Social unrest through new technologies: Twitter as a political tool

Abstract

Introduction. The 15-M movement (also referred to as the Anti-austerity Movement, the Indignados Movement, and Take the Square), marked a turning point in the way of understanding politics at all levels in Spain. Even today, political party Podemos is considered to be the direct heir of this movement, which occupied the front-pages of newspapers around the world in the weeks following the demonstrations of 15 May 2011 and sent aftershocks across the globe. The power of the Spanish civil society was manifested in full force, turning aside from political parties and politicised groups. This revolution was made possible by online social networks, which allowed previous movements to unify into one. Thanks to today’s technology, social networks can be monitored to capture their importance in the genesis, development and maintenance of this popular movement. Methods and results. The study is based on the review of Twitter’s key indicators, such as the trending topics and hashtags, as well as the review of the birth of the movement and its main lines of work, based on the dissemination of its activity, rather than on a sociological or content analysis perspective. The conclusions are in line with those drew in previous research works, which have served as the statistical corpus to frame the data obtained through empirical methods that are not commonly used in the social sciences.