This paper offers a comprehensive approach towards analyzing and explaining the role of Twitter in shaping and facilitating social movements especially during protests. It presents automatic and manual analyses of the tweet themes, usage characteristics and major Twitter users during a public outcry against a gang rape incident in Delhi, the capital city of India. Our results identified Twitter as an important channel of diffusion of ideas with the ability to share news and ideas rapidly among a vast set of adopters defying geographical boundaries. Results of the content analyses highlight the prominent use of social media resources in disseminating information on Twitter, and the remarkable role of Twitter users as citizen journalists during the days of the protest. Results of the social network analysis suggest that major role players on Twitter were the offline protest leaders.

This article explores how the Tunisian revolution was articulated on Twitter; it does so through a detailed analysis of a sample of more than 100,000 tweets posted between 18 December 2010 and 15 January 2011 with the hashtag #sidibouzid. In addition to this analysis nine active #sidibouzid users were interviewed. This examination shows that #sidibouzid constituted a global communication space in which different public audiences were strategically addressed through a variety of languages. How key users employed the different languages and the platform itself depended very much on their particular position in the Arab diaspora network.