Social Media Use for Contentious Politics: Facebook-Activism Against Imposed National Education Curriculum in Hong Kong

This paper examines the use of social media for the protest against the “Moral and National Education” curriculum in Hong Kong. Employing media content analysis and archival research, it explores how social media use facilitated grassroots movement organizations and stimulated cyber-activism among atomized users in practice. On 30 August 2012, a local student organization – Scholarism – went on a hunger strike. Occupying the public area in front of the Headquarters of the Hong Kong Government, members of Scholarism protested against the controversial curriculum imposed by the Education Bureau. In the subsequent days, tens of thousands of people joined the protest. Nine days later, the government succumbed to the pressure and retracted its plans. While new information and communication technologies provide the technical infrastructures for organizing movement campaigns and protests, various uses of new media configurations offer flexible mechanisms for people to take part in contentious activities. During the occupation protest, Scholarism eagerly employed Facebook technologies to coordinate collective actions and mobilize participants. At the same time, numerous users made active use of Facebook to communicate about the movement, forge social networks, produce alternative knowledge, and create innovative protest activities. As diverse actors simultaneously undertook online activism, the patterns of their computer-mediated communication facilitated the emergence of counter-publics and the development of movement practices and culture. Borrowing insights from the growing theory on computer-mediated social movements that challenges the assumption about requirements for formal leadership and organizational hierarchies, this paper argues that new media use modified the relationship between social movement organizations and individual users, and permitted alternative forms of civic engagement for democratic participation.