Protest Event Analysis Meets Autocracy: Comparing the Coverage of Chinese Protests on Social Media, Dissident Websites and in the News

Autor(en)

Christian Göbel, H. Christoph Steinhardt

Abstrakt

How accurate is media-elicited protest event data from autocracies where the state censors the media? Based on a source-specific model of event selection and a multisource dataset of over 3,100 protests from three Chinese megacities, we demonstrate the substantial advantages of using social media data, capturing 115 times more protests than English-language international news, 74 times more than domestic news, and 10 times more than dissident websites. Social media are most likely to cover small and nonviolent events that other sources often ignore. Aside from antiregime protests, they are less affected by censorship than often assumed. A validity test against public holidays and daily rainfall shows that social media data outperform dissident websites and traditional news. Social media, and to a lesser extent dissident media, are promising new sources for protest event analysis in autocracies. Scholars should treat news media-based event data from heavily censoring regimes with caution.

Organisation(en)

Institut für Ostasienwissenschaften

Journal

Mobilization

Band

27

Seiten

277–295

ISSN

1086-671X

DOI

https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-27-3-277

Publikationsdatum

2022

Peer-reviewed

Ja

ÖFOS 2012

506006 Friedensforschung, 504023 Politische Soziologie, 602045 Sinologie

ASJC Scopus Sachgebiete

Sociology and Political Science

Link zum Portal

https://ucrisportal.univie.ac.at/de/publications/9cbe22e1-b129-41c1-8f71-c72a54ef6ab1