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How Social Media Facilitates Political Protest: Information, Motivation, and Social Networks
How do social media platforms shape political participation, specifically protest behavior? Our summarization of evidence from studies of protest movements across the globe reveals three main conclusions: 1. Social media platforms facilitate information exchange essential to protest coordination; 2. Social media platforms facilitate protest-related motivational content exchange; and 3. The structure of online social networks affects who and how many people are exposed to information.
Citation
Jost, John T., Pablo Barberá, Richard Bonneau, Melanie Langer, Megan Metzger, Jonathan Nagler, Joanna Sterling, and Joshua A. Tucker. “How Social Media Facilitates Political Protest: Information, Motivation, and Social Networks.” Political Psychology 39, no. S1 (2018): 85–118. https://doi.org/10.1111/pops.12478
Date Posted
Feb 13, 2018
Authors
Area of Study
Abstract
It is often claimed that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are profoundly shaping political participation, especially when it comes to protest behavior. Whether or not this is the case, the analysis of “Big Data” generated by social media usage offers unprecedented opportunities to observe complex, dynamic effects associated with large-scale collective action and social movements. In this article, we summarize evidence from studies of protest movements in the United States, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine demonstrating that: (1) Social media platforms facilitate the exchange of information that is vital to the coordination of protest activities, such as news about transportation, turnout, police presence, violence, medical services, and legal support; (2) in addition, social media platforms facilitate the exchange of emotional and motivational contents in support of and opposition to protest activity, including messages emphasizing anger, social identification, group efficacy, and concerns about fairness, justice, and deprivation as well as explicitly ideological themes; and (3) structural characteristics of online social networks, which may differ as a function of political ideology, have important implications for information exposure and the success or failure of organizational efforts. Next, we issue a brief call for future research on a topic that is understudied but fundamental to appreciating the role of social media in facilitating political participation, namely friendship. In closing, we liken the situation confronted by researchers who are harvesting vast quantities of social media data to that of systems biologists in the early days of genome sequencing.
Background
A common claim is that social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are profoundly shaping political participation, especially when it comes to protest behavior. Whether or not this is true, the analysis of “Big Data” generated by social media use offers unprecedented opportunities to observe the effects of large-scale collective action and social movements.
Study
In this article, we summarize evidence from studies of protest movements in the United States, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine and present three main conclusions. The first is that social media platforms facilitate the exchange of information that is vital to the coordination of protest activities, such as news about transportation, turnout, police presence, violence, medical services, and legal support. The second is that social media platforms also facilitate the exchange of emotional and motivational content in support of and opposition to protest activity; examples of this include messages emphasizing anger, social identification, group efficacy (a group’s perceived ability to be successful), and concerns about fairness, justice, and deprivation. The final takeaway is that the structural characteristics of online social networks have important implications for who and how many people are exposed to information and the success or failure of organizational efforts.
Results
Next, we issue a call for future research on a topic that we believe is understudied but fundamental to appreciating the role of social media in facilitating political participation. Finally, we compare the situation and struggles of researchers who are harvesting large quantities of social media data to that of systems biologists in the early days of genome sequencing.