Barricades against Evictions: Coexistence of Short- and Long-term Frames in the Housing Movement on Facebook and Twitter

Abstract

Social movements fight to change society’s roots and challenge entrenched cultural frameworks. At the same time, however, they must attend to everyday activism and protests that constitute a clear and pragmatic mobilization goal. This article analyzes the case of a movement for decent housing on social media called Platform for Those Affected by Mortgages (PAH). This organization fights to guarantee universal access to housing, a recurrent problem in large cities. It grew in 2010 when the subprime mortgage crisis broke out in the United States. The bursting of the real estate bubble built up at that time had a global impact, pushing other markets. On the one hand, the movement has to change entrenched cognitive frameworks that say property must be bought and its loss is the individual’s responsibility. On the other hand, it must coordinate and try to gather as many people as possible to stop the evictions that occur every day. Twitter seems crucial for daily mobilization in this double logic, while Facebook allows for more complex narratives. The methodology used was a framing analysis of the content published on the organization’s official Facebook and Twitter accounts. Although these should be understood as overlapping layers, the movement is often trapped in a narrative that it does not want. By highlighting specific cases, it leads to an understanding that access to housing does not affect most of society.