Logistic and Infrastructure of Protest Camps in Authoritarian Regimes - An Automated Image Classification Approach to Detect Organizational Frames

The analysis of protest camp infrastructure is crucial in order to explain different protest outcomes and to assess important and fundamental questions about the course, the legitimacy, and the impact of popular uprisings in authoritarian settings. However, due to the conceptual and methodological difficulties in analyzing protest camps in authoritarian regimes, we have remarkably little systematic data about the quantity and level of the camp's infrastructure and the supporting logistics. In this article, we present a newly collected dataset of more than 150,000 images collected from Social Media to detect the infrastructure and logistics of protest camps in authoritarian regimes. As such, we aim to automatically detect basic infrastructure (e.g. tents, portable toilets, food stations) and auxiliary infrastructure (working stations, sports and religious facilities) in protest camp logistics. Using automated image analysis, namely object detection, we assess the existence of various objects that help people to camp, live and participate in protest camps. First, we test whether and which of these objects are shown in images shared widely on Social Media. Second, we ask in this article how people respond to these images on Social Media and if they care about the presence of basic and auxiliary infrastructure in pictures have an effect. We test this novel approach on a dataset of images collected from Social Media covering 11 protest camps in authoritarian regimes.