SMART: A Social Movement Analysis & Reasoning Tool with Case Studies on #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter

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 that SMART enables early detection of discourse shifts around key political events, providing journalists with actionable insights to inform editorial planning. SMART was developed through multiple interactions with a panel of over 20 journalists from a variety of news organizations over a 2-year period, including an author of this paper.