Categorising the Communicative Needs of Social Movements on Social Media

The Sunday at the ICA 2024 conference starts with a session on digital affordances of social media platforms, and begins with a paper by Christian Baden. Social media are many and diverse, and their affordances keep changing; this still needs to be better understood. Social movements are also many and diverse, which also means that the intersections between social media and social movements can be various, and the particular political intentions and communicative purposes of those movements need to be considered in this.

Social media affordances overall enable visibility, editability, persistence, and association – but what we need to move towards is to analyse the differential effects that the different types of affordances offered by the specific platforms have. Specific social media platforms’ affordances have also been theorised, but there are few agreements between individual studies of particular platforms on how they translate across platforms.

There is a need for a meso-level of research that connects these macro- and micro-levels, and this may need to be done for specific communicative purposes – in the case of the present paper, social movements. These generally seek to build collective identities, articulate public claims, and mobilise contentious performances – so how have social media been used to facilitate such purposes?

Building media relations, self-mediation, and collaborative storytelling have all been done via social media to undertake the articulation of public claims; decentralised action coordination and participation motivation are key activities in mobilising contentious performances; and integrative identity building, emergent hierarchies, and distributed decision-making are all key purposes in building collective identities.

The literature that identifies such practices tends to focus on Facebook and, especially, Twitter, and the meso-level approach enables a categorisation and synthesis of the existing research on social movements on these and other platforms; Twitter’s platform affordances for collaborative storytelling include hashtags and trending topics, easy resharing, easy access, hosting, archiving, and logging, and network structure, for instance, while on Facebook the easy sharing is less prominent, and on TikTok the posting is more labour-intensive and the discovery of posts is also more challenging.

Decentralised action coordination affordances are real-time coverage, layered rights, geo-tagging, and hosting, archiving, and logging, for instance – but while Facebook has many of these capacities, it is not very good at pushing content towards audiences; telegram is also useful here, but it has no geo-tagged events calendar, for instance. Many movements have built their own infrastructure, therefore – the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong built its own app, for example.

Affordances also overlap between these practices, of course – they address several of the communicative needs of social movements, but also cluster together around some specific needs. Some platforms provide specific subsets of these affordances, and this influences social movements’ platform choices; some social movements also emphasise specific communicative activities, and this again also influences their choice of platforms.

And none of this needs to be limited to social movement studies, of course – similar patterns also apply to other communicative activities.