SMART: A Social Movement Analysis & Reasoning Tool with Case Studies on #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter
Valerio La Gatta, Marco Postiglione, Jeremy Gilbert, Daniel W. Linna Jr., Morgan Manella Greenfield, Aaron Shaw, V.S. Subrahmanian

TL;DR
SMART is a tool that analyzes social media and news data to forecast emotional trends related to social movements, aiding journalists in timely and accurate reporting on issues like #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter.
Contribution
The paper introduces SMART, a novel system combining data collection, emotion extraction, and transformer-based forecasting to analyze social movements and support journalistic reporting.
Findings
SMART enables early detection of discourse shifts.
The system provides actionable insights for journalists.
A new 1-year dataset with over 2.7M Reddit posts and 1M news articles was created.
Abstract
Social movements supporting the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) play a vital role in improving human lives. If journalists were aware of the relationship between social movements and external events, they could provide more precise, time-sensitive reporting about movement issues and SDGs. Our SMART system achieves this goal by collecting data from multiple sources, extracting emotions on various themes, and then using a transformer-based forecasting engine (DEEP) to predict quantity and intensity of emotions in future posts. This paper demonstrates SMART's Retrospective capabilities required by journalists via case studies analyzing social media discussions of the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter before and after the 2024 U.S. election. We create a novel 1-year dataset which we will release upon publication. It contains over 2.7M Reddit posts and over 1M news articles. We show…
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Taxonomy
TopicsComputational and Text Analysis Methods · Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining · Misinformation and Its Impacts
