How Social Media Facilitates Political Protest: Information, Motivation, and Social Networks

TLDR

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are claimed to profoundly shape political participation, and the analysis of the vast data they generate offers unprecedented opportunities to observe complex, dynamic effects in large‑scale collective action, comparable to early genome sequencing efforts. The article summarizes evidence from protest movements in the United States, Spain, Turkey, and Ukraine that social media facilitates information exchange, emotional and motivational content, and that network structure influences protest outcomes, and it calls for future research on the role of friendship. The authors review and synthesize studies of protest movements to demonstrate these effects.

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.