The Anti-MAGA Protest Mapper

The Protest Mapper is a digital mapping tool designed to help journalists and community members contextualize local protests by visualizing them alongside broader regional or national trends. Using the tool, anyone can quickly create an embeddable, interactive map that displays all local protests occurring within a defined time period.

Created by Rahul Bhargava, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, this tool serves as a practical resource for embedding updated, interactive protest maps into news stories, blog posts, and community websites.

What It Is

Protest Mapper is a free, embeddable, browser-based tool that allows users to generate maps of recent protests within customizable geographic ranges (from 5 to 100 miles). The tool relies on two well-respected data sources: the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), which updates weekly, and the Crowd Counting Consortium (CCC), updated monthly. Users can choose between these datasets when generating their maps. Each protest event is marked by a pin that, when clicked, reveals a short summary of the demonstration.

How It Works

The Protest Mapper is designed to be simple and journalist-friendly and modeled after the workflow used in the popular DataWrapper. Users can input a location and select a time range to generate a map of protests, which is then exportable as either an embeddable iframe or a static image (.png). The map itself is lightweight - built with Svelte and hosted on GitHub Pages to keep it sustainable and low-cost.