Exploring the Influence of Social Interaction, Pressure and Trust in a Social Media Environment on Political Participation: The Case of Occupy Central in 2014

Wendy Chan Wing Lam

doi:10.29333/ojcmt/2527

Abstract

This study explores the factors that contribute to the political participation in the context of the Facebook platform. The author investigates the influence of social interaction, pressure and trust on users’ political participation in the event that happened in Hong Kong, the Occupy Central in 2014. The study allows us to identify which factor would contribute to the best in mobilizing the mass online in the social media environment. The results show that there are positive correlation of the factors, social interaction, the social pressure and trust to the political participation respectively. An important novel finding is the influence of social pressure in Facebook on political participation. This relationship reaches the statistical significance, implying that pressure should not be neglected online but rather it is more important than other factors when giving rise to the social movement. This study offers insight that the salience of social pressure in the online context, and suggesting a possible triggering outlet for the social movement.

Highlights

In this day and age, youngsters rely on the social media platforms to obtain the most up to date information.Over 70% of online adults use Facebook and over 20 % use other kinds of social media platforms, for instance, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter respectively (Pew Research, Sep 18-21, 2014)
The likes for the page could be inferred to the users’ inclination to read the materials updated by the page, once they “likes” the page, every post updated by the page would come to the top of the newsfeed eventually.Recent case, Occupy Central that took place in Hong Kong from September to December in 2014,political participation is heightened by the fact that the intense interaction in the social media platforms and the exchange of information would be the driving force for the success of this social movement, Occupy Central
Characteristics of the Sample For the exploratory stage, 176 completed responses were collected. They are mostly locals (91.5%), mainland students contribute to the total of 8 % and the international students would be of the total of 0.6 %

Summary

Introduction

In this day and age, youngsters rely on the social media platforms to obtain the most up to date information.Over 70% of online adults use Facebook and over 20 % use other kinds of social media platforms, for instance, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram and Twitter respectively (Pew Research, Sep 18-21, 2014). Social media platforms take a pivotal role in providing timely materials and at the same time they act as virtual places for people to interact with each other and share their thoughts and opinions. It has become public place for information gathering and even help put forward a social movement,Occupy Central, for instance, some popular Facebook pages that share the real time information about Occupy Central, Soc Rec (https://www.facebook.com /socrec) enlisted over 211, 000 likes in 2015 April; Inmedia (https://www.facebook.com/inmediahk) has gained 431,224 likes and some other pages that started up by the leaders/ activists of this social movement, for example, Joshua Wong Chi-fung has over 252, 000 likes for his personal page (https://www.facebook.com/joshuawongchifung). This research would touch on with the three crucial factors that are closely connected with political participation,they are social media trust and social interaction and social pressure

Methods

Results

Conclusion