Exploring the dynamics of protest against National Register of Citizens & Citizenship Amendment Act through online social media: the Indian experience

TL;DR

This study analyzes the role of social media in shaping protest movements against India's NRC-CAA legislation, combining qualitative fieldwork and quantitative computational methods to understand collective mobilization.

Contribution

It introduces an interdisciplinary approach integrating computational analytics with social science to study online protest dynamics in a sensitive national context.

Findings

Social media facilitates rapid collective mobilization.

Online discourse reflects and influences protest intensity.

Real-time data enhances understanding of protest evolution.

Abstract

The generic fluidity observed in the nature of political protest movements across the world during the last decade weigh heavily with the presence of social media. As such, there is a possibility to study the contemporary movements with an interdisciplinary approach combining computational analytics with social science perspectives. The present study has put efforts to understand such dynamics in the context of the ongoing nationwide movement in India opposing the NRC-CAA enactment. The transformative nature of individual discontent into collective mobilization, especially with a reflective intervention in social media across a sensitive region of the nation state, is presented here with a combination of qualitative (fieldwork) and quantitative (computing) techniques. The study is augmented further by the primary data generation coupled with real-time application of analytical approaches.