Quantitative Indicators of Text Style as a Factor of the Post Promotion in a Social Media Protest Communication

Abstract

A complete analysis of protest activity in the XXI century is not possible without an account of complex interrelations between online and offline behavior of different actors. Social media and the whole internet-space become a placement for new forms of behavior that transform the classical types of protest activity. Digital placements are not neutral to the communication due to specific laws and characteristics of online-interactions that affect the way actors try to communicate in the online and the extent they succeed doing that. This work investigates the influence of quantitative characteristics of text style on communication around protest movement in social media. The set of used characteristics consisted of mean length of a word in a post, the number of words in a post, a fraction of question marks over number of words in a post, a fraction of exclamation marks over number of words in a post, a fraction of brackets over over number of words in a post and a dummy on the difference between opening and closing brackets. Using regression analysis on a sample of original posts published in social media “Vkontakte” in 2018, we found that quantitative characteristics of text style have statistically significant impact on the promotion of the politically engaged posts. However, the predictive ability of these predictors to describe the variation between activity and broadness of protest communication in different context was inconsiderable.

Keywords

• political communication
• online communication
• social media
• social networks
• digital politics
• political protest
• protest movement
• social movements