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Chapter One
Promise and Practice in Studies
of Social Media and Movements
Sebastian Haunss
The recent protests during the ‘Arab Spring’ and in the wave of ‘Occupy’
movements have renewed interest in the use of the internet and especially
social media by social movements. Digital social media technologies offer a
low-cost way to reach out to large constituencies and to communicate in
many-to-many settings. In addition, with the spread of mobile- and smart-
phones, this technology is ubiquitously available. These characteristics have
led to a widespread adoption of social media in protest mobilizations. Social
movements now regularly use social media to communicate and to mobilize
for their actions. Are social media, when it comes to social movements and
protest, thus the leaflets and political posters of the early twenty-first centu-
ry? Or do they, as some authors have claimed, fundamentally alter the condi-
tions for the emergence of protest and social movements? May they even
cause social movements, as the notion of ‘Twitter’ or ‘Facebook’ revolutions
suggests?
In this chapter I address these questions by discussing the findings of
existing studies on social movements and social media. I assess to which
extent some authors’ claims about the fundamental importance of social
media technologies in recent protests and uprisings (e.g., Howard and Hus-
sain 2013) can be substantiated in empirical studies of protest mobilizations
or whether the results lend more support for the claim that social media did
not fundamentally influence the mobilization dynamics (e.g., Brym et al.
2014). The aim is not to explore all aspects of the quickly growing research
literature, but to discuss some of the more prominent recurring findings along
with the literature questioning them, and to offer some structuring elements
for relating the various studies to each other.
13
14 Sebastian Haunss
To do this, this chapter starts with a quick overview over the use of
internet technologies by social movements since the 1990s, and discusses
four general claims about the relationship between the internet and social
media on the one hand, and social movements and protest on the other. It
then proceeds to a closer look at recent empirical studies of protest and social
media, closing with an evaluation of the current knowledge and remaining
research gaps in this field. Special attention is paid to the question how
current digital communication tools interact with more established elements
in social movements’ repertoires of action.
A VERY SHORT HISTORY OF SOCIAL MOVEMENTS
AND THE INTERNET
Social movements have been quick to adopt digital computer networks as
communication tools for internal planning and deliberation and to reach out
to the general public. Long before the invention of the World Wide Web led
to the development of the internet as we know it today, already by the end of
the 1980s social movement activists created—linked through the Association
for Progressive Communications (APC)—mailbox-based computer networks
to facilitate communication and information exchange among geographically
dispersed activists (Harasim 1993; Lokk 2008). But these early uses of com-
puter networks among movement activists have hardly been noticed by social
scientists, and within their movements those activists who were using the
networks were clearly a small minority.
This has changed dramatically when the Zapatistas on 1 January 1994
began their struggle against neoliberalism and for the rights of indigenous
people in the Mexican state of Chiapas. The Zapatistas, with their charismat-
ic leader Subcommandante Marcos, skillfully used the internet to spread their
message across the world. Their ‘insurrection by internet’ (Knudson 1998)
led for the first time to speculations that the internet would facilitate new
forms of transnational or even global mobilization, provide social move-
ments with ‘historically new organizational capabilities’ (Cleaver 1998, 631)
and provide the tools and a virtual public sphere for wide participation in
direct democratic processes.
After this initial euphoria about the potential the internet would offer to
social movements, the protests against the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999
sparked the next round of scholarly interest in the relation between social
movements, protest and the internet (Van Aelst and Walgrave 2002; della
Porta and Mosca 2005; Juris 2005). The internet seemed to perfectly fit to
this ‘movement of movements’ with its nonhierarchical, dispersed and global
structure. Special attention was paid to the creation of Indymedia, a network
of independent media centres where everybody was able to publish news and
Promise and Practice in Studies of Social Media and Movements 15
commentary (Kidd 2003). During the protests in Seattle, and during subse-
quent protests and mobilizations of various social movements, Indymedia
has provided a partisan news channel where activists publish their interpreta-
tion of the events while the events are happening. To some degree, Indyme-
dia was the digital pendant to the foundation of alternative leftist newspapers
in the early (Libération, France 1973) or late (die tageszeitung, Germany
1978) 1970s. In both cases, movement activists or sympathizers saw a need
to create an alternative to the established mainstream press that—in the eyes
of the activists—disregarded or misinterpreted the movement and its activ-
ities. For the traditional paper-based newspapers, the notorious problem was
running them as profitable enterprises and over time they evolved into mod-
erately left daily newspapers written by professional journalists. For Indyme-
dia, financial sustainability also emerged as a problem and resulted in the
closure of several Indymedia sites (Giraud 2014), even though the costs for
running the web servers on open source software are extremely low in com-
parison to the production of a traditional newspaper. But in hindsight, Indy-
media’s more serious problem is that it never managed to reach a similarly
broad audience beyond the movements that are using it. Many Indymedia
sites have evolved into websites where movement activities are announced
and discussed among activists. This has led some authors to claim that Indy-
media has failed (Ippolita, Lovink and Rossiter 2009), whereas others inter-
pret the prevalence of debates as a positive sign for the development of
alternative democratic online counterpublics (Milioni 2009).
With internet use becoming an integral part of everyday life, its use in
protest campaigns and by social movements has meanwhile lost the air of the
spectacular. And consequently, since the early 2000s research has branched
out and now covers a broad variety of online activism. In an overview of
research findings, Jennifer Earl and her collaborators have categorized social
movements’ internet use into four types of usage patterns: brochure-ware,
online facilitation of offline activism, online participation and online orga-
nizing (Earl et al. 2010, 428), where brochure-ware stands for internet use
that basically replaces flyers, leaflets and brochures with websites and mail-
ing lists. Online facilitation of offline activism adds simple interactive ele-
ments to facilitate coordination between activists, online participation pro-
vides tools to interact with the addressees of the protest (e.g., online peti-
tions) and online organizing shifts the main mobilizing activities to the inter-
net.
More recently, a new series of massive protest mobilizations that began
with the Arab Spring in December 2010 and included the 15-M protests in
Spain (March 2011), the Occupy protests in the United States and in several
European countries (September 2011), and the protests in Istanbul’s Taksim
Gezi Park (May 2013) has refocused public and scholarly attention on the
specific interaction between large-scale mass protests and social media
16 Sebastian Haunss
(Castañeda 2012; Costanza-Chock 2012; Tufekci and Wilson 2012; Gamson
and Sifry 2013; Howard and Hussain 2013; Tremayne 2014). This last wave
of scholarly interest concentrated heavily on social movements’ use of com-
mercial global social networking and social media sites like Facebook and
Twitter, thus shifting the attention from social movements’ attempts to create
alternative online publics with their own tools and technologies, to social
movements’ use of existing corporate-provided and corporate-controlled so-
cial media tools to facilitate or enable mobilization.
Looking back on twenty years of research on social movements and so-
cial media, we can see public and scholarly attention shifting with the evolu-
tion of the technology, focusing always on social movements’ and protesters’
adoption of the most recent technological tools. This focus on the newest
internet technologies goes along with the recurring question whether these
new technological tools may offer new opportunities for collective action
unavailable to previous generations of activists. In addition, this dynamic is
also driven by the various social movements’ ability to mobilize large-scale
protests which have again and again surprised established news media and
many social scientists. For most pundits, the insurrection of the Zapatistas,
the Global Justice Movement’s protests in Seattle, the Arab Spring and Oc-
cupy Wall Street were completely unexpected events in times where social
movements were often seen as relatively weak and marginal political actors.
In this pessimist frame, technology seemed to offer an explanation for the
surprise about these unforeseen mobilizations, leading then to a rather opti-
mistic interpretation of the role of technology.
CYBER-OPTIMISTS, PESSIMISTS AND REALISTS?
These technology-focused and often enthusiastic interpretations of recent
social movements have usually been complemented by more pessimistic or
even dystopian interpretations of the new technological developments. Previ-
ous overviews on research about social movements and the internet have
identified three general perspectives which have been labeled cyber-opti-
mists and cyber-pessimists, with a large group of realists in between (Earl et
al. 2010; Gerbaudo 2012; Torres Soriano 2013; Lutz and Hoffmann 2014).
Cyber-optimists assume that the new technology would not only facilitate,
but genuinely enable, protest. Cyber-pessimists, on the other hand, either
argue that the internet would not have a substantial effect on social move-
ments’ ability to mobilize, or that it would even have a negative effect.
Between these poles, the largest group of scholars acknowledges effects of
new internet technologies but argues that these effects ‘tend to be in degree
and do not require new theoretical explanations, or even substantial alteration
to existing theories’ (Earl et al. 2010, 427).
Promise and Practice in Studies of Social Media and Movements 17
Unfortunately, this neat categorization obscures more than it reveals, be-
cause it at least implicitly suggests that the group labeled cyber-optimists and
the cyber-pessimists each share a distinct set of assumptions and convictions
about the internet and social movements. But a closer look at the writings of
authors associated with these groups shows that neither camp is in any way
homogenous. The optimism of the first group is based on differing and
partially competing assumptions, as is the pessimism of the second. More-
over, optimists do not necessarily answer to the qualms of the pessimists and
vice versa.
In order to assess the existing research, it is more helpful not to start from
the authors’ overall evaluations of the internet or of specific internet technol-
ogies but to focus on their assumptions about the relationship between inter-
net technologies and social movements. Following this perspective the exist-
ing literature on internet and social movements revolves around four general
claims about this relationship. Some of these claims are specific to individual
authors, some are shared by several. For the sake of convenience, I phrase
these claims here as positive relationships, but obviously the pessimists for-
mulate the inverse claims to denote a negative relationship. The four general
claims are:
Claim 1: The internet solves the problem of transaction costs
Claim 2: The internet solves the (rational choice) problem of collective
action
Claim 3: The internet corresponds to the conflicts of the network society
Claim 4: The internet enables new form of protest/organizing
In the following sections, I discuss each of these claims and evaluate their
empirical and theoretical foundations.
The Internet Solves the Problem of Transaction Costs
Clay Shirky, the US writer and academic, and ‘king of the techno-optimists’
(Gerbaudo 2012, 7), builds his argument about the benefits of modern inter-
net technologies for social movements on the idea of diminishing transaction
costs. In his book about organizations and group formation (Shirky 2008), he
argues that the key contribution of social media tools is their ability to radi-
cally reduce—if not completely remove—transaction costs for collective ac-
tion. Shirky writes that social media allow ordinary citizens to share informa-
tion and coordinate their activities on a previously unknown level. Before the
internet, it was hard and relatively costly (in terms of time and resources) to
inform people about a perceived injustice and to organize them in a collec-
tive action against it. Now, Shirky argues, ordinary people can arrange events
‘without much advance planning’ (Shirky 2008, 175) because they no longer
have to rely on slow and costly traditional means of contacting and coordi-
18 Sebastian Haunss
nating dispersed individuals. As a result, ‘[t]he collapse of transaction costs
makes it easier for people to get together—so much easier, in fact, that it is
changing the world’ (Shirky 2008, 48).
In his argumentation, Shirky draws on Yochai Benkler, who, in his book
The Wealth of Networks (Benkler 2006), had developed a somewhat similar
thesis. Benkler argues that the internet offers the possibility to coordinate
distributed collaboration on a previously unknown scale and with minimal
costs. It enables what Benkler calls peer production, that is ‘effective, large-
scale cooperative efforts’ (Benkler 2006, 5), on a global scale and under
conditions of abundance, by rapidly reducing the transaction costs of creating
knowledge. Under these conditions the likelihood of dispersed individuals to
cooperate would increase significantly (for a more detailed discussion, see
Haunss 2013, 230).
While the argument that the internet would have the potential to radically
reduce transaction costs and thus enable forms of collaboration that were previ-
ously almost impossible is compelling, it offers a solution for a problem with at
least dubious relevancy for social movements. Shirky argues that the most seri-
ous obstacle to the ‘basic human instinct’ (Shirky 2008, 60) to be part of a group
was until now too high transaction costs. But social movements are not simply
the result of group formation. While Wikipedia—the prime example of peer
production—is certainly impressive in terms of enabling cooperation among
otherwise unconnected and geographically dispersed individuals, it is not such a
good example for a powerful social movement. Precisely because, in order to act
collectively as a political actor, social movements have to define a problem,
create a shared interpretation, engage in continued interaction with an opponent,
find allies and create a collective identity. Radically lowering transaction costs
will facilitate some of these tasks, but it will not help much with others. Conse-
quently, in existing social movement research, high transaction costs have usual-
ly not been identified as the most pressing problem social movements face. High
transaction costs have been acknowledged to pose a significant problem for
transnational movements (Tarrow 1998, 235), but even for them the internet
lowers only the costs for communication, not the costs for protesting in distant
places (Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010, 1161).
While the observation of diminishing transaction costs is in itself con-
vincing, it helps to explain only some forms of internet-based and internet-
enabled activism. Low transaction costs promote, for example, mass partici-
pation in online petitions and similar forms of ‘clicktivism’ that reach a very
broad audience and require only minimal individual investments in terms of
time and resources.
Promise and Practice in Studies of Social Media and Movements 19
The Internet Solves the (Rational Choice) Problem
of Collective Action
A second line of arguments is built around the claim that the internet would
solve the collective action problem as it was formulated in the classical
works of Mancur Olson (Olson 1971). Starting from the standard rational
choice assumption of utility-maximizing individuals, Olson argues that indi-
vidual participation in collective action would be unlikely as long as the
collective action is aimed at generating collective goods. Collective goods
are all nonexcludable goods, meaning that individuals cannot be excluded
from using them. They can either be common goods if individual use is
depleting them (i.e., they are rivalrous), or they can be public goods if one
individual’s use does not impair everybody else’s use of the good (i.e., they
are nonrivalrous). In any case, their nonexcludability means that instead of
helping to produce the good, each individual can as well decide to free-ride
on other persons’ efforts, an option that is, from a utility-maximizing per-
spective, always more attractive because it allows for the enjoyment of the
benefits without paying the costs. Since many goods aspired by social move-
ments are collective goods, this problem should be especially virulent for
them.
Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg start exactly from this assump-
tion when they argue that ‘digitally networked action’ would do away with
the problems of collective action because it follows a different logic of ‘con-
nective action’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2012, 743). In their words, the logic
of collective action is riddled with the ‘organizational dilemma of getting
individuals to overcome resistance to joining actions where personal partici-
pation costs may outweigh marginal gains’ (Bennett and Segerberg 2012,
748). The internet, or more precisely internet-based personal communication
technologies, now offers a new option for collective action centred on the
personal transmission and sharing of political information. Bennett and Se-
gerberg argue that this ‘connective action’ is based on weak tie networks,
does not require strong organizational control or the construction of collec-
tive identities, but is nevertheless able to react effectively to given opportu-
nities (Bennett and Segerberg 2012, 750).
Bennett and Segerberg thus offer a ‘solution’ for the classical collective
action problem not by providing a new mechanism for selective incentives
(which was Olson’s solution) but by offering a new logic of connective
action built around digital media as organizing agents that supplements and
possibly substitutes the logic of collective action.
This optimistic vision is countered by Evgeny Morozov’s pessimistic
judgement of online activism as ‘slacktivism’ (Morozov 2011, 220). He
argues that the availability of tools for online activism might actually distract
activists from those forms of engagement that are needed to achieve signifi-
20 Sebastian Haunss
cant political change or even overthrow oppressive regimes: activism that
embraces the risk of being arrested, intimidated and tortured (Morozov 2011,
218). For him, connective action is less a promise than a threat to conven-
tional activism, because it would create the false illusion of meaningful en-
gagement while actually restricting activism to mostly low-risk and symbolic
forms of engagement.
But even if Morozov’s pessimistic evaluation of the new social media
tools’ negative consequences for social movements and protest may be a bit
overblown, Bennett’s optimistic evaluation suffers from a problem similar to
the transaction costs perspective. Since Olson first formulated his collective
action problem in the 1960s, a large body of research has accumulated show-
ing that Olson’s claim rests on a very narrow assumption, namely that indi-
vidual participation in collective action should meaningfully be conceptual-
ized as a rational choice cost-benefit-calculation.
A simple empirical observation shows that in contemporary societies
there is usually neither a lack of protest and social movements nor of collec-
tive action in general. The reason for this is, that collective action and espe-
cially participation in protests and social movements is motivated by many
things and individual cost-benefit-calculations are only one element among
others. Olson’s homo economicus model is thus not well suited to explain
collective action or its obstacles. Consequently social movement research has
largely abandoned a pure resource mobilization approach (McCarthy and
Zald 1977) that rests on similar epistemological assumptions.
But if the emergence and development of social movements depends on
(among others) the availability of resources, of political and discursive op-
portunities, on successful framing strategies, and the creation of collective
identities, then the easily created weak-tie networks of connected action are
at most one factor and probably not the most important to facilitate protest
and other forms of contentious politics. It thus makes more sense to interpret
connective action as one additional element in the repertoires of collective
action social movements can draw on, an element that will not replace forms
of engagement which require more commitment and sometimes even the risk
of bodily harm and incarceration.
The Internet Corresponds to the Conflicts of the Network Society
A more theoretical perspective that is not claiming that the internet or social
media would offer a solution to collective action problems can be found in
the writings of Manuel Castells (2009, 2012) and his former student Jeffrey
Juris (2005, 2014), who argue that the networking logic of current social
movements, and especially of the Global Justice Movement, correspond to
the more general assertion of networking logics in network societies.
Promise and Practice in Studies of Social Media and Movements 21
Juris argues that in the global justice movement ‘networks as computer-
supported infrastructure (technology), networks as organizational structure
(form), and networks as political model (norm)’ (Juris 2008, 11) are com-
bined in new cultural practices of the digital age developed in the movement.
The internet’s reticulate structure would correspond to the organizational
networks of the movement and also structure the activists’ ideals of coopera-
tion and social coordination. Whereas the claims that the internet would
solve the problem of transaction costs and of collective action are mainly
based on a notion of superior effectiveness of internet-based communication
and social media tools, Juris’s idea of a cultural logic of networking locates
the importance of the internet for social movements on a different level.
Here, the focus lies not so much on the technical efficiency but rather on the
promise of nonhierarchical social collaboration.
Castells picks up this idea of a cultural logic of networking and integrates
it into his theory of the network society, in which the internet represents one
instance of a networking logic that replaces the centralized and hierarchical
command-and-control logic of the industrial society (Castells 2000, 2009).
The emergence of the internet is thus embedded in more far-reaching social
transformations. Mobile phones and the internet, or more general modern
networked communication infrastructures, are for Castells not only more or
less new technologies but technological developments that correspond to
more general social changes associated with the emergence of the network
society. A similar thought has been developed by Bennett and Segerberg
when they argue that today’s flexible social weak-tie networks represent a
‘shift from group-based to individualized societies’ (Bennett and Segerberg
2012, 744).
The internet as a communication infrastructure becomes so important,
because in Castells’ perspective communication is at the centre of protest
mobilizations and social movements ‘are formed by communicating mes-
sages of rage and hope’ (Castells 2009, 301). As a consequence, changes in
the communication environment alter social movements’ chances to reach an
audience and mobilize for protest. He points especially to the strong parallels
between the viral logic of social media and the mobilization processes in
what he calls ‘networked social movements’, and in a more far-reaching
interpretation, he argues that the internet and networked social movements
‘share a specific culture, the culture of autonomy, the fundamental cultural
matrix of contemporary societies’ (Castells 2012, 230).
To some extent, Castells oscillates between his almost dystopian depic-
tion of the network society as undermining democratic processes and struc-
tured by powerful economic actors—a perspective that reminds us that un-
equal power relations do not vanish with the demise of hierarchical com-
mand-and-control systems as the dominant model for social and economic
relations—and his very optimistic interpretation of networked social move-
22 Sebastian Haunss
ments as utopian attempts to reprogramme the network and to ‘regain auton-
omy of the subject vis-à-vis the institutions of society’ (Castells 2012, 228).
The important contribution of Juris and Castells is their insistence that the
networking logic is more important than the concrete technical tools that are
used and which enable networked communication and collaboration. But
whether the networked structure of current ‘networked’ social movements
differentiates them from earlier social movements is at least disputable. In
the literature on social movements, a relatively long tradition exists arguing
that social movements in general—and not just current movements that rely
strongly on the internet—should be interpreted as networks (Diani 1992, 13;
Rucht 1994, 76–77), and not as special forms of organizations (e.g., McAd-
am 1982, 25) or as relatively unstructured phenomena of collective behavi-
our (e.g., Blumer 1949, 199). This doesn’t contradict the importance of net-
working logics for social movements but questions that it would be some-
thing new and specific to the networked social movements of the network
society.
The Internet Enables New Forms of Protest/Organizing
A weaker version of the networking logic is contained in claim that the internet
would enable new forms of protest and protest organization. The most promi-
nent idea in this respect is that the internet and/or digital communication technol-
ogies would enable leaderless movements. This claim comes in two flavors. The
first is what I call the weak-tie version. Its core argument is that new technolo-
gies enable multiple and flexible direct connections between (potential) activists.
Instead of creating connections through strong organizational ties, they are now
directly connected in decentralized weak-tie networks. This makes organizations
and leadership superfluous, or at least much less important than before. Bennett
calls these weak-tie based mobilizations ‘permanent campaigns’ (Bennett 2003,
150), sustained by the networking and mobilizing capabilities of digital commu-
nication technologies. Howard and Hussain argue that the uprising in Egypt that
toppled the Mubarak regime was such an instance of leaderless mobilization
(Howard and Hussain 2013, 32).
The second, strong-tie version is put forward by Juris when he argues that
the internet enabled the activists of the Global Justice Movement to build
alternative, nonhierarchical networks with a strong focus on grassroots de-
mocracy. The activists use digital communication networks to build horizon-
tal ties between autonomous elements, to facilitate the free circulation of
information, and to collaborate in decentralized consensus-based decision
making (Juris 2008, 11). But the links between activists that are created in
these networks are not weak ties between otherwise unconnected individuals
and existing only for short periods. Instead, Juris shows in his anthropologi-
cal field study within the Global Justice Movement that activists still estab-
Promise and Practice in Studies of Social Media and Movements 23
lish strong interpersonal links and friendships, that digital communication
creates only one layer in a multiplex network connecting the activists and
that these different layers are connected. This view is strongly supported by
Gerbaudo’s research in which he highlights the interconnectedness of online
and offline protests and reports activists’ claims that their ‘Facebook friends’
were actually also real friends and thus did not represent only weak ties
(Gerbaudo 2012, 146).
Both notions of technology-enabled leaderlessness have been criticized
from three perspectives. The first (e.g., Leach 2013) argues that the move-
ments’ attempts to create structures without stable and formal hierarchies are
not particularly new but have been practiced with more or less success in
various social movements at least since the 1980s. Relating leaderless struc-
tures and horizontal communication to the internet, to social media or more
generally to digital communication tools would thus exaggerate the role of
technology.
The second line of criticism does not deny that social media would be
effective to coordinate huge weak-tie networks in leaderless protest activ-
ities. But it claims—similar to Morozov’s criticism of slacktivism—that
these forms of activism should not be uncritically applauded and instead seen
as weaker and more ephemeral forms of protest. As a result, Geert Lovink
argues—or actually rather demands—that ‘strong organizational forms, firm-
ly rooted in real life and capable of mobilizing (financial) resources, will
eventually overrule weak online commitments (I “like” your insurrection)’
(Lovink 2012, 170).
A third line of criticism argues that the communication and cooperation
structures which can be observed in current social movements are actually
less leaderless and horizontal than asserted in the literature. This position is
put forward by Paolo Gerbaudo, who argues that the practices of current
movements (his research is based on the Egyptian uprising, the Spanish
indignados and Occupy) ‘are ridden with a deep contradiction between the
discourse of leaderlessness and horizontality and organizational practices in
which leadership continues to exist, though in a dialogical or interactive
form’ (Gerbaudo 2012, 157). Instead of leaderless movements, he observes
new forms of leadership based on differential use of social media tools and
linked to the still important ‘street-level leadership’ structures in current
social movements. Gerbaudo does not deny that social media play an impor-
tant role and even structure the practices of current social movements. But he
sees their role as one element in a more complex ‘choreography of assembly’
(Gerbaudo 2012, 11) in which the construction of virtual public spaces inter-
acts with the appropriation of physical public spaces. This echoes to some
extent Dieter Rucht’s earlier claim that the internet would not replace but
complement established media practices of social movements (Rucht 2004).
Social media are well suited to reach sympathizers and activists. But social
24 Sebastian Haunss
movements usually can only be successful if they reach and get support from
a broader audience. And this general public still can only be reached reliably
through mass media. Internet and social media tools can thus only comple-
ment and not replace other media strategies.
In sum, this discussion of the four most prominent claims about the rela-
tion of the internet and social media on the one hand, and protest and social
movements on the other, offers a rather ambivalent picture. Overall, the far-
reaching claims about fundamental transformations of mobilizing structures
and processes generally rest either on weak empirical grounds or they offer
solutions for collective-action problems that do not exist or are not among
the most pressing problems for current social movements. But even if the
internet and social media have not changed everything for protest and social
movements, they undeniably have altered the conditions and possibilities for
protest mobilizations in numerous aspects. In the following section I there-
fore discuss the most interesting findings of the growing empirical research
literature on internet and social media use in protests and social movements.
SOCIAL MEDIA USE IN CONTEMPORARY PROTESTS
Empirical studies about the use of social media and the internet in contempo-
rary protests are generally based on two types of data sources: on the one
hand, authors have directly analysed the content of digital media and the
networks that are created between their users. On the other hand, digital
media use has been investigated with more general research tools like sur-
veys and (participant) observation.
In the first line of investigation, one way to analyse online activism is to
assess the hyperlink structures that connect activist (and other) websites. Re-
searchers quickly have started to collect this readily available information in
order to identify important organizations and websites in various protest mobil-
izations. The results show that organizations which are important in the offline
mobilization process (e.g., most visible in news reports about the protests) usual-
ly also show up as central and strongly connected nodes in the link networks
(Van Aelst and Walgrave 2002; Badouard and Monnoyer-Smith 2013). Hyper-
link networks thus seem to replicate relationships among organizations that also
exist in the offline world. Some studies find more diversity in online compared
to offline networks (Gillan 2009), but generally research points to strong signs of
homophily in hyperlink networks, meaning that like-minded (Pilny and Shumate
2012) and/or geographically close (Vicari 2014) organizations are more strongly
linked than ideologically or geographically diverse organizations. Unfortunately,
only a few studies have systematically compared offline cooperation links and
hyperlinks between organizations, but where this is done, strong correlations
between both levels are found (Pilny and Shumate 2012, 276).
Promise and Practice in Studies of Social Media and Movements 25
More recently, researchers have started to look at Twitter communication
networks instead of hyperlink networks (Gerbaudo 2012; Conover et al. 2013;
Howard and Hussain 2013; Tremayne 2014). Twitter networks constructed from
shared hashtags or retweets are promising data sources because they potentially
allow analysing connections not only between organizations but at the individual
level, and analysing the content of Twitter messages can qualify the nature of the
relationships. But Twitter data is also highly problematic because it is often
impossible to say whether the originator of a tweet is actually an actively in-
volved protester or only an interested commentator. Robert Brym and his collab-
orators show, for example, that in the Egyptian uprising in 2011 most tweets
(nine out of ten) originated from outside Egypt (Brym et al. 2014, 270). One
thing that the analyses of Twitter data consistently show is the highly skewed
nature of social media use. Networks of several thousand nodes are usually
dominated by a handful of highly connected nodes through which a large part of
the information flows. This power law distribution (Gerbaudo 2012, 135)
contradicts the notion of social media as tools for more egalitarian participation.
Research that builds on participant observation, surveys of protest partici-
pants and general-population polls complements and qualifies the findings of
studies based on a direct analysis of internet and social media networks.
Beyond explaining specific mobilization and protest dynamics, this research
provides insights about at least four general aspects of the relation between
internet/social media and social movements/protest: it highlights differences
between social media tools, it enhances our understanding of the complex
relation between online and offline protest, it points to new and emerging
forms and repertoires of protest and it addresses the often problematic rela-
tionship between state and corporate interests and social movement use of
social media tools, pointing especially to the aspect of censorship and sur-
veillance.
While the more general claims about the effects of the internet and/or
social media on social movements and protest often do not differentiate
between different technological tools, empirical research on recent protests
points to strong differences between social media tools: Brym and his collab-
orators, for example, show that in the Egyptian uprising Twitter has been
used ‘more like a megaphone broadcasting information about the uprising to
the outside world than an internal informational and organizing tool’ (Brym
et al. 2014, 270). Instead of building networks among protesters, it thus has
functioned as a partial replacement of traditional forms of alternative media,
aimed at sympathizers, the general public and especially at journalists who
then publish the information obtained via Twitter in traditional mass media.
The movement activists’ differentiated view on Twitter and Facebook is
supported by Gerbaudo’s study, who argues that in the activists’ practices
Twitter has replaced mailing lists, while Facebook is seen as a modern equiv-
alent to Indymedia (Gerbaudo 2012, 145).
26 Sebastian Haunss
The second aspect that many empirical analyses address is the complex
relation between offline and online activism. Studies of all current protests,
especially those of the Arab Spring, insist that these mobilizations relied
heavily on preexisting strong social ties. The internet and social media
played an important role because they were difficult to control and to censor,
but neither for coordination among core activists nor for reaching and mobi-
lizing a wider public did they function as primary coordination and informa-
tion tools (Brym et al. 2014, 282). Preexisting offline social networks were
central and indispensable for the core activists. And according to a survey
among protesters on Cairo’s Tahrir Square, nearly half (48.4 percent) of
those interviewed ‘reported that they had first heard about the Tahrir Square
demonstrations through face-to-face communication’ (Tufekci and Wilson
2012, 370), thus making direct personal contacts and foreign mass media the
most important avenue to reach out to and mobilize sympathetic populations
under conditions of a state-controlled and censored press. The specific con-
tribution of social media could then be providing a tool to broker between
different organizations and populations (Lim 2012, 244). And with regard to
core activists, Stefaan Walgrave and his collaborators argue that digital com-
munication tools enable them to connect their different activities and stay in
touch with different organizations they belong to (Walgrave et al. 2011, 344).
Thus, instead of supporting Howard and Hussain’s far-reaching claim that
‘digital media has . . . become a necessary and sometimes sufficient cause of
democratization’ (2013, 39), many empirical studies of internet and social
media use in current protests show that in order to understand protest and
mobilization dynamics one has to look at the interaction between traditional
mass media (and in oppressive regimes, especially foreign mass media),
social media and other forms of digital communication and face-to-face com-
munication. One of the most promising frameworks for understanding the
specific structure of these interactions in repressive regimes has been devel-
oped based on an analysis of movements that were active long before digital
communication tools were available for almost everyone. It is Karol Jaku-
bowicz’s study of the role of media in the social transition processes in
Eastern Europe, in which he analyses the interaction between official mass
media as propaganda tools, foreign mass media as sources for alternative
views and moral support of local opposition and underground media as pro-
viders of alternative information and interpretation as well as connecting
nodes in clandestine social networks (Jakubowicz 1995). To which extent the
availability of digital communication tools has changed this relationship has
still not been systematically analysed, but research on the Arab Spring sug-
gests that social media tend to replace the role underground media and to
some extent also foreign mass media have played in the protests leading to
the transformations in Eastern Europe.
Promise and Practice in Studies of Social Media and Movements 27
A third general aspect to which empirical studies on current social move-
ments and protest point is the emergence of new media practices as new
forms and repertoires of protest. On the one hand, this means the emergence
of new internet-specific protest forms like website hacking, email bombing,
distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks or virtual demonstrations in the
form of website blackouts or coordinated banner campaigns. These internet-
specific forms add to existing protest repertoires and complement established
offline action forms (Van Laer and Van Aelst 2010, 1150), and are used to
mutually enhance their visibility in the general public (Haunss 2013, 108).
On the other hand, studies highlight especially the innovative use of video
platforms like YouTube. While social movement activists have used videos
in their mobilizations already for a long time, the ubiquitous availability of
video-recording hardware in the form of mobile phones and the ease of
distributing them via video-sharing websites like YouTube has profoundly
changed the role videos can play in current protests. Zeynep Tufekci and
Christopher Wilson report that ‘almost half (48.2 percent) the respondents [in
their survey among protest participants at Kairo’s Tahrir Square] had pro-
duced and disseminated video or pictures from political protest in the streets’
(Tufekci and Wilson 2012, 373). This creates new possibilities to reach out
to distant publics and adds a very emotional element to social movements’
mobilization tools.
Finally, some studies also address the issue of censorship and surveil-
lance. While in the Arab Spring social media have been hailed as being
outside state control and thus have enabled communication under conditions
of severe state repression, some authors have pointed out that electronic
communication comes with its own fallacies. Two problems have been
noted, one concerning the contradictions between the commercial goals of
the companies that run social media services and activists who use them for
protest purposes, and another one that concerns the enhanced surveillance
capabilities of states.
With regard to the first problem, William Lafi Youmans and Jillian York
have shown how the uses of social media by protesters in Egypt clashed with
corporate rules prohibiting anonymous use of Facebook and governing the
deletion of ‘inappropriate’ content on YouTube (Youmans and York 2012).
Concerning the second problem, Morozov has presented an account on how
Iranian authorities have used information gathered on social media sites to
prosecute activists of the failed ‘Green Revolution’ (Morozov 2011, 11). But
it is not only repressive regimes in the Arab world but also democratic
regimes like Germany that rely increasingly on digital communication data to
persecute protesters (Dix 2012). Connecting the two aspects, Oliver Leistert
has argued more generally that corporate interests in extensive data collec-
tion and their willingness to disclose this data to state agencies creates a
serious risk for oppositional activists (Leistert 2013).
28 Sebastian Haunss
CONCLUSION
Overall, this critical review of the literature on the relationship between
internet and social media on the one side and protest and social movements
on the other highlights three aspects.
First, the internet and social media do not completely reconfigure the
conditions and options for protest and social movements. This is mainly
because, in most cases, protest remains place-based and still relies to a very
important amount on preexisting and face-to-face social networks. Thus,
upon closer inspection, the far-reaching assumptions from cyber-optimists
and pessimists often lack sound empirical foundations. Social media neither
solve existing collective action problems nor does their use by protesters
indicate the emergence of new forms of protest specific to the network soci-
ety. Cyber-optimists and pessimists alike tend to overestimate the importance
of social media for current protests.
Second, empirical studies consistently show that current social move-
ments have quickly adopted new internet and social media technologies and
integrate them into their toolbox of more traditional communication and
media practices. Research especially shows that core activists tend to be the
most intense users of new digital communication technologies for protest and
political information purposes, whereas more distant sympathizers and on-
lookers still rely for their political information mainly on traditional mass
media and—especially in repressive regimes—on face-to-face social net-
works. How exactly internet technologies and social media interact with
traditional media and communication technologies and with direct forms of
personal interaction is still underresearched. The general pattern is clearly
additive—new technologies and communication practices do not replace old-
er ones, they rather complement them and are used alongside established
repertoires. But few studies (e.g., Gerbaudo 2012) have really systematically
tried to investigate how they add up.
Finally, several issues emerge which have not or only very superficially
been addressed, but which are important for understanding the relationship
between social media and protest. One such issue is the existence of differ-
ences between movements with regard to the use of internet and social me-
dia. Research generally focuses on movements in which internet and social
media play a prominent role, and often also on movements which have only
recently emerged. Whether or not the findings for these movements represent
a more general pattern can only be said on the basis of more comparative
studies looking on a broader population of movements. Related to this is a
lack of knowledge about the changing role of specific digital communication
technologies within one and/or across several movements. Research tends to
focus on the newest technological developments and their adoption in current
social movements and protest. But some technologies stay and social move-
Promise and Practice in Studies of Social Media and Movements 29
ments continue to use them. Although with changing circumstances and with
the emergence of new technologies, the use of existing tools (e.g., Indyme-
dia, SMS, etc.) may change as well.
What is therefore needed to expand the knowledge about the function and
use of social media and other digital communication technologies and to
overcome the limits of existing research is more longitudinal and more com-
parative studies that go beyond the most recent and the most prominent uses
of these technologies, as well as studies that pay closer attention to the
interaction between states, corporations and protesters when it comes to the
use of social media.
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