Social Media and the Organization of Collective Action: Using Twitter to Explore the Ecologies of Two Climate Change Protests

TLDR

The 2009 Twitter Revolutions renewed the debate over whether new social media can influence contentious politics. The authors contend that studying the link between evolving communication technologies and collective action requires recognizing how these technologies shape specific protest ecologies. They analyze social media as organizing mechanisms beyond information, showing that digital traces reveal broader organizational patterns, and illustrate this with two hashtags from the 2009 UN Climate Summit protests in Copenhagen. They find that Twitter streams serve as crosscutting networking mechanisms, embed and are embedded in gatekeeping processes, and reflect shifting dynamics within the protest ecology over time.

Abstract

The Twitter Revolutions of 2009 reinvigorated the question of whether new social media have any real effect on contentious politics. In this article, the authors argue that evaluating the relation between transforming communication technologies and collective action demands recognizing how such technologies infuse specific protest ecologies. This includes looking beyond informational functions to the role of social media as organizing mechanisms and recognizing that traces of these media may reflect larger organizational schemes. Three points become salient in the case of Twitter against this background: (a) Twitter streams represent crosscutting networking mechanisms in a protest ecology, (b) they embed and are embedded in various kinds of gatekeeping processes, and (c) they reflect changing dynamics in the ecology over time. The authors illustrate their argument with reference to two hashtags used in the protests around the 2009 United Nations Climate Summit in Copenhagen.