Social Media as The Contagion of Protest: From Nation to Another
“The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They control the minds of the masses.”- Malcolm X
The golden words of Malcom X have somehow represented the current situation of how the media is gaining power and importance in the heart of our society. Astonishingly, the intensive use of the internet, especially Social Networking Services (SNS) or the so-called “social media” has been a common denominator in the popular social movements and protests that have occured in the past few decades, even in the most diverse scenarios. But beforehand, we shall ask — why do social movements occur and how does social media abet it?
Social Movements and Protests, The Society’s Means of Expression
As the dissatisfaction with the dictatorial regimes, as well as the rising youth unemployment, corruption, poverty, inflation, and violent repression, social movements and protests are becoming more rampant. They are used to voice society’s hope for change. The prelude of these movements also occurs on the internet in many forms, such as twitter threads, facebook posts, and instagram hashtags. To put it in another way, this agenda arises from the moment citizens express their indignation via social networks or in the current internet jargon, when it “goes viral”.
Like other aspects of the modern world, contemporary social movements begin to undergo gradual transformation. The internet and social network in particular, grease the wheels of the events and fetch them to international attention at unprecedented pace, enabling the uprisings to be bigger by the rapid gatherings of the masses.
This social network also symbolises the new social morphology of our society. This society, named as the “network society”, uses information and communication technologies to establish its social structure. However, the internet is a tool that emerges but does not change behavior; on the contrary, people’s behavior takes advantage of the internet to broaden and organize itself into what it represents (de Moraes, 2004).
In spite of this, with respect to the social movements, the fact stresses that major mass demonstrations of the population were organized by mobilization via social media and thereafter showed their strength with the massive presence of people on the street. One deals with a standard feature of the social movements, namely that they spill over from social media onto the street. Fascinatingly, this phenomenon has existed for a long time.
History and Present Time Show It All
If we look meticulously into this phenomenon, social movements appear to have been influenced by social media, and it’s no different from how history has shown. History provides examples of media incentivizing street protests, which spread across borders. To give an instance, the popular displeasure which terminated communism in Eastern Europe began in Poland in the early 1980s swept through Hungary, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania by the help of Radio Free Europe. The radio spread the information about protests and catalyzed its spillover across borders (Puddington, 2000).
Not stopping from that, 30 years later, the wave of street protests that sparked the Arab Spring in 2011 established social media as the new conduit for the spread of protests. In 2019, a second wave of protests that started in Sudan and Algeria spread to other Arab countries, including the Arab Republic of Egypt, Lebanon, and Iraq, subsequently resulting in a global contagion of protests spreading over Chile to the Russian Federation to Hong Kong SAR, China.
Just as the global pandemic put a hindrance on street protests, the death of George Floyd in US police custody thrusted a global protest movement against police brutality and racial injustice. Even in the last few days, the hashtag of #MosiTidakPercaya to Indonesia’s UU Cipta Kerja issued by local parliament, triggered big demonstrations in many Indonesian cities. Following this, the hashtag of #WhatisHappeninginThailand has also triggered many student protests across Thailand against the country’s injustice and systematic cruelty. Again, social media is the main channel of protest engagement.
Social Networks are The Catalyst of Contagious Protests
In the recent research published by Arezki et al., social media is found to be acting as the catalyst for spontaneous street protests spillovers across countries. The research uses data on non-violent and unorganized protests, as well as their coverage in news media for 207 countries for the period 2000 to 2020.
Technically, the research uses the number of Facebook subscribers as a fraction of the population to capture social media penetration in a country. This happens as Facebook accounts for the lion’s share in pretty much all world regions among different social media platforms. The figure below shows the evolution of the street-protest frequency affected by the news coverage. The research’s measure of normalized article counts is constructed by taking the ratio between the number of articles mentioning “street protests” and the total number of articles for each country-month pair multiplied by 100.
The results point to significant spillovers of foreign protests to domestic protests with an important role from social media using the news-based measure. Between countries with social media penetration larger than 30% (measured in 2018), a one standard deviation increase in foreign protests, which is 3.1 more protests per million persons in the foreign country, leads to 1.2 more domestic protests per million persons. In short, news-based protests about neighboring countries in the previous months have significant effects on current month domestic news-based protests, with the consideration of how news circulate easier and faster through social network services or social media.
Sources: Dow Jones FACTIVA and calculation of Arezki et. al
Conclusion
When there is suppression of protests, either by the government or by the media, social media is increasingly used for spreading text, audio, photos, and videos of the riots. When repression is related to social media, as was the case in Egypt, ironically this action can exacerbate the revolt and make the citizens angrier, thus encouraging greater interaction between them and leading them to seek new hybrid communication tactics to overcome the barriers imposed by the repressive government.
Moreover, digital tools, including networks and mobile technology, are evidence of snowball effect, which is only possible because of the structure and design of modern digital communications that transcend the traditional geopolitical boundaries. At the end of the day, we can conclude that social media makes it much easier for protesters in one country to raise their voice, and for sympathizers in other countries to read, learn and emulate. In other words, the coverage of a social movement on news through social media is the catalyst of contagious protests in other parts of the world.
Muhammad Akbar Putra | Undergraduate Economics Student Batch 2019 | Staff of Economic Studies Division at KANOPI FEB UI
References:
Arezki, R, A Dama, S Djankov and H. Nguyen (2020), “Contagious Protests”, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 9321.
de Moraes, D (2004). Por uma outra comunicação: Mídia, mundialização cultural e poder, 2nd edition., pp. 255–287. Editora Record, Rio de Janeiro
Hassanpour, N. (2011). Media disruption exacerbates revolutionary unrest. In: American Political Science Association (APSA) Annual Meeting Paper.
Puddington, A (2000), Broadcasting Freedom: The Cold War Triumph of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty.
Soares C.D.M., Joia L.A. (2015) The Influence of Social Media on Social Movements: An Exploratory Conceptual Model. In: Tambouris E. et al. (eds) Electronic Participation. ePart 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 9249. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22500-5_3
Valenzuela, S, A. Arriagada, and A. Scherman. (2012). “The social media basis of youth protest behavior: The case of Chile.” Journal of communication 62.2 pp 299–314
