Birth of a Movement: The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement and the Politicization of Mexican Copyright

Abstract

The literature on social movements—national and transnational—and social media has tended to focus on cases from the global North rather than the South, raising questions about its applicability to countries with low Internet penetration rates and weak civil societies. To remedy this deficit, this article presents the case of the Mexican Stop Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) network. In 2010–11, a network of about a dozen underfunded copyright and Internet activists convinced the Mexican Senate to reject—unanimously—the ACTA, a U.S.-led plurilateral treaty that critics claimed would strengthen international intellectual property rights at the cost of fundamental Mexican Constitutional and human rights. This article argues that this victory was the result of activists' use of social media in a way that recognized the limits and possibilities within existing Mexican political arrangements. While Stop ACTA's success suggests social media's utility for social movements in other developing countries, it leaves open the question as to whether it can make up for weak civil society institutions over the long-term.