Social Cues for Protest Participation: An Analysis of Social Media Communication By Social Movement Organizations

In this paper, we combine a range of content and statistical analyses to probe the relationship between social cues linked to a specific behaviour—protest participation—on social media, and the responses to such cues. In a comparative analysis of two social media platforms—Facebook and YouTube—that each foreground affordances for either visual or text-based communication, we contrast posts by social movement organisations in three countries (Germany, Romania and the UK) pertaining to protest participation with other posts made by the same organisations during several months of observation in 2023-24. We do so with the aim to understand whether protest-related posts are more likely to be observed (operationalised as the number of views/post) and reinforced (with platform-specific reward metrics such as likes or shares) such that they are more likely to be socially transmitted among social media users. As protests are an expression of collective grievances which are in turn predicated on a sense of injustice (Gamson, 1992), we expect protest-related posts to be more emotional and moralizing in a way that makes them more likely to be conducive to social transmission (Brady et al., 2023) than the other content social movement organizations might produce both in video and textual format. However, we use the comparison of organisations to argue that while protest-related content may be more likely to be socially transmitted, the prestige of the organisations—measured as the number of followers—and their domain expertise—the degree to which they are directly involved with an issue under contention, will moderate social transmission.