Description: This data set focuses on Social media and student leadership in South Africa, consisting of about 803 563 tweets from #RhodesMustFall to #FeesMustFall on Twitter.Abstract: The Student Movement in South Africa (SMSA): From #RhodesMustFall to #FeesMustFall is a research project with a special focus to determine the role of social media activism during the 2015/16 student movements; the relationship between social media activism and student leadership; and how the use of social media reflected and/or impacted the protests on the ground.

Tweets from individuals public Twitter accounts.

Note: The social media trace data typically includes visual data (e.g. ‘profile pictures’, published selfies, other photos, memes etc.) as well as audio-visual data (e.g. published selfie-clips, video clips). This personal visual / audio-visual material is part of the public digital trace data of social media and resides in the public realm; unless specifically indicated, it can be considered openly accessible and usable for research purposes.

There is no sampling procedure, the project considered all publicly accessible historical social media data related to specific hashtags/campaigns from the period of 01 January 2015 – 31 December 2016.