Quantifying Political Self-Organization in Social Media. Fractal patterns in the Spanish 15M movement on Twitter

Abstract

The objective of this work is to better analyse and understand social self-organization in the context of social media and po-litical activism. More specifically, we centre our analysis in the presence of fractal scaling in the form of 1/f noise in dif-ferent Twitter communication networks related to the Span-ish 15M movement. We show how quantitative indexes of brown, white and pink noise correlate with qualitatively dif-ferent forms of social coordination of protests: rigidly orga-nized protests (brown noise), reactive-spontaneous protests (white noise) and complex genuinely self-organized protests (pink noise). In addition, pink noise processes present corre-lations that reach much further in time, maintaining a dynam-ical coherence that last several days, and also show a balance between mean distance and clustering coefficient within the interaction network.