Social media has become an established platform for people to organize and take offline actions, often in the form of civil unrest. Understanding these events can help support pro-democratic movements. The primary method to detect these events on Twitter relies on aggregating many tweets, but this includes many that are not relevant to the task. We propose a multi-instance learning (MIL) approach, which jointly identifies relevant tweets and detects civil unrest events. We demonstrate that MIL improves civil unrest detection over methods based on simple aggregation. Our best model achieves a 0.73 F1 on the Global Civil Unrest on Twitter (G-CUT) dataset.

Twitter is commonly used for civil unrest detection and forecasting tasks, but there is a lack of work in evaluating how civil unrest manifests on Twitter across countries and events. We present two in-depth case studies for two specific large-scale events, one in a country with high (English) Twitter usage (Johannesburg riots in South Africa) and one in a country with low Twitter usage (Burayu massacre protests in Ethiopia). We show that while there is event signal during the events, there is little signal leading up to the events. In addition to the case studies, we train Ngram-based models on a larger set of Twitter civil unrest data across time, events, and countries and use machine learning explainability tools (SHAP) to identify important features. The models were able to find words indicative of civil unrest that generalized across countries. The 42 countries span Africa, Middle East, and Southeast Asia and the events range occur between 2014 and 2019.

We present CUT, a dataset for studying Civil Unrest on Twitter. Our dataset includes 4,381 tweets related to civil unrest, hand-annotated with information related to the study of civil unrest discussion and events. Our dataset is drawn from 42 countries from 2014 to 2019. We present baseline systems trained on this data for the identification of tweets related to civil unrest. We include a discussion of ethical issues related to research on this topic.