A new paper by Zachary C Steinert-Threlkeld, Delia Mocanu, Alessandro Vespignani, and James Fowler of the Department of Political Science at the University of California – San Diego, Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Socio-Technical Systems at Northeastern University, and Department of Medicine at the University of California – San Diego, uses GDELT to explore the link between online organizing on social media and subsequent physical protest activity in the streets. They use hashtag cohesion to examine centering activity on social media around key protest-related topics and find that such behavior precedes major physical unrest.