text FreeMediaVe

It's a protest -- FreeMediaVe

Chavez was shutting down radio and TV stations, and there was a protest using twitter.

When I started searcgubg there were 1500 tweets by 3a.m. August 3. The pace has been fast and furious.

"What the Hashtag" [website] started following this hashtag earlier than August 3. They have numbers of tweets beginning on 07/30 and the largest number of tweets in their records was 08/01. However, they find fewer tweets than does Archivist. So the numbers are not directly comparable. But it is evidence that the protest was already going strong before August 3.

The search term is the hashtag: #freemediave

As noted above I was a bit late and missed a substantial number of messages at the initial stage of the protest.

I need to inject a warning here. I do not read Spanish, and most of the messages are in Spanish. They could be far afield from the protest as far as I know. But even if they have wandered from the original point the people using this hashtag have found it useful to communicate with this organizing hashtag.

I found it interesting that even though the number of messages per day declined they did not go away. It was a protest that seemed to sustain itself over a substantial period of time. So I continued to search. Eventually the file became so large I decided to conduct the search using two files. The search stopped for the first file 3/3/2010. The first file contains 193,120 messages.

The second file reaches back to 2/24/2010 and continues until 4/4/2010. The overlap between the two is modest and can be deleted easily. The number of messages was 9276. The figure shows the distribution over time.

The figure for the first series is dominated by the first couple of days. After that there is no differentiation in the plot. This one gives an idea about the variability in messaging 8 months after the initial protest.

After the Freemediave campaign had been going they decided to start another protest stream -- this one naming Chavez.

The search term was the hashtag #nomaschavez. One should note that many of these messages contained both of the hashtags. So there is overlap between the two collections. The same warning about Spanish applies to this collection. I have not tried to translate any of the messages.

The first message found was from September 5, 2009, and the search was terminated April 4, 2010. The file contains 26,918 messages. The figure gives the time series for this stream.

There is an initial burst of activity. It is much less activity than in the freemediave stream. That decays quickly, and there is a brief resurgence in January.

The files are freemediave-090803.xml, freemedia01.txt, freemediave.xml, freemedia02.txt, #nomaschevez.xml, and nomaschavez.txt.