On spatial variation in the detectability and density of social media user protest supporters

Although much has been published regarding street protests on social media, few works have attempted to characterize social media users’ spatial behavior in such events. The research reported here uses spatial capture-recapture methods to determine the influence of the built environment, physical proximity to protest location, and collective posting rhythm on variations in users’ spatial detectability and density during a protest in Mexico City. The best-obtained model, together with explaining the spatial density of users, shows that there is high variability in the probability of detection of social media user protest supporters and that the collective posting rhythm and the day of observation are significant explanatory factors. The implication is that studies of collective spatial behavior would benefit by focussing on users’ activity centres and their urban environment, rather than their physical proximity to the protest location, the latter being unable to adequately explain spatial variations in users’ probability of detection and density during the protest event.     

Social movement 2.0: integrating and assessing scholarship on social media and movement

With over five years of hindsight following historic protests around the world, we review scholarship published on “Social Movement 2.0” (SM2.0)—our shorthand for the convergence of Web 2.0 platforms and protest, movements, or other resistance activities. Initially, we review 97 articles as offering disparate assumptions concerning social movement, agency, and the relationship between humans and new communication technologies (NCTs). We suggest SM2.0 scholarship could benefit from following debates in social movement rhetoric and media ecology. Particularly, building upon rhetoricians’ critiques of traditional movement theory, we encourage scholars to amplify the constitutive meanings and identities created through NCTs in protest (rather than rely upon functional paradigms). Building upon media ecology scholarship, we critique SM2.0 analysis that leverages technological determinism or isolationism to address media’s power in social change. We feature instead scholarship that unpacks the relationship between media and the unique contexts in which protestors build networks of resistance. We call for greater complexity in scholarship at the intersections of movement and media.     

Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square

Based on a survey of participants in Egypt's Tahrir Square protests, we demonstrate that social media in general, and Facebook in particular, provided new sources of information the regime could not easily control and were crucial in shaping how citizens made individual decisions about participating in protests, the logistics of protest, and the likelihood of success. We demonstrate that people learned about the protests primarily through interpersonal communication using Facebook, phone contact, or face‐to‐face conversation. Controlling for other factors, social media use greatly increased the odds that a respondent attended protests on the first day. Half of those surveyed produced and disseminated visuals from the demonstrations, mainly through Facebook.     

Protest Paradigm in Multimedia: Social Media Sharing of Coverage About the Crime of Ayotzinapa,Mexico

In 2014 protests erupted around the world after 43 college students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico, were kidnapped and massacred. This bilingual, cross-national content analysis explores the relationship between multimedia features in stories about the Ayotzinapa protests and how social media users liked, shared, and commented on that coverage. This study furthers our understanding of the protest paradigm in a digital context, and sheds light on differences in mainstream, alternative, and online media outlets' coverage of protesters. Additionally, this study suggests social media users might prefer more legitimizing coverage of protesters than mainstream media typically offer.     

Tents,Tweets, and Events: The Interplay Between Ongoing Protests and Social Media

Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular uprisings. In this article, we use time‐series data of Twitter, Facebook, and onsite protests to assess the Granger causality between social media streams and onsite developments at the Indignados, Occupy, and Brazilian Vinegar protests. After applying Gaussianization to the data, we found contentious communication on Twitter and Facebook forecasted onsite protest during the Indignados and Occupy protests, with bidirectional Granger causality between online and onsite protest in the Occupy series. Conversely, the Vinegar demonstrations presented Granger causality between Facebook and Twitter communication, and separately between protestors and injuries/arrests onsite. We conclude that the effective forecasting of protest activity likely varies across different instances of political unrest.     

Ideological motives,digital divides,and political polarization: How do political party preference and values correspond with the political use of social media?

Social media provides new platforms for political participation and ideological categorization. However, little research has been done on how party preference is related to politically active social media use. We begin with a consideration of how political participation on social media has evolved between various socio-economic and demographic groups in advanced information societies and especially in Finland. In our empirical analysis we examine the general use of social media as well as its use for political purposes with the aid of a nationally representative dataset, collected in 2017–2018 from 3724 Finnish citizens. We argue that there are notable differences between parties when examining their supporters’ social media use for political purposes. The differences are related to the digital divides and political extremes. The results confirmed the idea that new political movements made up of younger and more educated supporters have been successful by leveraging social media. The study also revealed that the ideological gap between party supporters is greater in social media especially when examining new kinds of politics based on cultural questions, identity issues, and post-materialist values.     

Social networking site usage and participation in protest activities in 17 Latin American countries

Recent studies have reported a significant relationship between the use of social media and political engagement. However, there appear to be few comparative studies that explore the association between social networking site use and participation in different types of protest activities for the case of Latin America. The present study employs supervised and unsupervised data analysis techniques to explore this association for 9 different social networking sites and 5 types of protest using disaggregated data on 17 Latin American countries. Multiple correspondence analysis is applied to create proxy measures of the two phenomena, followed by a cluster analysis using these measures to classify individuals into different clusters in each country studied. These clusters indicated that there exists an interplay between the use of these sites and participation in protests. Decision rules were then induced to generate interpretable information on the clusters identified for each country. The results suggest that there is a high degree of heterogeneity in social networking site use and protest participation.     

Social media use and university students’ participation in a large-scale protest campaign: The case of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

This study examines the impact of social media use on participation in large-scale protest campaigns that feature a range of participation opportunities. It develops a theoretical model which distinguishes between support generation and behavior activation effects, differentiates collective action, digital, and personalized action participation, and posits social media use as a mediator between social psychological predictors of protest behavior and actual participation. The empirical analysis focuses on Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in 2014. Analyzing a probability sample of university students (N = 795), the findings show that sharing political information and direct connections with political actors via social media have significant impact on both support for and participation in the Umbrella Movement. Social media use has effects on each dependent variable in the causal chain even after all the immediate causes are controlled. Social media use also mediates part of the impact of general political awareness, efficacy, and grievances on movement support and participation.     

Wild Public Networks and Affective Movements in China: Environmental Activism,Social Media,and Protest in Maoming

In the following essay, I offer and explain the concept of wild public networks as a tool for social movement scholars interested in taking a network approach to contemporary protests via poststructuralism. Wild public networks offer scholars a means of approaching social movements that moves past binaries to productively incorporate affect. In so doing, the concept of wild public networks advances an ontological shift for social movement scholars that also alters what we examine and how. Wild public networks consider how the movement of the social can be witnessed in changes to relationships between actants and the configurations of networks. To explicate this new concept, I turn to contemporary environmental protests in Maoming, China.     

Saving lives using social media: Analysis of the role of twitter for personal blood donation requests and dissemination

Social media has an impact on many aspects of human life ranging from sharing personal information to revolutionizing political systems of entire countries. One not so well studied aspect of social media is analyzing its usage and efficacy in healthcare, particularly in developing countries which lack state-of-the-art healthcare systems and processes. In such countries, social media may be used to facilitate patient-centric healthcare by involving the patient for fulfilling personal healthcare needs. This article provides an in-depth analysis of one such need, that is, how people use social media to request for blood donations. We study the request and dissemination behavior of people using social media to fulfill blood donation requests. We focus on twitter, and blood donation accounts in India. Our study reveals that each of the seven twitter accounts we studied have a large followership of more than 35,000 users on an average and receive a substantial number (more than 900) of donation requests in a day on an average. We analyze the requests in various ways to present an outlook for healthcare providers to make their systems more patient-centric through a better understanding of the needs of people requesting for blood donations. Our study also identifies areas where future social media enabled automated healthcare systems can focus on the needs of individual patients. These systems can provide support for saving more lives by reducing the gap between blood donors and the people in need.     

Social media,social integration and subjective well-being among new urban migrants in China

The current generation of migrants in Chinese cities, named “new urban migrants,” is closely related with social changes in today’s China. As these urban migrants are increasingly dependent on new media, particularly social media for news, entertainment, and social interaction, it is important to know how social media use contributes to their social integration and subjective well-being. Based on an online survey, this study identified positive relationship between new urban migrants’ social media use and their subjective well-being, as well as the possible indirect relationship through social integration. The overall positive socio-psychological effects of social media use within Chinese urban migrants were found. Specifically, this study revealed that social media use can contribute to their social integration, including their building of social identity and social network as well as real-world social participation. New urban migrants’ social integration, particularly their level of social identity, is significantly associated with their subjective well-being.     

Characteristics and social impact of the use of social media by Chinese Dama

Against the backdrop of broader social changes, social media has developed rapidly in China, which has pushed the transition of the media environment from a traditional authority-dominated one to a modern media society. In particular, the use of social media by Chinese Dama can be perceived as an exemplar of media-driven social change. ‘Chinese Dama’ is a buzzword coined in tandem with the development of social media since 2013. This term represents a particular group of middle-aged Chinese women who reflect a distinctive social phenomenon in China. It is noteworthy that a growing number of Chinese Dama are learning to use social media and have established thousands of social media communities, exerting significant influence on the wider media and social environment. This study focuses on the major changes undergone by Dama, transitioning from being passively covered by media to becoming active users of social media, and this research analyzes the motivations and hallmarks of their social media activity. Although the use of social media by Chinese Dama, the traditional nucleus of Chinese society, has contributed to narrowing the digital divide and resulted in the Dama’s gaining more discourse power and ushered in new diverse lifestyles, we argue that the Dama also exert a far-reaching positive and negative influence on society, pushing for the modernization transformation of the Chinese society.     

Network enforcement as denunciation endorsement? A critical study on legal enforcement in social media

Facing the increasing prevalence of hate speech and other personality rights violations on social media, the legislature tries to improve the law enforcement by involving the social media companies. In 2017, the German Bundestag passed a new law, the Network Enforcement Act (NetzDG), which requires website owners to review the content published on their pages upon it being reported by users and to remove it as soon as possible in the event of a breach of the law. This forces social media operators to establish efficient reporting systems which can create breeding grounds for user denunciation. To get an overview of whether this is really the case, we briefly discuss state surveillance and denunciation and analyse the statistics of content blockings and deletions in five countries (USA, Germany, United Kingdom, Russia and Turkey). In Germany the number of blockings and deletions of content has risen for Facebook, Twitter and YouTube due to the NetzDG, but it has also been found that the majority of reports were unjustified as they did not lead to any restriction or deletion of the content. When comparing the German numbers with those of the other countries investigated, it becomes apparent that after the introduction of the NetzDG in Germany, more content is being blocked and deleted. Also, a comparison of the various laws regulating online content in these countries was conducted. It was found that not only Germany has tightened the regulation of online content and that other countries are also trying to transform the Internet into a more hate free environment.     

Drivers of social media fatigue: A systematic review

With a large amount of time spent on social media platforms, more and more people are suffering from social media fatigue. The concept of social media fatigue refers to a host of negative emotional responses to activities on social networking sites, such as tiredness, burnout, exhaustion, frustration, disinterest toward communication. Since research on social media fatigue is still nascent, the goal of this paper is to provide an empirical landscape of this field through a systematic literature review. A systematic literature search and screening process were considered and a final sample of 40 articles were included. First, this review presents the research contexts of the included studies such as geographical location, sample characteristics, data collection method, and the like. Second, it identifies drivers of social media fatigue and categorizes them into three conceptual levels: individual, relational, and environmental. Results of this systematic review outline several key directions for future research. Also, it contributes to a more nuanced theoretical understanding of how social media fatigue arises. Finally, identifying factors influencing fatigue helps social media service providers and health professionals to propose relevant intervention strategies to mitigate this phenomenon.     

Segmenting consumers based on social media advertising perceptions: How does purchase intention differ across segments?

Digitalization, personalization and globalization shape how companies contact and communicate with their consumers who have different needs and wants. In these highly competitive heterogeneous markets, it becomes crucial to reach consumers in an easy, low-cost and more targeted manner. Social media advertising is one of the effective ways of attracting potential customers, retaining attention of current customers and influencing them through persuasive content. Despite its plentiful and obvious advantages, the variation among consumers’ responses to social media advertising remains as a major challenge. Hence, this study aims to identify different consumer segments based on the social media advertising features, discover differences in their individual traits, and examine variation among those segments in terms of the factors that predict their purchase intentions. By utilizing cluster analysis, consumers are segmented according to their perceptions regarding social media advertising features: perceived relevance, performance expectancy, hedonic motivation, informativeness, and interactiveness. It is revealed that consumers are grouped under three segments, namely: “susceptible”, “dispassionate”, and “impervious”. It is found that there are statistically significant differences among these segments in terms of being easily persuaded, impulse buying tendency, self-confidence, and social network proneness in which consumers in “susceptible” segment are more easily persuaded, have high level of self-confidence, have more impulse buying tendency, and are more prone to social networks when compared to other groups. It is also discovered that there are differences among these segments in terms of the factors that determine their purchase intentions for the products presented in social media advertising. The purchase intention of consumers in “susceptible” segment for products exhibited in social media advertising, is determined by perceived relevance, ease of being persuaded, self-confidence and social network proneness. On the other hand, the purchase intention of consumers in the “dispassionate” segment is shaped by informativeness, ease of being persuaded, and social network proneness. Finally, the purchase intention of consumers in “impervious” segment is influenced by hedonic motivation, perceived relevance, impulse buying tendency, and ease of being persuaded. Nevertheless, when the whole sample is considered, it is observed that consumers’ purchase intentions for the products and services presented in social media advertising are influenced by the following factors: perceived relevance, performance expectancy, informativeness, impulse buying tendency, ease of being persuaded, and social network proneness. Understanding differences across segments can help companies design, manage and convey their social media advertising campaigns to their target audience in a convincing, timely, effective, and efficient way, which in turn, let them gain competitive advantage in highly volatile and dynamic markets.     

Contentious Actions and Communication for Social Change: The Public Hearing (Jan Sunwai) as Process

This article explores the relationship between ‘contentious actions’ and communication processes in communication for social change (CSC) theory. Beginning with an analysis of the contributions made by Charles Tilly to the understanding of the methods and repertoires of popular protest and E. P. Thompson's interpretation of the moral economy of protests, it explores the history of contentious action in India, before focusing on the empowerment potential of the ‘Public Hearing’ as contentious action, specifically in the context of the Right to Information Movement in India. It argues that contentious actions such as public hearings need to become a focus for study in CSC theory precisely because it contributes to the validation of Voice, and to individual and collective empowerment.     

Social media and internet public events

Contemporary China is experiencing deeper reform and social transformation. The newly born social media have participated in the historical process of China’s reform and social change. Based on the existing literature of social media and internet public events, this article aims to study China’s internet public events through the perspective of social transformation theory, especially theories of the civic society and public sphere. This study has used case study to explore the role that social media play in social change in China through in-depth analysis of 57 typical cases. We found that social media are not only an important information source and means for online civil mobilization, but also provide citizens an open and free space for discussion of internet public events. The impact of social media in promoting social change was reflected in the supervision of governmental, judiciary and other public power; maintenance of justice and protection of disadvantaged groups; attracting the government’s attention, urging governmental information publicity and investigation of the events, and promoting social management innovation and institutional change. Social media are a helpful force in the construction of internet public sphere and civil society of contemporary China. Meanwhile, it is necessary to be cautious that social media is also likely to be a breeding ground for nationalist and populist discourses.     

Social participation of the elderly in China: The roles of conventional media,digital access and social media engagement

China is the most rapidly aging country and has the largest aging population in the world. However, social participation is an important intervention to boost the active and healthy aging. The present study investigated the effects of media usage, together with social-demographics and health variables, on Chinese older adults. Drawing upon a national research project with a representative sample (N = 1,399) of older adults (55+) from 58 cities in China, the research findings revealed that conventional media, digital access and social media usage had positive effects on older adults’ informal social participation, while age moderated the relationship between informal social participation and digital access, particularly regarding access to tablet PCs and smartphones. Moreover, conventional media, digital access and social media engagement largely explained seniors’ formal social participation regardless of their social-demographic backgrounds. Finally, the roles of conventional media and digital media in older adults’ social participation are discussed.     

Social Media and Citizen Participation in “Official” and “Unofficial” Electoral Promotion: A Structural Analysis of the 2016 Bernie Sanders Digital Campaign

Drawing on interviews with leaders of the effort to promote the 2016 Bernie Sanders U.S. presidential candidacy on social media, this study contrasts the structure and content of various organizational networks to map the hybrid ecosystem of the contemporary digital campaign. While the “official” Sanders organization built applications to transform supporters into a tightly controlled distribution network for its social media messaging, this was complemented by “unofficial” grassroots networks that circulated more informal and culturally oriented appeals. The latter are classified according to the models of organizationally enabled and self-organized connective action in digital social movements, with structural differences in oversight and moderation that suggest varying levels of creative autonomy for citizens and reputational risk for the associated campaigns.