Social Media’s Role in Facilitating Political Revolution
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The Symposium provides undergraduates from all academic disciplines with an opportunity to share their research with the university community and other guests through conference-style oral presentations. The Symposium represents part of a larger effort of Iowa State University to enhance, support, and celebrate undergraduate research activity.
Though coordinated by the University Honors Program, all undergraduate students are eligible and encouraged to participate in the Symposium. Undergraduates conducting research but not yet ready to present their work are encouraged to attend the Symposium to learn about the presentation process and students not currently involved in research are encouraged to attend the Symposium to learn about the broad range of undergraduate research activities that are taking place at ISU.
The first Symposium was held in April 2007. The 39 students who presented research and their mentors collectively represented all of ISU's Colleges: Agriculture and Life Sciences, Business, Design, Engineering, Human Sciences, Liberal Arts and Sciences, Veterinary Medicine, and the Graduate College. The event has grown to regularly include more than 100 students presenting on topics that span the broad range of disciplines studied at ISU.
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In recent years, a number of countries across the world have faced civil unrest that has led to political revolution. In many of these instances, social media websites have been pointed to by pundits as a tool used by activists to further their cause, however current research is still split as to the extent that social media helps to propagate political revolutions. This research is focused on determining how extensively social media has been used to further revolutionary causes. In order to determine social media’s role in political upheaval, this research will collect politically charged tweets from areas where major political protests took place on the days leading up to and proceeding the events. The tweets will then be analyzed to determine whether social media was being used to plan and organize demonstrations, and whether the information spread via social media contributed to unrests in areas separate from the locations of the original protests.