Armed groups of civilians known as "self-defense forces" have ousted the powerful Knights Templar drug cartel from several towns in Michoacan. This militia uprising has unfolded on social media, particularly in the "VXM" ("Valor por Michoacan," Spanish for "Courage for Michoacan") Facebook page, gathering more than 170,000 fans. Previous work on the Drug War has documented the use of social media for real-time reports of violent clashes. However, VXM goes one step further by taking on a pro-militia propagandist role, engaging in two-way communication with its audience. This paper presents a descriptive analysis of VXM and its audience. We examined nine months of posts, from VXM's inception until May 2014, totaling 6,000 posts by VXM administrators and more than 108,000 comments from its audience. We describe the main conversation themes, post frequency and relationships with offline events and public figures. We also characterize the behavior of VXM's most active audience members. Our work illustrates VXM's online mobilization strategies, and how its audience takes part in defining the narrative of this armed conflict. We conclude by discussing possible applications of our findings for the design of future communication technologies.
Opportunity Structures: characteristics of a social system that facilitate or hinder the activity of a social movement @cite_43 . For instance, online donation campaigns take advantage of the immediate emotions after a disaster or of friendships to harvest higher levels of participation and donations @cite_3 .
@cite_43 @cite_3
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As telecommunication networks become more common, there is an increasing interest in the factors underlying the development of online social structures. It has been proposed that these structures are new forms of organizing which are not subject to the same constraints as traditional social structures. However, from anecdotal evidence and case studies it is difficult to evaluate whether online social structures are subject to the same problems as traditional social structures. Drawing from prior studies of traditional social structures and empirical analyses of longitudinal data from a sample of Internet-based groups, this exploratory work considers the role of size and communication activity in sustainable online social structures.A resource-based theory of sustainable social structures is presented. Members contribute time, energy, and other resources, enabling a social structure to provide benefits for individuals. These benefits, which include information, influence, and social support, are the basis for a social structure's ability to attract and retain members. This model focuses on the system of opposing forces that link membership size as a component of resource availability and communication activity as an aspect of benefit provision to the sustainability of an online social structure. Analyses of data from a random sample of e-mail-based Internet social structures (listservs) indicate that communication activity and size have both positive and negative effects on a structure's sustainability. These results suggest that while the use of networked communication technologies may alter the form of communication, balancing the opposing impacts of membership size and communication activity in order to maintain resource availability and provide benefits for current members remains a fundamental problem underlying the development of sustainable online social structures. Introduction: opportunities mobilizing structures and framing processes Doug McAdam Part I. Political Opportunities: 1. Clarifying the concept of political opportunities Doug McAdam 2. States and opportunities: the political structuring of social movements Sidney Tarrow 3. Social movements and the state: thoughts on the policing of protest Donatella della Porta 4. Opportunities and framing in the East European revolts of 1989 Anthony Oberschall 5. Opportunities and Framing in the Political Cycle of Perestroika Elena Zdravomyslova Part II. Mobilizing Structures: 6. Mobilizing structures: constraints and opportunities in adopting, adapting and inventing John D. McCarthy 7. The organizational structure of new social movements in relation to their political context Hanspeter Kriesi 8. The impact of national contexts on social movement structures: a cross-movement and cross-national comparison Dieter Rucht 9. Organizational form as frame: collective identity and political strategy in the American Labor Movement 1880-1920 Elisabeth S. Clemens 10. The collapse of a social movement: the interplay of mobilizing structures, framing, and political opportunities in the Knights of Labor Kim Voss Part III. Framing Processes: 11. Culture ideology and strategic framing Mayer N. Zald 12. Accessing public media electoral and governmental agendas John D. McCarthy, Jackie Smith, and Mayer N. Zald 13. Media discourse, movement publicity, and the generation of collective action frames: theoretical and empirical exercises in meaning construction Bert Klandermans and Sjoerd Goslinga 14. Framing political opportunity William A. Gamson and David S. Meyer 15. The framing function of movement tactics: strategic dramaturgy in the American civil rights movement Doug McAdam. Every day, thousands of people make donations to humanitarian, political, environmental, and other causes, a large amount of which occur on the Internet. The solicitations for support, the acknowledgment of a donation and the discussion of corresponding issues are often conducted via email, leaving a record of these social phenomena. In this paper, we describe a comprehensive large-scale data-driven study of donation behavior. We analyze a two-month anonymized email log from several perspectives motivated by past studies on charitable giving: (i) demographics, (ii) user interest, (iii) external time-related factors and (iv) social network influence. We show that email captures the demographic peculiarities of different interest groups, for instance, predicting demographic distributions found in US 2012 Presidential Election exit polls. Furthermore, we find that people respond to major national events, as well as to solicitations with special promotions, and that social connections are the most important factor in predicting donation behavior. Specifically, we identify trends not only for individual charities and campaigns, but also for high-level categories such as political campaigns, medical illnesses, and humanitarian relief. Thus, we show the extent to which large-scale email datasets reveal human donation behavior, and explore the limitations of such analysis. This paper examines social structures underlying economic activity in Second Life (SL), a massively multiplayer virtual world that allows users to create and trade virtual objects and commodities. We find that users conduct many of their transactions both within their social networks and within groups. Using frequency of chat as a proxy of tie strength, we observe that free items are more likely to be exchanged as the strength of the tie increases. Social ties particularly play a significant role in paid transactions for sellers with a moderately sized customer base. We further find that sellers enjoying repeat business are likely to be selling to niche markets, because their customers tend to be contained in a smaller number of groups. But while social structure and interaction can help explain a seller's revenues and repeat business, they provide little information in the forecasting a seller's future performance. Our quantitative analysis is complemented by a novel method of visualizing the transaction activity of a seller, including revenue, customer base growth, and repeat business.