Social Protest

Abstract

Social protest is a form of political expression that seeks to bring about social or political change by influencing the knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors of the public or the policies of an organization or institution. Protests often take the form of overt public displays, demonstrations, and civil disobedience, but may also include covert activities such as petitions, boycotts/buycotts, lobbying, and various online activities. Protest activities motivated by both individual rewards (including a variety of personal benefits and gratifications) and collective incentives (benefits that are realized by a large class of individuals that does not necessarily include all individual protesters). Most protests represent the collective interests and issues of activist groups, coalitions, or social movements that challenge mainstream institutions. In the process, they serve a number of important democratic functions, including providing opportunities for participation and expression for individuals, and as a potential engine of social change for communities and nations. Communication is central to the success of a protest group by facilitating information exchange, mobilization, coordination, integration, identity formation, and many other essential functions. Researchers from communication, political science, and sociology fields contributed to this literature and investigated a variety of types of protests—antiwar, environmental, racial, civil rights, and gender to name a few. Research examines the content of news coverage of social protest, as well as its antecedents and consequences. Research on protest news content is a lot more plentiful than research on the effects of such content. Such research not only has revealed the limits of traditional mass media coverage, but also offers hope in the form of optimism regarding the benefits of new digital communication technologies. In the ten years since this article was originally published, communication research continues to explore diverse social protest contexts and emphasizes the impact of social media even more than before. While researchers share common theoretical backgrounds in classic social movement research, the rapidly evolving media landscape invites discussion on the ability of classic theories to adequately explain highly mediated contemporary protests. For example, protest coverage may be shifting away from episodic framing to thematic framing as news analysis and opinion-laden journalism supplant traditional hard news forms. The ascendance of partisan media and the emergence of social media bots may be increasing public susceptibility to misinformation and manipulation. Finally, protests in the modern age are more chaotic, less predictable, and increasingly global. At the time of writing, protests are occurring all around the world in support of the Black Lives Matter movement following the police killing of George Floyd, suggesting the potential for social protest to sway public perceptions and effect significant social change. Given the unprecedented frequency and scale of social protests around the globe and the rapid evolution of media systems in the digital age, theory and research on media and social protest may look very different over the course of the next decade.