Online Protests Research Articles

SOCIAL MEDIA AND PROTESTS ENGAGEMENT: WHAT’S GENDER GOT TO DO WITH IT?

Social media allows people to organize themselves and take action against social injustices and policies. Used to spread information, social media has been linked to the dissemination of political protests around the world. Relying on the Theory of Planned Behavior and Herd Behavior, this studied aimed at identifying gender differences in social network protests’ participation. Making use of multivariate data analysis through Partial Least Squares Path Modeling (PLS-SEM), 318 Brazilians responded the study and the results indicate that there are differences between the relationships of the antecedents of the use of the social network between users of different genders. The differences are in the relationship between the attitude and the use of social networks to participate in protests, with a positive effect on men and negative on women. This means that men understand that participating in online protests through social networks can improve awareness of events, giving strength to the movement and helping to ease the tension of protests, while women do not. The results go beyond the studies on which they were based, including the gender multigroup analysis and presenting a new model of technology adoption with new elements, such as the herd behaviour, embracing the imitation, and the uncertainty constructs. There is also a contribution to a greater understanding of the influence of social media on collective activism or movements.

Fighting for the Internet: Online Blackout Protests and Internet Legislation in the United States, 1996-2018

Fighting for the Internet: Online Blackout Protests and Internet Legislation in the United States, 1996-2018

Images that Matter: Online Protests and the Mobilizing Role of Pictures

Do images affect online political mobilization? If so, how? These questions are of fundamental importance to scholars of social movements, contentious politics, and political behavior generally. However, little prior work has systematically addressed the role of images in mobilizing online participation in social movements. We first confirm that images have a positive mobilizing effect in the context of online protest activity. We then argue that images are mobilizing because they trigger stronger emotional reactions than text. Building on existing political psychology models, we theorize that images evoking enthusiasm, anger, and fear should be particularly mobilizing, while sadness should be demobilizing. We test the argument through a study of Twitter activity related to a Black Lives Matter protest. We find that both images in general and some of the proposed emotional attributes (enthusiasm and fear) contribute to online participation. The results hold when controlling for alternative theoretical mechanisms for why images should be mobilizing, and for the presence of frequent image features. Our paper provides evidence supporting the broad argument that images increase the likelihood of a protest to spread online while teasing out the mechanisms at play in a new media environment.

Education Reform, Teacher Resistance, and Social Media Activism in Mexico, 2013–2016

In 2012, the Mexican federal government encouraged the establishment of an educational reform. Teacher unions claimed the reform lacked legitimacy because they had never been consulted. From 2013 to 2016, there were several offline and online protests. The purpose of this report is to study how the popularity of social media has increased the potential for spreading alternative discourse as a subaltern weapon, giving teachers an option to fight back.

Assessing political participation on the Internet in contemporary China

Drawing on the resource model of political participation, this study examines the ways in which various resources, including money, computer and Internet access, Internet skills, and civic skills predict Chinese citizens’ political participation online. The results showed that income was a significant predictor of online political participation regardless of whether it was by using the Internet to contact governmental officials, monitoring public policies online, or participating in online protests. Civic skills also consistently predicted the three forms of online political participation. Computer and Internet access, as well as Internet skills, were significant predictors of some forms of online political participation, but not all of them. Political interest positively moderated the association between income and each of the three dependent variables. The theoretical and empirical implications of these results are discussed.

The Effect of Online Protests and Firm Responses on Shareholder and Consumer Evaluation

Protests that target firms’ socially irresponsible behavior are increasingly organized via digital media. This study uses two methods to investigate the effects that online protests and mitigating firm responses have on shareholders’ and consumers’ evaluation. The first method is a financial analysis that includes an event study which measures the effect of online protests on the target firm’s share price, as well as an investigation of the boundary effects of protest characteristics. The second method is an online experiment that assesses the effect of an online protest campaign on consumers’ perception and purchase intention, as well as any mitigating effects that a firm’s response may have. Contrary to recent studies suggesting that participation in online protests is only token support without any substantive effects, our results show that online protests do hurt. Firms can expect to suffer financial, reputational, and sales damage when an online protest campaign mobilizes consumers successfully. We also show that online protests are more likely to take firms by surprise than offline protests. Firms can exacerbate or reduce the damage by their response. We find that although firms may repair the damage to consumers’ purchase intentions, the negative effects on a brand’s image are harder to rectify. The results have valuable implications for protest organizers and managers faced with the task of responding.

Images That Matter: Online Protests and the Mobilizing Role of Pictures

Do images affect political mobilization? If so, how? These questions are of fundamental importance to scholars of social movements, contentious politics, and political behavior generally. However, little prior work has systematically addressed the role of images in mobilizing participation in social movements. We theorize that images are more easily processed than text, lowering the cost of deciding to participate in a social movement. In addition, images might trigger emotional responses, increase expectations of success, and generate collective identity; all leading to greater mobilization. We test these theories though a study of Black Lives Matter, utilizing both observational and experimental data. We fnd that both images in general and the proposed key attributes of images contribute to online participation. Our paper thus provides evidence supporting the broad argument that images increase the likelihood of a protest to spread while also teasing out the mechanisms at play in a new media environment.

Tweeting India’s Nirbhaya protest: a study of emotional dynamics in an online social movement

Previous research has recognized the role of emotions in protests and social movements in the offline world. Despite the current scenario of ubiquitous social media and ‘Twitter revolutions,’ our knowledge about the connections between emotions and online protests still remains limited. In this study, we examine whether online protest actions follow the same emotional groundwork for supporting and nurturing a social movement as in the offline world, and how these emotions vary across various stages of the social movement. Through a computer-assisted emotion analysis of 65,613 Twitter posts (tweets), posted during the Nirbhaya social movement (movement against the Delhi gang-rape incident) in India, we identified a strong resemblance between online emotional patterns and offline protest emotions as discussed in literature. Formal statistical testing of a range of emotions (negativity, positivity, anger, sadness, anxiety, certainty, individualism, collectivism, and achievement) demonstrates that they significantly differed across stages of the social movement; as such, they influenced the course of the online protest, resonating parallels with offline events. The findings highlight the importance of anger and anxiety in stirring the collective conscience, and identify that positive emotion was pervasive during the protest event. Implications of these findings are discussed.

Catch me if you can: Online protests on sites powered by user-generated content

This study concentrates on online protests in websites that rely on user-generated content. We develop a case study on Digg, a website powered by user-generated content that encounters backlash from their community. Through an interpretive analysis of the case we identify how the context and interactions among key players lead to what we call a “catch me if you can” game, where users and administrators of the website battle in an effort to outsmart and outmaneuver each other. The findings reveal a tension between users and administrators that intensifies during the protest, and should be considered carefully by site administrators.

The emergence of the Human Flesh Search Engine and political protest in China: exploring the Internet and online collective action

For scholars with an interest in Chinese society and politics, protest is not a new subject, especially rural resistance and urban strikes. Numerous studies have been conducted which focus on social movements and popular protests, but the online protests by Chinese Internet users have not received the same amount of attention. The focus of this article is on how Chinese citizens use the Internet as a platform to protest against official misconduct or more specifically the emergence of a type of online protest called the Human Flesh Search Engine (HFSE). This type of protest has largely been overlooked by the literature on protest in China. This study aims to provide an appropriate and comprehensive definition of HFSE as a form of online protest via exploring its structural characteristics and general contexts. Drawing on the findings, I argue that a full understanding of protest in the digital age is possible only when the Internet and online forms of protest are taken into account.

Using Twitter in Political Campaigns

Social media has invaded elections in Mexico. However, the power of citizens through the use of this platform is still unknown. Many citizens criticize political candidates using Twitter, others build networks and some others try to collaborate with candidates. This research is focused in understanding this kind of behavior, analyzing the case of the presidential candidate Enrique Peña Nieto (PRI) in Mexico who won the presidency with a large participation but without the support of Twitter users. After two online protests against this presidential candidate - #IamnotProletariat and #Iam132 – political image could have been undermined and voters could have thought differently. But this was not the case and despite of this, the candidate won. The challenge to understand this online protest and its link to the political campaign is addressed in this paper.

Revenge by photoshop: Memefying police acts in the public dialogue about injustice

In this article, we are interested in the role digital memes in the form of pictures play in the framing of public discourses about police injustice and what it is that makes memes successful in this process. For this purpose, we narrate the story of one such meme: the ‘pepper-spray cop’. In our analysis, we link the creation and spread of the meme to the democratization of online activism and the subversive acts of hierarchical sousveillance. Based on our findings, we discuss features of the meme and the process linked to its initiation, rapid spread and disappearance as vital for the success of visual memes in the context of online protests.

Houses that Cry: Online Civic Participation in Post-Communist Romania

This essay explores the role of online communities and cyber-activism in fostering ‘real-life’ participation. It begins by revisiting a topic of controversy among citizenship studies scholars: the erosion vs. the expansion of citizenship and active participation instances in the past three decades. Arguably, participation in online communities is one of the most notable instances of reinventing active citizenship. While sceptics view the Internet and social capital as a contradiction in terms and deplore the waning of traditional communities, supporters of online participation emphasize the potential of the Internet to bring together people who would have otherwise never met in support of a cause. The second half of the essay will demonstrate that, in some cases, the actions of protest undertaken by online communities turn into “acts of citizenship” by challenging habitus, power and regulations (Isin, 2008). It will discuss the activity of Houses that Cry, a project created by architecture students in Bucharest in order to protect the architectural patrimony of the city. Their initiative can be considered an act of citizenship for two reasons: first, they shifted online protests from blogs and forums to the street, community and the media. Second, they transformed the protection of endangered historical buildings into a matter of public interest.

The Impact of Internet Emotion on Online Protests and Offline Demonstrations: An Analysis of the 2008 Candlelight Rallies

The Impact of Internet Emotion on Online Protests and Offline Demonstrations: An Analysis of the 2008 Candlelight Rallies

Capital punishment and virtual protest: A case study of Singapore

This paper analyses how the online community in Singapore protested against the hanging of a Vietnamese drug trafficker in December 2005. Singapore has upheld capital punishment in the island state despite pressure from local and global civil society organisations and diplomatic channels. This paper traces how the online medium was used by the public to protest against capital punishment in the quasi–authoritarian state. The virtual community protested against the hanging by maintaining a rigorous discursive protest on the Internet. These sustained discourses became enmeshed with those of the offline media in Singapore. This confluence of the online and offline media discourses is important in building a two–tier public sphere in Singapore. The first–tier public sphere is one dominated by the government-controlled media and the ruling party while the second–tier public sphere is a space where civil society organisations and social movements express viewpoints marginalised in the offline society. The confluence of these two tiers has a material significance for the political landscape of Singapore. This paper explores this phenomenon through the case study of online protests against capital punishment in Singapore.

From Active Audience to Media Citizenship: The Case of Post-Mao China

This article studies media practices of urban Chinese in order to examine conceptual changes in the notion of citizenship in post-Mao China. It focuses on how the media can cultivate a “rights” consciousness among the populace and how new media have been appropriated as alternative public spaces for articulating alternative political discourses. Through two case studies (the deaths of Sun Zhigang and Li Siyi), I argue that the concept of citizenship can no longer be thought of as a formal and institutional given, but as a concept of fluidity and flexibility that rests on the spatial and subjective positions of the individual in question. New media have been playing an essential role in decentralizing “citizenship.” Active audience participation in online discussions, petitions and protests can influence public opinion, check the authority, and even challenge the political agendas of the government as shown in the abolition of “anti-vagrancy laws” in the case studies. I describe this as the practice of “media citizenship.” It is a sign of empowerment for the awakening “masses” of certain factions of Chinese society for whom participation in the circulation of “lay” knowledge of social and political issues is equivalent to exercising citizenship.