Abstract
Recent years have witnessed multiple international protest movements which have purportedly been greatly affected by the use of Twitter, a micro-blogging platform. Social movement actors in Iran, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan and Thailand are thought to have utilized Twitter to spread information, co-ordinate protest activities, evade government censorship and, in some cases, to spread misinformation. We propose a framework for conceptualizing and analyzing Twitter data related to contentious collective action crises. Our primary research goal is to delineate a framework informed with a social movements lens and to demonstrate the framework by means of Twitter usage data related to the Thailand protests of 2010. Our proposed framework concerns itself with two aspects of protest activities and Twitter usage, namely, analyzing the content and structure of messages and our construct of Twitter protest waves.