The Mechanisms Behind the Effect of Social Media on Protesting Behavior: Evidence from Brazil

Orientador(a): Pedro Carvalho Loureiro de Souza

I show that social media activity, through Twitter, positively affected protesting behavior during the Brazilian demonstrations of June 2013. I use variation in internet quality and access across municipalities as a source of exogenous variation in Twitter activity, in order to overcome a problem of reverse causality. I find, for the preferred specifications, that a 10\% increase in Twitter activity led to an increase of 16\% in the number of protestors in the streets and an increase of 10.2\% on the probability of an event happening. Furthermore, results indicate that the mechanism behind the effect of social media in protesting behavior was an intra-day pre-protest coordination, rather than live coordination, or days ahead coordination, and that negative propaganda against the government did not play a role through social media.

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