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 smartphones, 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 century? Or do they, as some authors have claimed, fundamentally alter the conditions 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 Hussain 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.

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 computer 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 dramat