The tale of two sides in the 2019 anti-CAA protest—An analytical framework

The 2019 anti-CAA protest in India witnessed massive Twitter participation from people on both sides. It was unique compared to most online social movements that showcase people’s movements against authority. The article offers a framework for a big data-driven outside-in analysis of such online social movements. Unlike most existing research focusing on a particular aspect of such a movement, the framework presented examines mobilization and counter-mobilization from various angles. The work systematically juxtaposes the proponents and opponents using statistical analysis, text mining, and graph analysis techniques. Different aspects such as users, content, themes and focus of the conversations, conversational patterns, instrumentation of virality, leadership styles, emotions, and toxicity of the discourse have been considered. The study also examines them as types of frame alignment effort as per Frame Alignment Theory. The framework proposed by this work can be successfully employed to understand any future online social movement and any inductive research using user-generated Big Data. • Analytical grid to understand mobilization and counter mobilization in online social movement. • Framework to do statistical analysis, text mining, and graph analysis for user-generated content. • Lexical richness and divergence analysis help differentiate the two sides. • Activity vs. visibility analysis tells whether the movement is grassroots on both sides. • Hashtag activism and information virality. • Activities analyzed as conscious frame alignment efforts.