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In this paper we investigate the relationship between the geographic location of protestors attending demonstrations in the 2013 Vinegar protests in Brazil and the geographic location of users that tweeted the protests. We explored the overlap between different sources of geographic information from Twitter -namely geocode, hashtag, and user profileprovided by multiple samples drawn from a population of three million tweets related to the events and compared the data to the location of protestors attending the street demonstrations. We adjusted the data for the uneven distribution of the population and performed geospatial and spatial clustering analysis over sets of spatial locations. We found evidence for the hypotheses that users tweeting the protests are geographically distant from the street protests and that users from geographically isolated areas rely on Twitter hashtags to remotely engage in the demonstrations.

In this article, we discuss the communicative functions of hashtags during a period of major social protests in Brazil. Drawing from a theoretical background of the use of Twitter and hashtags in protests and the functions of language, we extracted a sample of 46,090 hashtags from 2,321,249 tweets related to Brazilian protests in June 2013. We analyzed the hashtags through content analysis, focusing on functions, and co-occurrences. We also qualitatively analyzed a group of 500 most retweeted tweets to understand the users' tagging behavior. Our results show how users appropriate tags to accomplish different effects on the narrative of the protests.

Political conversations on social media are linked to the discussion about the public sphere. Traditionally, this is associated with Habermas' (1991, 1996) concept. Habermas (1991) initially believed in a public sphere with the citizens occupying equal hierarchical positions when deliberating.