Abstract:
Throughout history, social protests have been an effective means for individuals and groups to express their demands, concerns and aspirations in the search for a significant change in several dimensions of society. This constant quest for social transformation has evolved over time, and in the current digital era, social media have emerged as a revolutionary tool that has completely transformed the dynamics of social protests. These digital platforms have provided an instantaneous and global avenue for effervescent individual ideas and opinions to connect and amplify, overcoming geographical and cultural barriers.

In this talk, I will present different studies that I have carried out on social demonstrations. I will first show the robustness of some statistics, which inspires the idea of criticality in the sense of statistical physics. Then, I will show how we represent the system through network science. Our temporal onehour networks will show how all the manifestations exhibit two kinds of high connectedness: a global hierarchical one (high nestedness and low modularity) surrounded by several sustained points of high connectedness characterised by the coordination within the subgroups (high modularity and low nestedness). Finally, I will show how the transition points from high modularity to high nestedness can be found without the need to represent the system in networks but simply through entropic measurements. I will also briefly show the studies we are currently conducting.