Online Rebellion: Self-Organized Criticality of Contemporary Protest Movements

Abstract

The theory of self-organized criticality (SOC) is applicable for explaining powerful surges of protest activity on social media. The objects of study were two protest clusters. The first was a set of Facebook groups that promoted the impeachment of the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. The second was a set of groups on the social network Vkontakte that provided support for anti-government rallies in Armenia, referred to as Electric Yerevan. Numerous groups in the examined clusters were functioning in SOC mode during certain periods. Those clusters were able to generate information avalanches—seemingly spontaneous, powerful surges of creation, transmission, and reproduction of information. The facts are presented that supported the assumptions that SOC effects in social networks are associated with mass actions on the streets, including violence. The observations of SOC make it possible to reveal certain periods when the course of a sociopolitical system is least stable.