Abstract

Social media represent powerful tools of mass communica-tion and information diffusion. They played a pivotal role during recent social uprisings and political mobilizations across the world. Here we present a study of the Gezi Park movement in Turkey through the lens of Twitter. We an-alyze over 2.3 million tweets produced during the 25 days of protest occurred between May and June 2013. We first characterize the spatio-temporal nature of the conversation about the Gezi Park demonstrations, showing that similar-ity in trends of discussion mirrors geographic cues. We then describe the characteristics of the users involved in this con-versation and what roles they played. We study how roles and individual influence evolved during the period of the up-heaval. This analysis reveals that the conversation becomes more democratic as events unfold, with a redistribution of influence over time in the user population. We conclude by observing how the online and offline worlds are tightly in-tertwined, showing that exogenous events, such as political speeches or police actions, affect social media conversations and trigger changes in individual behavior.