Can Self-organized Criticality Theory help identify Political Mobilization on Social Media?

Abstract

One of the challenges of monitoring political mobilization on social media is the setting of formalized mobilization criteria to identify early symptoms of political mobilization across different groups. We propose and test a tool for identifying groups that display a high level of political mobilization. This tool is based on the hypothesis that strong engagement of users in group activities and discussions is common to groups in a state of self-organized criticality (SOC). An attribute of SOC, known as pink noise, can be observed in time series. To test this hypothesis, we sourced data on activity in 200 Facebook groups in France and Germany.