Does activism count if you are on the couch?

New research suggests that the people who tint their Facebook profile pictures with the French flag to support Parisians, for example, may actually be useful to the causes they support.

These are the folks who sign online petitions, share activist videos, and retweet celebrities who take a political stand. They’re willing to lift a finger for a cause — mainly the one used to tap “like” or “share” or “retweet”.

Some dismiss them as “slacktivists”, but a new study in the journal PLOS ONE finds that these peripheral players actually play a critical role in extending the reach of social movements —even doubling them.

Led by Professor Sandra González-Bailón of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and Pablo Barberá from New York University, the study analyses tens of millions of tweets surrounding a few specific social protests: The 2013 Gezi Park protests in Turkey, and the 2012 United for Global Change campaign, which was led by the Indignados (Spain) and the Occupy movements.

Using location data embedded in the tweets, the researchers were able to differentiate between the people who were physically at a protest site versus those who were spreading the message from afar. They also looked at the senders’ networks to construct a model of how information flowed and spread during the protest.

The study helps advance our understanding of the role of Twitter in protests, something that has been hotly debated.

‘The revolution will not be tweeted’
Some critics have been passionately against the idea that Twitter plays any substantial role in social movements, says González-Bailón. In October 2010, Malcolm Gladwell argued in The New Yorker that “the revolution will not be tweeted.” Real movements for social change, he argues, have a committed, disciplined central authority. Online social networks with their weak ties and decentralised structure can’t achieve change.

It wasn’t the best timing
When the Arab Spring protests began just a few months later, it became quite clear that Twitter in fact does play a significant role in modern protests, with some observers even seeing it as the key instrument for organising any modern protest.

González-Bailón takes more of a balanced view. “Of course social media doesn’t push you to risk your life and take to the streets,” she says, “but it helps the actions of those who take the risk to gain international visibility.”

Source: www.futurity.org
 

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