Activist Facebook Pages as a Fifth Estate in Finland

The next ECREA 2014 speaker is Niina Niskala, whose interest is in Finnish uses of Facebook. Are there communicative power groups that can be seen as examples of social and political movements or even as a 'fifth estate': a network of online individuals able to collaborate to an extent that it challenges the other estates and creates real-world power shifts?

The project gathered data from those of the most popular Finnish Facebook pages that support specific causes or missions or engage in political protest or support. These were analysed for a number of key attributes, and later analysis focussed on the six largest and six smallest of the groups.

Four of these twelve reached high social effectiveness and influence values, and may be seen as an emerging fifth estate: a pro-equal marriage rights group; campaign to collect money for hospitals; a campaign for Viking Line to build new ships in Finland; and a group of volunteers that monitors food producers and offers consumer information.

Group size, media visibility, online and offline activity tended to correlate with high communicative power, and the project also explored the mechanics of success and failure of such groups. So such fifth estate groups do exist on Facebook, even if the majority of public pages do not fall under this category. Companies tend to cooperate with these groups reasonably well, while government officials do not.