When we searched #NotAgainSU and NotAgainSU, we found a dramatic spike in the number tweets posted on February 18th. On this day, Syracuse University’s administration started handing out suspensions to more than 30 students involved with the #NotAgainSU sit-in at Crouse Hinds Hall. The latest tweets since last Tuesday, the 18th, consisted of updates from students continuing to sit-in. The administration and the protesters tried to reach an agreement on diversity and safety proceedings last December, but students remained unsatisfied, sparking this month’s activity.
The most retweeted tweet on this issue came from @Zellieimani:
This is bad, real bad y’all.
Syracuse University just handed our suspension notices to students staging a sit in.
To date, no student has been reprimanded for the hate crimes during the fall semester but students have been reprimanded for demanding better
#NotAgainSU pic.twitter.com/jGnJ7ZKK2o
— zellie (@zellieimani) February 18, 2020
This tweet shows a copy of the suspension letter given to students from Syracuse’s Dean of Students when they continued to protest in Crouse Hinds Hall past the building’s hours.
Geography
The majority of the tweets, 94.3%, came out of the United States. The United Kingdom had the second highest level of tweet activity with 1.1% of tweets. Less than one percent of tweets came from countries such as Canada, Germany, France, and even the territory of Puerto Rico.
Word Cloud
The word cloud appeared very people focused, meaning the largest buzz words included terms like “students” and “protesters.” This showed us that Twitter discourse highlighted students’ perspectives and experiences. People tweeting seemed to care more about the students rather than the university itself, only calling out the university for its “bad” actions. “CitrusTV News” appeared as a popular term in the word cloud, showing the high level of student news organizations coverage as opposed to national news coverage.
Buzzgraph
The strongest connections on the buzz graph mirror the results from the Word Cloud. Once again, “students” shares the strongest with our search term. However, this chart features a strong association with the terms “Syracuse” “university” and “Crouse” “Hinds” “hall.” Interestingly, these terms are broken into individual terms; however, each associated term features equally thick connecting lines making it safe to assume users often tweeted the terms together. Given that the protest occurred in Crouse Hinds Hall and protesters urged allies tweet the term “FreeCrouseHinds,” the prevalence of these terms did not surprise us.
Other insights
In the leader board analysis, a fist appeared as the top emoji used in #NotAgainSU discourse, which the movement has been using as a symbol of solidarity. We also found the sentiment report to be inaccurate in how it categorized tweets as negative or positive; however, after reading tweets we found most to be negative.