ABSTRACT
Internet mass incidents https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9780203795453/82e4306e-586c-459b-b61c-c5f453342f78/content/figch07_in1_B.tif" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> are a different species of social protest. Our data set of 548 large-scale mass incidents does not include any Internet protests. However, as Internet protests have become a popular form of protest in China, it is impossible to depict a full picture of social protest without giving an account of Internet protest in China. We have generated a different list of large-scale Internet protests. In accordance with our other data set, we limit the Internet protests to the same time frame: 2003 to 2010. By large-scale Internet mass incidents, we refer to the Internet discussion critical of government (including government officials) behavior with more than a 1 million click rate. For large-scale microblog-based mass incidents, our criteria are that they must involve at least three opinion leaders, each with at least 100,000 followers, and each with issues of at least 10 microblogs daily during the incident.
