As protesters use social media to unify, and call for action, government regimes are responding with tactics using the microblogging site Twitter to distract and confuse people, according to a study.
A team of political scientists, including those from The Pennsylvania State University (Penn State) in the US, studied Twitter interactions during Venezuela's 2014 protests, in which citizens voiced opposition to government leaders, and called for improvements to their standard of living.
The researchers said the tweets of the protesters focused mainly on the agitation itself, while those issued by the ruling regime covered more diverse topics.
According to the study, published in the journal Political Science Research and Methods, this could mean that regimes are growing more savvy in their use of social media to help suppress mass movements.
"When we started doing this study there had been a lot of optimism about the capacity of social media to produce revolutions throughout the world, like Arab Spring and the Colour Revolutions in Europe," said Kevin Munger, study co-author from Penn State.
"But it seems like, in hindsight, this was the result of short-term disequilibrium between the capacity of the masses to use this technology, and the limited capacity of these elites to use it," Munger added.
He said a lot of these elites may have not been keeping up with modern communication technology, and got caught unawares.
For that short period of time, the political scientist said social media did produce better outcomes for revolutions and mass movements.
As part of the study, the researchers examined social media from both the Venezuela regime, and its opposition.
After the death of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in early 2013, Nicolas Maduro, then vice-president, won a special election, following which there were mass protests related to economic decline and increased crime in the South American country.
The scientists found that the regime abruptly shifted its Twitter strategy after agitations swept across the country.
They said the regime's tweets became even more diverse than usual -- covering topics such as tree-planting events, and the posts did not address the protests at all.
With continued protests, the Penn State researchers said the opposition also became less focused, suggesting this may have been a reaction to the regime's social media strategy.
According to Munger, the way that attention works on social networks offers a glimpse into why the strategy to distract citizens might be effective.
"To have effective protests, you need to have a ton of people coordinated on a single message, so spreading other narratives disrupts that process of coordination," said Munger.
"Being able to spread doubt is effective. You don't have to get people to love your regime, you just need people to less convinced of the single narrative," he added.
The study noted that the regime also seemed to develop a more sophisticated approach to using hashtags, which are words or phrases that begin with a hash sign -- # -- that is used by social media sites to help users identify and follow conversations about certain topics.
It noted that the regime used long hashtags, as opposed to the shorter hashtags that are more commonly used, to promote distraction among the protest groups.
Citing an example, the researchers said, the regime used the hashtag -- #RodillaEnTierraConNicolasMaduro -- to their tweets, which means "knees on the ground with Nicolas Maduro" in English.
They said this represents a more top-down approach at using Twitter to galvanize support, as opposed to the grassroots bottom-up strategy of the protesters.
"That's not a hashtag that individual protesters would come up with, and not just because it mentions the opposition leader, but because it is more of a focus-group tested way of specifically promoting a narrative," said Munger.
"The opposition was using short hashtags to coordinate different groups on a single message. But, we see the regime's lengthy hashtags as an explicit attempt by them to generate a new topic of discussion," he added.
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