periods in 2013 (%)

Source: Topsy filtered extract count of retweets based on list of leaders and
institutional Twitter’s accounts. Authors’ own elaboration.
Our data on the distribution of retweets during a typical week of protest signals about
how participants might use Twitter. The concentration of retweets during the day of the
protest suggests that these activists use Twitter to communicate and diffuse information
during the event and to coordinate further collective actions. For example, as argued by
our interviewees, during August 4th’s demonstration, Twitter was intensively used by
student leaders and protest participants to denounce police repression and to call for
further mobilisation.18

4.2 The retweet networks’ evolving centrality

The analysis of centrality of accounts in the retweet networks provides insights about the
changing and emerging leadership roles of this social movement. During the first two
years of the student movement, and especially during 2011, when the movement scaled
up, the most central positions in were clearly held by a group of individuals, most notably
Camila Vallejo and Giorgio Jackson. They were the elected representatives of the student
body of the two main Universities in Chile, the Universidad de Chile and the Pontificia
Universidad Católica de Chile, respectively. In SNA terms, they had a high betweenness
centrality, which increased over time, as well as a high outdegree, i.e., a high number of
retweets that were forwarded from other accounts, as can be seen in Figure 6.
 What can Twitter tell us about social movements’ network topology 329

Figure 6 Retweet student network’s outdegree, Sept. 22, 2011

Source: Topsy filtered extract count of retweets based on list of leaders and
institutional Twitter’s accounts. Authors’ own elaboration

Figure 7 Retweet student network’s outdegree for August 8th 2012 protest

Source: Topsy filtered extract count of retweets based on list of leaders and
institutional Twitter’s accounts based on authors’ own elaboration
330 C. García et al.

This network structure, in which the personal accounts of a few individual leaders are at
the centre of the network, is consistent over the different protest weeks analysed in both
2011 and the first months of 2012. However, by mid-2012, and especially throughout
2013, we observe a change in the centrality roles, where personal accounts lose weight in
comparison with organisational accounts. As it can be seen in Figure 7, which presents
the network of retweets during the protest held on August 8, 2012, although Camila
Vallejo (by then Vice-President of the Federation of Students of the University of Chile)
remains a very central actor, the official account of the Federation (la_Fech) is the most
central one. Other organisations’ accounts, such as Difusion_ACES, of high school
students, also became more central.19
In 2013, the previous pattern in the centrality of relevant actors on the retweets
network is reversed. As shown in Figures 8 through 10, the movement’s leaders
accounts became less central in comparison with other organisations, both student and
civil society related organisations, which came to occupy the more central positions in the
networks. Figure 8 shows that, for the protest event of July 7th, the jjcc_Chile account
(Communist Youth of Chile, which is linked to the Communist Party) and
ChileaLaMoneda20 (an organisational account of a civil society group that mobilised for
the 2013 Presidential elections) have occupied the most central positions in the
network. These accounts are followed by two students organisations: Infoestudiantes (a
student group that disseminated news about the student movement) and ConesChile
(the institutional account of a high school students’ organisation).21 On a third level,
two accounts of the leaders of the movement appear, Afielbaum (the President of the
Catholic University’s Students Federation) and MoisespParedesR (leader of high school
students).

Figure 8 Retweet student network’s outdegree for July 7th 2013 protest

Source: Topsy filtered extract count of retweets based on list of leaders and
institutional Twitter`s accounts. Authors’ own elaboration
 What can Twitter tell us about social movements’ network topology 331

In fact, if we consider the betweenness centrality measures through time, we observe the
increasing centrality of institutional accounts in Twitter. If in 2011 the central nodes of
the network of retweets were the personal accounts of the movement’s leaders, in 2013
we observe a more central and connecting role of the institutions supporting the
movement, that is, students’ federations, associations, civic groups, and so on. The trend
is clearly observed in Figure 9.

Figure 9 Average betweenness centrality of leaders’ and organisations’ accounts during weeks of
protest (2011–2013)

Source: Topsy filtered extract count of retweets based on list of leaders and
institutional Twitter’s accounts. Authors’ own elaboration

Figure 10 Total number of retweets of leaders and organisations accounts during weeks of
protests (2011–2013)

Source: Topsy filtered extract count of retweets based on list of leaders and
institutional Twitter’s accounts. Authors’ own elaboration
If we now make the same comparison by using data on the out-degree measure of leaders
and organisations’ accounts, that is, the retweet networks, we observe an even more
pronounced increase in relevance of organisational accounts, as shown in Figure 10.
This change in the centrality of actors in the retweets’ networks was not a natural
outcome of the spread of Twitter use, from individual leaders to organisations. Neither
was it a natural outcome of the turnover in the students’ official leadership, which
332 C. García et al.

changes as one-year mandates come to an end and leaders may or not be reelected.
Rather, based on the several interviews and focus groups conducted, we contend that it
was the result of an ‘institutionalisation’ strategy of Twitter by the students’
organisations. As old and new media history show (Jenkins, 2006), new media – in this
case Twitter – became mainstream: from a few central official leaders using this tool
partly on their own, after three years we observed both organisational learning and
control over this new media tool. As one focus group participant pointed out, the
uncontrolled use of a few leaders’ Twitter accounts in the first semester of 2011 was a
source of tensions:
“now (in 2013) there is a systematic respect of the political organizations, and
its leaders, in terms of restricting some things with respect to the social network
22
sites...”

5 Student movement decay or institutionalisation?

What we observe through the Twitter lens is the evolution over time (2011–2013) of the
Chilean student movement. As we know from the literature on revolutions and social
movements, cycles of contention are characterised by phases of strong confrontation
followed by periods of demobilisation.23 In this case, the peak of mobilisation was in
mid-2011, followed by a period in which protests continued but with lower levels of
mobilisation.
Even considering its weakening through time, however, this case is very different
from the ‘networked social movements’ studied by Castells, in that the Chilean Student
Movement is both a centralised movement and one that has been active for over three
years. Cases such as OWS, OL, Los Indignados and even the demonstrations we
witnessed in Turkey, Brazil and the Arab Spring, tend to be rapid, localised and transient
events. We show that the Chilean Student Movement has sustained over these past three
years as per the Twitter activity and the related organisational learning declared by the
interviewed actors.
As for the decay and eventual death of the Chilean student movement, our Twitter
data indicates that we have and probably will have student movement for a while. Why?
Because, though the volume of this movement-related tweets as well as the number of
protests in the streets during 2013 have decreased, the average degree has increased in
this period, as previously shown in Figure 2. That is to say, the connectivity, and density
of the Twitter network is higher now than in 2011, i.e., the students are more connected
among each other.

6 Conclusions and further work

The 2011–2012 Chilean Student Movement offers an excellent test bed to study the
dynamics of network generation and evolution through social media, especially via
Twitter. Moreover, Twitter does work as a mirror of the student movement in that it
allows analysing the Twitter-based behaviour during the weeks of protests in what we
have called the rhythm as well as the topology, and centrality of the student network.
By looking at the centrality measures of both leaders and organisations, we make a
distinction between the Chilean student movement and the so-called ‘networked social
 What can Twitter tell us about social movements’ network topology 333

movements’. The Chilean movement’s organisation is a rather hierarchical one, whereby

students elect representatives yearly at various levels. In most universities, students elect
representatives of their career and/or their faculty, as well as elect leaders of federations
at the university level, who have become central leaders nationwide. An additional
difference is the ‘sustained’ characteristic of the student movement as it has been ‘alive’
and ‘protesting’ for more than three years now as evidenced in the 26 protests analysed.
That is not the case with the ‘networked social movements’ – most notably OWS, OL and
the Indignados and to a lesser degree the Arab, Turkish and Brazilian movements –
which have been rapid and passing events.
As for what we called ‘the process of institutionalisation of Twitter’, we have
observed an evolution of the movement as well as organisational learning in terms of the
media tools used to diffuse information and coordinate collective action. Although the
movement’s core institutions elect new leaders (or may reelect them) on a yearly basis,
organisations have learned to utilise different platforms – including Twitter – to
communicate, to move the movement forward, and to frame the movement’s core
demands through a collective discourse that has to be sustained beyond the electoral
cycles.
This article presented a preliminary analysis of the use of social media by the Chilean
students’ movement, one that did not pretend to test hypothesis, but rather to launch
preliminary arguments that need further research. More specifically, a content analysis of
the retweets could allow us to better understand the uses of the Twitter by specific actors.
In the future it will also be interesting to include 2014 data, in order to verify the
sustainability of the movement, as well as the continuing balance or tension between
personal and institutional accounts as the movement elect new representatives. Finally,
we plan to include additional insights from our qualitative fieldwork to deepen the
analysis of the meaning and social media behaviour of the protests’ weeks, to understand
the increasing institutionalisation as per the changing centrality of the movement in
particular, as well as the ongoing relationship between this movement and the digital
tools, more generally.

Acknowledgements

The research paper was funded by the Chilean Science & Technology Research Fund
(FONDECYT Project 1130897) and the MISTI grant (MIT-Chile PUC Seed Fund 2012).
We would like to thank the reviewers for their comments on a previous version, as well
as Cesar Hidalgo, Peter Gloor, and the members of the Web in Movement Research
Group, especially Anita Perricone, Germán Bidegain and María Ignacia Pinto. We also
thank the interviewees for their time. The authors have no relationship whatsoever with
the student movement or with government agencies monitoring it or political parties
either supporting or confronting it.

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Notes
1 Between March of 2013 and January of 2014 we interviewed 39 key student leaders
(presidents and vice-presidents of federations, high school leaders, and students in charge of
communications within organizations) in the cities of Santiago, Valparaiso, Concepción and
Antofagasta.
2 We organised two focus groups with leaders and with those in charge of social network sites
in students’ organisations, in September and December of 2013.
3 In this article, we focus mostly on university student organisations, because they have played
the central role in the 2011–2013 mobilisations. However, high school students have also been
key actors in mobilisations, especially after the important 2006 protests, known as the
Penguins’ Revolution. For an analysis of that movement, see Donoso (2013).
4 The next paragraphs rely on the analysis by von Bülow and Bidegain (2014).
5 See the data available in http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/888932846975 (accessed 25 September
2013).
6 According to the public opinion surveys conducted by the Center for Public Studies (Centro de
Estudios Públicos – CEP), at the end of 2011 over 60% of respondents supported the
organization of street protests by students. See the data available in http://www.cepchile.cl
(accessed 31August 2013).
7 Mesa Directiva FECH, ‘Agosto Estudiantil: declaración mesa FECH sobre la toma Casa
Central Universidad de Chile’, August 18, 2012.
8 See http://www.gob.cl/informa/2012/09/26/
presidente-pinera-promulga-ley-que-otorga-beneficios-a-deudores-cae.htm (accessed 6
September 2013).
9 Data available in http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IT.NET.USER (accessed 4 April 2014).
10 According to a recent report, in comparison with Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, in Chile there
are more users accessing the Internet with mobile tools such as tablets and smartphones
(ComScore, 2013).
11 Interview with Angello Giorgio, President of the Federation of Students of the Universidad
Adolfo Ibañez between 2011 and 2012, Santiago, August 23, 2013.
12 In this article, we do not analyse these framing struggles. There is a large literature on this
topic by social movement theorists and political communication scholars, and there is also an
emerging literature that uses content analysis to study these processes. See, for example, the
discussion about framing in Lakoff (2005). For content analysis of tweets, see, for example,
Segerberg and Bennett (2011, pp.208–209).
336 C. García et al.

13 Topsy is a social search and analytics company based in San Francisco, California, which is
certified as a Twitter partner. It maintains a comprehensive index of tweets up to hundreds of
billions, dating back to Twitter’s inception in 2006. The use of the Topsy search engine was
funded by the National Commission for Scientific and Technological Research (CONICYT).
Responsibility for the selection of this tool and the methodology used remains with the
authors.
14 Topsy allows downloads of 10,000 tweets maximum per file in a csv. We did as many queries
as required for each mention. The time frame analysed was from January 2011 through
November 2013. As a result, we got 183 packages of tweets sent by the selected actors in our
list and 928 packages of tweets in which these actors where mentioned or retweeted. For this
publication we focused on the latter. We obtained the following information: time and date of
the message, language, body of the message, user profile, user profile’s location, user profile’s
generation date, user name and user time zone. We use the software R to merge all these large
packages for each mention and then to conform a unique data set organised by date of
creation.
15 See https://gephi.org/ for more details.
16 According to official police data, the protests organised during the month of August resulted
in 2,434 demonstrators arrested (data provided to the researchers by the Chilean Police
Department).
17 ‘Cacerolazo’ can be translated as a ‘banging of pans’, and it is part of the traditional repertoire
of protest activity in Chile.
18 Similar arguments about the uses of Twitter during street protests were presented by the
participants of the first focus group organised in Santiago, September 2013.
19 The Coordinated Assembly of High School Students (Asamblea Coordinadora de Estudiantes
Secundarios – ACES) is one of the two national-level organisations of high school students in
Chile.
20 Chile a La Moneda’ means Chile to the National Government Palace.
21 The National Coordinator of High School Students (Coordinadora Nacional de Estudiantes
Secundarios – CoNES), is together with ACES (see footnote 20), a national-level organisation
that mobilises high school students.
22 Participant of the second focus group, Santiago, December 2013.
23 See, for example, the analysis of cycles of contention in Tarrow (2011, Chapter 11).
 What can Twitter tell us about social movements’ network topology 337

Appendix

List of protest numbers and dates (2011–2013)

Protest event Date
1 May 12, 2011
2 May 26, 2011
3 June 1, 2011
4 June 16, 2011
5 June 23, 2011
6 June 30, 2011
7 July 14, 2011
8 August 4, 2011
9 August 18, 2011
10 August 24, 2011
11 September 22, 2011
12 September 29, 2011
13 October 18, 2011
14 April 25, 2012
15 May 16, 2012
16 August 8, 2012
17 August 28, 2012
18 September 27, 2012
19 April 11, 2013
20 May 8, 2013
21 May 28, 2013
22 June 13, 2013
23 June 26, 2013
24 July 11, 2013
25 September 5, 2013
26 October 17, 2013