This paper seeks to determine the comparative opportunities and limitations of ‘new’ and ‘old’ data sources for early warning, crisis response, and violence research. The authors compare the information set produced through social media violence reporting with conventional violence reporting around the August and October 2017 Kenyan elections. Specifically, they leverage data from a sample of social media reports of violence through public posts to Twitter. These reports are compared with events coded from media and published sources coded by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) along three dimensions: (1) the geography of violence reporting; (2) the temporality of reporting; and (3) the targeting of reporting.
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