Figure 1

Online Google Trend search volume and momentum vs. on-street protests for Chile. Example shown is typical of results emerging from our analysis for countries across Latin America. Vertical axis shows normalized Google Trend search volume relative to average background values, for the words protesta (protest) in blue and huelga (strike) in red. Also shown as dashed lines is the momentum for each of these keywords, i.e. rate-of-change of these keyword search volumes. Green solid circles show the actual number of on-street protests in Chile. These take the values 1, 2, etc. but for clarity, no green solid circle is shown on days for which there are zero protests. Black dots, which are offset vertically for clarity, show days on which Google Trends volume and momentum for these keywords all rise above the background steady-state value (i.e. signal exceeds noise) and hence our analysis predicts an on-street protest in Chile. There appear to be rises in the volumes and momenta around the same time as bursts of actual on-street protests.