Social Movements in the Age of Social Media: A Structural and Content-based Analysis

Abstract

A wave of protest movements in recent years leveraging the potential of social media reveals the evolution in the process of collective identity in social networks, including the radical shift in the content and semantics of protest identity. The interplay of social media with social movements needs to be studied not only by illuminating the structural notion of networks in digital activism but also the actual content that flows through the medium such as the discourses and the iconographies pertaining to the social movement. With an aim to achieve this understanding, we propose a generic framework for the study of social media movements focusing on structure and content of social networks specifically characteristics such as homophily, structural capital and media richness along with the process of resource mobilization. We suggest a mixed-method approach to help answer the proposed research questions and validate the framework. The paper also discusses possible implications for research and practice.