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Violence, Sectarianism and Patterns of Communication in Yemen MURI Presentation Christia, Dahleh, Jadbabaei, Leskovec, 1

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Question What is the effect of violence on a societys structure of communication? Examine effects of exogenous violent shocks indigenous violent events on patterns of communication in Yemen. Specifically, look at the effects of drone strikes and Arab spring protests on cell phone communication. For the Arab spring protests we can also look at the effect of communications on protest activity Builds on recent work that uses CDRs to examine the change in social networks of communication after rapidly evolving and transient events such as emergencies. 2

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Patterns of Communication 3 years of call records metadata from January 2010-January 2013 Anonymized data on: Caller Location Date and time of call Duration of call Call or sms Increase in cell phone penetration from roughly 40% to over 70% in that time span. No 3G in Yemen and only 15% internet penetration. 3

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Users and Calls per Day 4

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Data on Violent Incidents Exogenous: 73 Drone StrikesIndigenous: 432 Arab Spring Events 5

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6 Drone Strikes Jan 2010-Jan 2013

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7 Bulk of Strikes in 2012-Jan 2013

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Analytical Approach Address our question by looking at: Volume of calls Timing of calls Direction of calls (incoming vs. outgoing) Duration of calls Mobility effect in calls Individual level network connections. Also look at how violent events compare to other important but largely peaceful events Look at whether phone data reveals the countrys divisions. 10

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Day of Week Call Patterns 11 Friday Prayer

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First Strike: 24 May 2010 Tower 2: 3.7 miles from strike Tower 1: 0.6 Miles from strike 12 Marib: Approximately 17,000 people, 2,200 unique numbers

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Marib Strike May 24 th 2010 Entire CountryTower 0.6 miles from strike 13 Spike

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Direction of Call Traffic May 24 th 2010 14

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Duration vs. Time Plotted Average Call Duration vs. Time of day Slight decrease in average call duration right after strike i.e. people make shorter phone calls This decrease only happens in outgoing calls 15 Average duration is a lot longer at night than during the day (2 mins vs. ~5 mins) After drone strike, average duration is much shorter than the average at that time of day

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Duration After Strike Calls in the 1 hour after the strike happened Red normal night, long-tailed, Blue May 24 th, narrow-bands 16

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Al-Awlaki Strike September 30 th, 2011 in the middle of nowhere He had pulled over for breakfast on side of road Drone Strike 37 Miles Away 34 Miles Away Nothing for 30 miles here 17

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Al-Awlaki Strike No spike at all at the 2 nearest towers 18 The day of the strike was quite calm Note the standard pattern on Friday, even on the day Awlaki was killed

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Another Strike - Lawdar Lawdar 1/30/2012, Killed 15 militants Arab Spring happening in the same time period 19 Just one set of towers in town, 0.3 miles away

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Lawdar 20 The outlier on January 30 th A jump in calls around 11:00PM, consistent with other spikes (incoming/outgoing/within tower/duration), but not too large comparatively... Large differences in total volume for Mondays over just a 2 month interval (not monotonically increasing each week) To zero out influence of strike, normalized call volume Probably not a good idea in the long run, but helps here Important next step: Distinguish drone strikes in war-torn vs. peaceful areas Power outage

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Measurable Strikes 73 are between Jan 2010 and Jan 2013 10 in Zinjibar, where antennas were shut off as under Al Qaeda control; for 1 no location data Of the remaining 62: 33 strikes less than 2.5 miles from a tower, 41 less than 5 miles, 51 less than 10 miles Remaining 11 greater than 10 miles (unlikely to see a spike) 21

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Anecdotal (so far) findings Based on the handful of cases we have looked at: Drone strike effect on communications appears very localized and quite contained in terms of time. Hits appear to happen at night which probably helps with keeping the effect more contained. Strike seems to have shortening effect in terms of duration of outgoing calls. There also appears to be an increase in incoming calls. But all this very tentative as based only on a few cases. 22

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Next Steps See if we could predict the time of a strike by a spike/deviation from the standard level for that day of the week for the towers near the strike for all 62 strikes in the dataset. Look for missing strikes. Quantify local spikes for other activities such as religious holidays, celebrations, other cultural events, and leverage them in connection to violent events. Look at whether tower outages are in any consistent way linked to drone strikes. Look at individual level data (who called whom). Do the same analysis for Arab Spring events. There, also look at whether there is any network behavior that seems to affect events. 23