Social media and mass movement relation: A content analysis of mass movement in social media

The debate over whether or not the emergence of the social media has changed the way people communicate for socializing has received heightened interest since the role in the emergence of mass movements all around the world. Contemporary social mass movements like the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the protests in Istanbul's Gezi Park or others all around the globe received worldwide attention because of intensive excessive use of communication technologies and flow of information concentrated around social media. The key role of social media in these mass movements may be summarized as the ability to collect enough number of sufficiently angry individuals and also maintain the level of grievances as a catalyzer which is certainly necessary for sustaining the collective action. In some cases all efforts made by governmental institutions for forestall and censorship of dissemination of information frustrated by the sympathizers and supporters by using different techniques yet some of them not. But as a one of the most important tool of the new media, social media has ignited the individuals voices demand for democracy to justice and anticorruption to equality. The aim of this study by using content analysis is to explore the possible relationship and resemblance in the messages which are related mass movements occurred in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Turkey, Spain and US in the social media environment Twitter. The thesis composes of three theoretical and one research sections as a total four chapters. In the theoretical sections; a literary research has been conducted and conceptual explanations has been included on the topics of social media, mass movements-social media interaction and the effects of communication theories supported by social and physiological theories focusing on individuals and masses. In the research section, search was conducted on 100 twitter messages of each country as total 600 which were selected the peak day of crises. The key issues that are investigated throughout content analysis technique of the study are subject, aim, target audience and background of movements. Each tweet messages under these four main categories, divided into different number of sub categories such as subject 9, aim 72, target audience 13 and background of the movements 12 as a total number 106 codes. The findings obtained as a result of qualitative analysis also supported by quantitative data about the users profiles. The conclusions reached are hoped to serve as guideline for future researchers in this field since it contains some clues and a different assessment as in other researches hitherto.