Mixed-Initiative Social Media Analytics at the World Bank

This paper discusses a project that studied the relationship between citizen trust and social protest using visual analysis of approximately 11 million sentiment classified Tweets from the period of the 2014 Brazilian World Cup. The results of the study reveal that the 2014 World Cup protests in Brazil sprang from a wide range of grievances coupled with a relative sense of deprivation compared with emergent comparative 'standards'. This sense of grievance gave rise to sentiments that activated online protest that may have led to other forms of social protest, such as demonstrations. The paper describes an innovative approach to big data analytics - mixed initiative social media analytics - and discusses the potential of using big data in social science research of this kind, as well as some of the open methodological, technical and ethical issues still to be addressed.