Social movements and digital media in the UK

The past 30 years have seen sweeping change in how social movements organise, mobilise and appeal to the public, largely as a result of digital media. This article takes stock of these changes by focussing on transnational movements with a strong presence in the UK, movements that were emblematic of broadly two key phases in the relationship between digital media and social movements: the periods before and after the emergence of social media.

The pre-social media period began roughly in the mid-1990s and ended with the 2011 wave of mobilisations. It was a phase dominated by websites and email lists, and included significant experimentation as this was when social movements started to explore the uses of digital media for activism.

GJM activists used websites and email lists intensively to disseminate alternative information to the public and to promote the activities of the movement. The web was important for establishing alternative news websites and for facilitating the production of news from below, by amateur citizen journalists with limited resources and training. Indymedia played a crucial role in this respect. The first Indymedia site was founded during the ‘battle of Seattle’ when GJM activists realised that mainstream news outlets were either marginalising or misrepresenting the protest. UK Indymedia, which also began in 1999, trained a new generation of activists in alternative news production. Indymedia was indispensable for promoting a culture of ‘open publishing’, allowing activists with no journalistic experience to easily publish their own reports from the streets and in an unfiltered manner, a feature that seems a given now, but was almost unheard of at the time. Indymedia also reported on the anti-war mobilisations in the beginning of the 2000s, when people opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq took to the streets. The demonstration against the war in Iraq in February 2003 still remains the largest that the UK has ever seen.

Websites and email lists also transformed the organisational dynamics of social movements. Communication that was much more expensive in the past, and thus required infrastructures offered by well-resourced organisations – from printers to photocopiers to telephone lines –, could now be undertaken by smaller groups or even by interested individuals. This provided grassroots groups and activists with greater organisational autonomy in coordinating large protest events. It also lowered the costs of negotiation in the formation of coalitions, making it easier to bring different groups together in organising events under informal umbrella platforms. Activists could simply launch a common webpage for the event, with links to the websites of separate organisations, without entering into in-depth discussions. Therefore, the use of websites and email lists allowed the GJM and other social movements during this period to operate as ‘networks of networks’, eschewing hierarchical organising in favour of more decentralised organisational designs with multiple leaders and centres of power.1

The use of social media strengthened even further the organisational autonomy of grassroots groups and individual activists who could organise events without a pre-existing organisational infrastructure. Still, websites and alternative news outlets retained their value as spaces where potential participants could gain more in-depth information about the movement in question. While social media are helpful for circulating information, posts most often share hyperlinks to content that sits on a different platform. In other words, the advent of social media enriched the communication ecology of social movements and refined the activists’ understanding of how to use each medium in the ecology more effectively.

Yet the employment of social media by Occupy was not without tensions and internal conflicts.2 Facebook and Twitter are proprietary platforms whose business model is based on the tracking and exploitation of user-generated data. In addition, these platforms are not designed with social movements in mind, so their usability and interface design are not ideal for activist purposes. However much platform founders such as Mark Zuckerberg attempted to legitimate their creations by making bold claims about their democratic value, the platforms were designed with marketing and advertising in mind rather than political organising and deliberation. Thus, Occupy activists with a commons and anti-capitalist ethos were reluctant to employ proprietary social media platforms. This was particularly the case for the more technically adept activists, many of whom were part of free software and free culture movements that were ideologically opposed to commercial platforms. These activists opted instead to create free software alternatives or to use already existing servers and email listservs, on the RiseUp platform for instance, that operated with values they believed in.

Livestreaming is another technology that was popularised with the 2011 wave and matured during the past decade. Offered initially by small companies such UStream and Bambuser, livestreaming allowed Occupy activists to use their laptops and mobile phones to broadcast live from the streets. The movement became a 24-hour live performance for those watching from afar. This provided more opportunities for online participation – or spectatorship more accurately – and for reporting on events in a raw and unfiltered manner that was almost impossible to censor. But this enhanced transparency also gave rise to internal conflicts around the potential of these technologies for self-surveillance.5 Some years later, big tech companies entered the livestreaming game, with Facebook Live beginning in 2016 and Instagram Live in 2017, while start-up companies were pushed out of the market. In the space of a decade, livestreaming has become a mundane technology, democratising the capacity for live broadcasting, but also increasing big tech's control of the technology.

Thus, in the past 30 years, as social movement organising and mobilisation have evolved together with digital media, activists have honed their ability to operate in this ever-changing media landscape. Newer mobilisations seem to be utilising the full range of digital media technologies. For instance, Extinction Rebellion has an email newsletter, a website and social media accounts in all major platforms, and employs Telegram and livestreaming to report from the streets.

Whether these challenges will lead to a more fundamental rupture in the old ways of doing things – from politics to economy to big tech – still remains to be seen. But what is certain is that there is a window of opportunity for progressive social movements to push for their desired change. In turn, this may add another twist in the ever-evolving relationship between digital media and social movements in the UK.