Social Media User Engagement with Protest Events

The next speaker in this ECREA PolCom 2023 conference session is Luna Staes, whose focus is also on online user engagement with street protests. Social movement organisations are using social media to engage with the public, and this also generates user engagement metrics (likes, shares, comments, etc.) that provide instant feedback on online publics’ appetite for protest messages.

But to what extent do protest messages actually resonate, and what explains such user engagement: is this related to the features of the actual protest, of the content about the protest, or of the digital communication style itself? The present study examined some 3,000 Facebook and Twitter posts about street protest events between 2017 and 2021 in Brussels; for these it generated a user engagement score (with total engagement calculated as likes + shares * 2 + comments * 3, to weight for the different levels of engagement that these represent).

Protest messages do go viral, and especially on Facebook; Twitter engagement was greater only for peace organisations (not climate organisations, trade unions, or civil rights organisations). Such user engagement is also affected by protest (disruption, unity, numbers, commitment) and digital communication features (visuals, emoji, hashtags), but not much by content features (except for references to traditional media attention).