FIGURE 2.1 Cumulative number of views in the first three hundred days from upload for four YouTube videos
TINY ACTS OF POLITICAL PARTICIPATION
In this chapter we examine the ever closer relationship among collective action, the Internet, and social media. We aim to understand the way in which people participate politically using social media. Our argument is that social media are a permanent feature of the ‘political weather’—the context within which political events take place. Increasingly every action and interaction has the possibility of involving very large numbers of citizens often acting independently from actors in traditional political or media institutions.
We identify two main periods of change in which digital technologies have influenced the way that people spend their daily lives and decide whether or not to participate in political activities. During the period when use of the Internet started to become widespread, from the end of the twentieth century to around 2005, it was collective action organizations (such as interest groups) that seemed to gain most from Internet-based political communication and interaction. The second period came with the widespread adoption of social media, which offered new ways in which individuals could generate content and participate politically without going through organizations. Citizens can now easily obtain political information, communicate with their peers, and disseminate views, issues, images, and information without belonging to anything.
Social media have extended the range of activities that are open to people wishing to participate politically so that even those without a strong interest in politics may find themselves contributing micro-donations of time and effort to political causes. These tiny political acts can scale up to large-scale mobilizations around collective goods. When people decide whether or not to undertake such acts, they are exposed through social media to new or different forms of social influence. We identify the key features of this changed information environment that are most likely to influence people’s collective behaviour in the years to come.
BEFORE SOCIAL MEDIA: POLITICS AS USUAL
From the beginning of the century, the Internet has been identified as a potentially important influence on collective action. As we showed in Chapter 1, a number of scholars have considered how widespread use of the Internet affects political participation,1 arguing that it changes the opportunities and incentives that are relevant to collective action, advantaging some collective endeavours and endangering others.2
These works demonstrate how the main influence of the Internet on collective action in those early days was mediated by organized interest groups. Internet-mediated interaction reduces the costs of large-scale coordination and organization so that costs remain largely constant for many sizes of group, with potential benefits for all kinds of associations large or small. Internet technologies were adopted by large, established interest groups (international charities, for example, such as Oxfam or the Red Cross) both for their own internal operations and in their interactions with members or supporters. Just as earlier media technologies such as radio and television were used more effectively by those groups large enough to be able to bear the costs,3 the size of these established organizations meant that they were able to employ specialist information technology staff, invest in expensive information systems, and make the most of emerging Internet technologies to extend their political influence,4 for example by producing professional-looking websites that were optimized for search engines and came near the top of search results.
Small interest groups (such as locally based community groups or clubs) also had much to gain from the use of Internet technologies, particularly in terms of increasing their visibility. Researchers specializing in political parties observed that smaller, newer political parties find it easier to exploit Internet technologies, particularly where they have little access to mainstream media (as in the United Kingdom).5 John and Margetts found that an extremist party like the British National Party was adept at using the Internet to connect to members and attract supporters.6 In the United States, Bimber’s 2003 study showed that the infrastructure of information technology could for small organizations with few resources largely substitute for money and staff, ‘permitting modestly or poorly endowed groups to behave as if they had greater resources’. For example, the Million Mom March, a rally against gun control held in Washington DC, in 2000, which was allegedly attended by about 750,000 people and matched by smaller rallies across the United States, used technology to build a viable network-based organization with very little funding.7 However in those early days of Internet use, with burgeoning numbers of new users with unsophisticated search skills, it could be hard for small, new groups or parties to keep pace with larger ones, especially in terms of being able to develop professional websites, swiftly update site content and design, maintain search engine rankings, or provide functionality such as online donation facilities.8 Of course, small, new interest groups could publicize issues, disseminate information, and coordinate activities across a far larger geographical range (including across national boundaries) than ever before, but in a zero-sum competition for political attention they struggled to compete against the large, well-established interest groups.
Internet-based interaction also brought new types of organization into the interest group ecology, organizations that would not have been viable without the Internet. In the United States in the early 2000s, a ‘new generation of political advocacy groups’9 entered the political area, characterized by low-cost, high-speed virtual mobilization and organization. One of the first was MoveOn, an Internet-based advocacy group that quickly grew in terms of members (five million by 2010), but maintained only thirty-eight staff members and no office space.10 Established advocacy groups in the United States found it difficult to adopt Internet-based technologies to mimic the success of innovative groups like MoveOn, but a number of global advocacy groups emerged at this time, based entirely on Internet-based platforms, helped by publicly available code, and in some cases, following the perceived success of MoveOn.org.11 Avaaz, for example, started as an international civic organization promoting activism (such as online campaigns and petitions to world leaders) on a number of issues, particularly climate change and human rights, with a stated mission to ‘ensure that the views and values of the world’s people inform global decision making’ (Avaaz.org), claiming more than forty million members by 2014, representing every country in the world. The online NGO Kiva (founded in 2005) was the ‘world’s first person-to-person micro-lending website’, offering potential entrepreneurs in developing countries the chance to enter their profile on the site. Potential donors visit the site, browse profiles, and choose someone to make a loan to; in so doing, they can receive email journal updates and track repayments. By 2008, Kiva’s 270,000 lenders, who hand over money in $25 increments, had funded 40,000 borrowers in forty countries, totalling $27 million in funding.12 Such a coordination task, involving the matching of individual lenders and borrowers, is hard to imagine offline without spiralling transaction costs.
Another set of Internet-based collectives that exist mostly or entirely online emerging earlier had a more radical and anarchistic nature, growing out of the controversial and often misunderstood ‘hacktivist’ movement. The term ‘hacktivism’ mixes ‘hack’ (the act of penetrating and altering the computer-based applications of other organizations) and ‘activism’ and was first used in the 1990s by the cDc, ‘Cult of the Dead Cow’, a collective that campaigned for access to information as a basic human right. While the term ‘hack’ is now often linked to illicit computer-based activity, as it originated in hacking circles a hack is more widely defined as the use of technology in ‘an original, unorthodox and inventive way’,13 and hacktivism is based on the idea of using technology to perform acts of protest and civil disobedience in online settings: ‘activism gone electronic’ aimed at enacting positive social change.14 The most famous hacktivist group from this early period of the Internet was probably the Electrohippies Collective, which mounted denial of service attacks (where hackers bombard a target machine with huge numbers of requests in a short space of time, overloading its capacity to the extent that other users cannot access the machine) as part of anti-globalization protests against world trade talks in Seattle in 1999 and in Doha in 2001.
Aligned to but extending beyond the hacktivist movement was a new strand of activist campaigning for new types of public or commons goods based on the Internet itself. Advocates of ‘cyberlibertarianism’ followed the US poet and lyricist John Perry Barlow in proclaiming the Internet (or ‘cyberspace’) as a new ‘electronic frontier’ requiring its own ‘Declaration of Independence’: ‘imagine a continent so vast that it may have no end to its dimensions, imagine a new world with more resources than all our future greed might exhaust, more opportunities than there will ever be, entrepreneurs enough to exploit, and a peculiar kind of real estate that expands with development’.15 Ever since a stream of activism has bubbled away around issues relating to the utopian or dystopian future offered by the Internet, including freedom of expression, net neutrality, freedom from copyright restrictions, and resistance to Internet censorship.
The early days of Internet-mediated interaction brought potential advantages for both large and small interest groups and facilitated the emergence of a range of new groups based on organizational innovations. In this way, the Internet changed the ecology of interest groups, with technological expertise and innovation taking on new importance in shaping a group’s fate. The Internet extended the range of interest groups with which citizens could engage, and set up a fierce competition for citizens’ attention. But most individual Internet users experienced online political participation and action as a fairly one-sided affair until the mid-2000s. They could search for political information (largely provided by political institutions and organizations), join political groups, and donate money to charities or groups; yet the ability to share information with their peers or to know what other people were doing politically in a way that was unmediated by an organization was not widespread. They could communicate with each other, but largely through email, which does not lend itself to widespread dissemination and relies on knowing an email address or belonging to an email group or list. In this context, it is easy to see why so much academic work at that time focused on the theme of ‘politics-as-usual’,16 arguing that the Internet would intensify the participation only of people who are already involved in politics with individuals doing (or not doing) online what they used to do (or not do) offline.17 As a result of this intensification of political action, inequalities in democratic participation would become greater. These scholars argued that although more fluid types of organizational membership had emerged, which allowed some groups to mobilize individuals and to raise money without suffering from the classic Olsonian free-rider problems of too-large groups, in general the types of individuals who joined them came from the same socioeconomic groups as those who had traditionally participated politically.18
‘HERE COMES EVERYBODY’—THE RISE OF SOCIAL MEDIA
From the end of the 1990s arrived a raft of Internet-based innovations that really offered a different way of experiencing the Internet and challenged the claim that the Internet meant politics as usual. These innovations allowed ordinary users of the Internet to generate content themselves, instead of merely accessing available information provided by the professionally maintained websites of organizations. Although they started to emerge from 1998, it was not until the middle of the following decade that usage of these applications, known by this time collectively as ‘Web 2.0’, reached critical mass and the implications for collective action became apparent. This development started with weblog or blog hosting services (Open Diary, LiveJournal, Blogger): websites that were easy for non-technical individuals to set up and update, for example to put forward an opinion, start a discussion, or record a diary. By allowing ordinary users to easily generate content online, blogs opened up new possibilities for individuals with political or collective aims to publish and disseminate information and to interact with interested parties, through blog-based discussion and comment that was indexed and searchable. In the early days of blogs, research showed that the percentage of Internet users actually using blogs for sharing information and opinions was small, that the percentage writing them was even smaller, and that the majority of Americans did not even know what a blog was.19 Increasingly, as predicted by Shirky, a small number of large blogs received the overwhelming majority of readership, attention, and hyperlinks from other Internet sources, in a power-law-like way,20 and the political blogosphere in particular became populated by journalists crossing over from the mainstream media, with politicians joining in later. However, for the first time blogs offered ordinary people—or at least a self-selecting group of them—the opportunity to disseminate political information and comment in the same way as traditional media sources and at least have a chance of reaching huge numbers of people in what Shirky called the mass amateurization of journalism.21 Blogs remain particularly popular in Russia, where the blogging platform LiveJournal (which incorporates some features from other social networking platforms, such as friends and newsfeeds) played an important role in the protests after parliamentary and presidential elections in 2011.22
As the political blogosphere grew and became integrated into political life, another Internet-based development brought a new approach to the promulgation of political information and knowledge. In 2001 Wikipedia, a web-based free content encyclopaedia, written collaboratively by largely anonymous Internet volunteers and owned by the Wikimedia Corporation, a not-for-profit organization, was established. By 2014 Wikipedia had nearly half a billion unique visitors monthly, making it one of the top ten (behind Facebook, Google, and YouTube) most visited sites in the world with about a hundred thousand active contributors in 287 languages working on over thirty-two million articles.23 Wikipedia is important in collective action terms for a number of reasons. For its time it was a new kind of public good, collectively produced, and the most studied and cited example of the potential for online crowdsourcing and peer production.24 If those who contribute share Wikipedia’s stated aim to ‘empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain’, then their contributions may be understood as collective action. Indeed the self-selected ‘Wikipedia community’, who meet at an annual Wikimania event and campaign for the continuation of the world’s first ‘free encyclopaedia that anyone can edit’, also join other campaigns for free information goods, as in 2011 when the Italian-language Wikipedia community became the first to black out the site for three days in protest at the DDL intercettazioni (wiretapping bill). The English-language Wikipedia site supported a campaign against legislation in the United States that would have allowed the government to require Internet service providers to block websites in 2012 by blacking out the entire site for twenty-four hours, displaying only a message of protest and the words ‘Imagine a world without free knowledge’. Most contributors are acting to provide a collective good even if they get some private benefit from submitting the content, with only a few providing information purely for private benefit. Benkler extolled enthusiastically the virtues of peer production of public goods, based on the willingness of large numbers of people to contribute time and resources without either material incentives or organizational hierarchy.25
From 2002 a host of social networking sites appeared that facilitated the building of social networks or social relations between people through the maintenance of a personal profile and a means of communicating and disseminating information. Friendster, a site that allowed users to contact other members and to share content and media output, was set up in 2002. It was the first social networking site to acquire over a million users. It was closely followed by Cyworld in South Korea the same year, MySpace in 2003, and a burgeoning range of other platforms, including Facebook, Google’s Orkut, which became very popular in India and Brazil, and Mixi in Japan. Tuenti, in Spain, appeared in 2006. LinkedIn, a social networking site geared for people in professional occupations, was launched in 2003 and reported three hundred million users in more than two hundred countries by 2014, around one-third in the United States. It ranks thirteenth in the Alexa Internet list of hundred most popular websites. In addition, many sites that sell goods and services, such as Amazon, eBay, and Alibaba (the leading Chinese marketplace), and travel sites such as TripAdvisor, increasingly incorporated an interactive feedback component where individuals post and read comments and rank the performance and trustworthiness of sellers.
Other social media developments include photo- and video-sharing sites, in particular the photo-sharing site Flickr from 2004 and from 2005 the video-sharing site YouTube, which allows individuals to upload, share, and watch videos. By 2012, YouTube was the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Google and Facebook (Alexa). The site claims to receive more than one billion unique users each month, with one hundred hours of video uploaded every minute.26 Users can set up their own channels, and the most popular ‘YouTubers’ have many millions of subscribers and sponsorship deals with advertisers, such as PewDiePie, whose channel features jokes, profanity, and commentary on video games, with thirty-five million subscribers by 2015 after two years at the top of the list of most subscribed channels.27 YouTube took off politically during the 2008 US presidential election campaign (branded the first ‘YouTube election’), particularly thanks to Barak Obama, whose own official channel at BarackObama.com received over 250 million views by 2014 and for whom a host of videos were uploaded by external supporters (such as the notorious Obama Girl videos, which with over 120 million views were described as one of the top ten Internet memes of all time by Newsweek). As a place where videos may be easily uploaded and shared, YouTube has played an important role in all kinds of political events, the most grotesque of which were the beheadings of Western journalists by the radical terrorist group known as Islamic State in 2014, although within hours YouTube had removed the video and deleted the account that had posted it.
Figure 2.1 gives an indication of the increasingly large numbers involved and the speed at which topics gain attention on YouTube. In the 2009 Iranian election protests, only four years after YouTube was launched, Neda Agha-Soltan, who was shot dead on 20 June 2009, became the public face of the protests when videos of her death were uploaded, reaching nearly a million views in a few days. A video of US President Barak Obama unknowingly singing ‘Call Me Maybe’, in a ‘mash up’ that interpolates sections from his speeches into a popular song, reached forty million views in the summer of 2011. Obama’s contest with Mitt Romney in the YouTube comic series Epic Rap Battles of History, which pits famous figures against each other in mock rap battles, was watched by over ten million viewers within a few days, reaching over a hundred million by February 2015. Eric Garner, who died on 17 July 2014 in Staten Island, New York, after a police officer put him in a chokehold, was featured in a video, titled ‘I Can’t Breathe’ (his last words), which reached nearly 300,000 views in the first days after his death and 900,000 after another burst of protest activity when the police officer who caused his death was indicted in December. A glance at Figure 2.1 shows that cumulative views of these videos show a similar pattern, with extremely rapid growth in the first days or even hours of uploading, a pattern of growth we investigate in detail in Chapter 3.
FIGURE 2.1 Cumulative number of views in the first three hundred days from upload for four YouTube videos
By 2008, Facebook had emerged as the leading social networking site, with 600 million people using it each month, rising to 1.35 billion by the end of 2014 (www.statista.com), having largely replaced regional platforms like Cyworld, Mixi, and Orkut. From 2010, Pinterest, Tumblr, and Google+ emerged to challenge Facebook, although Google+, even with 549 million users by 2013, has struggled to battle this kind of critical mass. These applications have been joined by newer variants such as Vine, WeChat, Snapchat, and Line. Instagram had gained 300 million monthly active users by 2014, only two years after launching. The photo messaging application Snapchat also gained huge popularity among young people from 2012, partly perhaps due to its promise to delete all data after transmission, with 700 million photos and videos a day being sent by May 2014. These sites make it possible to connect people who share interests across political, economic, and geographical borders, and as such even in countries with lower rates of Internet penetration, social networking sites have become a popular arena for political activity. Facebook in particular was credited by the media with a prominent role in the Egyptian revolution of 2011, with Egypt ranked twenty-first globally in Facebook usage with twelve million subscribed users of the site by 2012.28 A large-scale survey of ten thousand respondents across Arab nations in 2012 showed Facebook as the third most popular news source, behind the Arab television networks Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya.29
Twitter, since its founding in 2006, has proved itself an important venue for political activity in recent years. The micro-blogging site allows its users to post a comment of 140 characters to their followers, who may (or may not) retweet it to their own followers. Twitter ranks in the top ten most popular sites,30 and by 2014 there were 284 million active users.31 Like other Internet platforms the number of followers each user has is highly skewed. While the most popular users are music or movie celebrities (notably Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga, with 58 million and 43 million followers, respectively, in December 2014), Barack Obama far surpassed other politicians in having 51 million followers by the same time, and new entrants to the political scene rapidly amassed a following, such the UK comedian turned political activist and campaigner Russell Brand, with 9 million followers by 2014. Twitter was credited with a particularly prominent role in protests against allegedly rigged elections in Iran in 2009 and the Tunisian revolution of 2011, and with the buildup of social capital more generally.32
The success of Twitter’s micro-blogging format has been replicated in other countries, such as by Sina Weibo, launched in China in 2009, which now has a similar market penetration, in use by well over 30 percent of Chinese Internet users, with 368 million users and 100 million messages every day. But Sina Weibo imposes rigorous self-censorship at the behest of the Chinese government, and statements on politically sensitive topics containing blacklisted keywords or links, which might have potential for generating collective political activity,33 are prevented from being posted or quickly removed. Twitter works well with political action as it is easy to gain (and identify) followers and the communications are quick and easy, due in part to the character limit (and the ability for links to other content to be shortened and included) and also the ability for tweets to be published from mobile phones. Campaigns can send out short messages, for example coordinating where to meet or whom to email, but can also send longer reports to followers by linking to videos, images, and longer texts. Of course, our focus here is collective action in pursuit of public goods, which may be perceived as positive, but some forms of collective action can be negative, for example as happened in the riots in England in August 2011 when mobile messaging programmes and social media were used to communicate between rioters and to avoid the much slower and less tech-savvy police. But showing the other side of the collective action story, social media were used to organize a spontaneous cleanup straight after the riots (#cleanup). All the above are rapidly growing spaces where people can easily generate their own content and share it with friends, acquaintances, friends of friends, and strangers, bringing the facility to disseminate information, images, opinion, and comments into the mainstream, rather than being the property of a specialist elite as in the early days of the Internet.
Large proportions of the populations of countries with high levels of Internet penetration are using social media. In the United States, 75 percent of the population had at least one social media profile in 2014 and nearly a third of adults over sixty-five use Facebook. Similarly, 76 percent of all UK citizens used social networking sites, 72 percent of Mexicans, 66 percent of Japanese, around half of Russians and Brazilians, and a quarter of people in countries in the Middle East.34 Among young people, these figures are even higher, with over 90 percent of UK, Spanish, and Italian Internet users between eighteen and twenty-nine using social networking sites and 89 percent of US Internet users in this age range.35 Overall, estimates suggest that there were 1.8 billion users of online social networks by 2014, predicted to rise to 2.4 billion by 2018 (www.statista.com). Not only is a large portion of citizens using social media, but they are spending increasing proportions of their time there. In 2015, in the United Kingdom social media users spend on average 2.2 hours a day on social media, while in the United States this figure is 2.7 hours and in both Brazil and Mexico an astonishing 3.8 hours.36
All these social media platforms started to be used much more heavily from the mid-2000s as mobile phones increasingly provided access to the Internet and native smartphone apps made them even more readily accessible. At this point, social media became available to populations who did not have regular access to Internet-connected computers. Mobile phone subscriptions in the Arab world, for example, nearly matched the region’s population by the end of 2011, at 346 million,37 and increasingly the majority of these were Internet-enabled with access to the whole gamut of social media. Nearly half of all mobile users in the United Kingdom (with a very high penetration of mobiles) use social media applications on their phone. A report into ‘non-use of the Internet’ in 2012 revealed that many of those who claimed not to use the Internet in UK surveys of Internet use actually did use Facebook and other social media applications, but did not recognize this as Internet use,38 meaning that many Internet usage figures underestimate actual levels.
One of the leading commentators on the Internet and social movements, Clay Shirky, encapsulated the ways in which social media had brought citizens into political organization with the title of his book Here Comes Everybody.39 He emphasized the new capacity to ‘organize without organizations’, highlighting the role of technological networks in individual sharing, discussion, collaboration, and ultimately collective action, although at the time empirical evidence for the development was sparse and even Shirky admitted that this kind of collective action step was ‘mainly in the future’.
THE DEATH OF MEMBERSHIP AND THE RISE OF THE INDIVIDUAL
Social media focus on individuals, rather than organizations. They allow individuals to expand and shape their own social networks and to tailor the information environment in which people operate, in terms of the information they are exposed to on a daily basis. Social media allow Internet users to personalize their own experience online and thereby reinforce personalization of digital activity: ‘whether through texts, tweets, social network sharing or posting YouTube mashups, the communication process itself often involves further personalization through the spreading of digital connections among friends or trusted others’.40 By choosing which social media to use and which users to follow or friend, people create their own distinctive information environment and shape the social signals to which they are exposed on a daily basis, which influences any decisions they make as to whether or when to participate politically.
Most importantly, the decision about whether to undertake a tiny act of participation is much less lumpy than the decision whether to join an interest group or political party. The social media age then has advantaged individuals over organizations in terms of reducing the costs of participation. For organizations, the costs of coordination have dropped massively. However, there is also new competition for coordination, with the social media platforms themselves. Individuals who wish to raise an issue or participate in a campaign or debate can easily do so without belonging to anything, or even coming into contact with a political organization. Even if they do, the notion of ‘belonging’ to contemporary interest groups is a far looser concept than traditional membership, as discussed below. And on the Internet, where ‘information is free’ (echoing Wikipedia’s mission statement), regular Internet users are resistant to the idea of paying for content.
This shift in the concept of membership is being reinforced by a generalized decline in membership of organizations in the offline world. Membership of political parties has long been in decline over most of the world.41 What political scientists have termed ‘partisan dealignment’42 started in earnest about twenty-five years ago, culminating in what some have termed the ‘rise of the apartisan American’,43 that is, a US citizen who is interested in politics and active but who does not want to align herself with a political party, and also the ‘Cyber Party’, a new ideal type of political party characterized by a far looser relationship with supporters than was normal for earlier ideal party types.44 Traditional notions of membership of interest groups have also declined, although there is variation across countries, with the steepest fall in the United States,45 and a more stable pattern over time in Europe,46 with some recent declines.47
Newer organizations seeking to foster political engagement based on social media epitomize this shift from membership to far weaker patterns of allegiance, with a very different conception of membership to that of traditional interest groups. The civic activism organization Avaaz, for example, now calls itself a ‘campaigning community’ and shows the real-time number of ‘members’ (forty million at the end of 2014) on its front page at www.avaaz.org. These are people who have made any kind of contribution to one of its petitioning, emailing, donating, petition signing, or lobbying campaigns, however small (basically, anyone who has interacted with their website). Likewise, the successful UK campaigning organization 38 Degrees claimed over 2.5 million members by 2015, a member being anyone who has signed a petition or undertaken any other action from their website, blog, Facebook page, or Twitter handle. The organization polls their ‘members’ on what new campaigns they should undertake, and claims success in stopping the UK government’s policy to privatize forests; blocking various building projects such as a mega-dairy in Lincolnshire; and convincing the UK government to sign the EU directive on human trafficking. The ‘Save Our Forests’ campaign involved a petition that garnered half a million signatures and the crowdfunding of a national opinion poll. From 2008, the loosely formed hacktivist collective Anonymous has undertaken a range of online protests and email hacks and distributed denial of service attacks, for example against the Assad regime in Syria with its OpSyria campaign.48 Anonymous was named by Time magazine in 2012 as one of the most influential groups in the world. Anonymous reflects its anarchist origins by taking the notion of membership to a new level of ambiguity: ‘it is impossible to “join” Anonymous, as there is no leadership, no ranking, and no single means of communication: Anonymous is spread over many mediums and languages, with membership being achieved simply by wishing to join’.49
MICRO-DONATIONS OF POLITICS
The growing proportion of time spent by individuals on social media reshapes the context in which people decide whether or not to participate politically. Nearly all these media were developed for private use, for sharing content of private or semiprivate value. But they all have the potential to host a wide range of political activities: sharing and receiving news, information, and views; expressing opinions; discussing issues; coordinating activities; matching individuals across political, geographical, and economic boundaries; and disseminating political information and expertise.
There is every sign that the swelling ranks of social media users are indeed using social media sites for these political activities. In the United States, data show that in 2013, 39 percent of American adults took part in some sort of political activity (such as liking, sharing, or reposting content related to political issues) in the context of a social networking site, rising among younger people (eighteen to twenty-four) to two-thirds, which equates to nearly three-quarters of those young adults who use social networking sites.50 Such figures challenge the widely held perception of political disengagement among young people, and show that the youngest American adults are more likely to engage in political behaviours on social networking sites than any other venue. They also suggest that political activity on such sites is likely to lead to further engagement, as 43 percent of users say they have decided to learn more about an issue because of something they saw on a social networking site, especially among the youngest age group.51 In Arab countries the proportions are also high; shortly after the events of the Arab Spring, more than 60 percent of users of social networking sites (around one-third of the citizens in Lebanon, Tunisia, and Egypt) said that they use the sites to share views about politics and 70 percent use them for community issues.52
In addition to general social media sites, there are now a range of Internet-based platforms dedicated to political activity, which may be regarded as social media in that they allow users to generate content through some kind of participatory act such as generating an email to a political leader or signing a petition. The newer civic activism groups discussed above such as Avaaz and MoveOn encourage users to contribute a range of micro-donations of political resources quickly and easily, such as joining an email campaign or online protest, signing a petition, or contributing money. Also worthy of note are the growing number of electronic petition sites operated by both governments and non-governmental organizations (including Avaaz), discussed in Chapter 3, which are used by a significant proportion of citizens in many liberal democracies. Internet-based platforms for charitable giving have also become popular, such as JustGiving, a platform that allows individuals to set up their own donation pages for specific causes, often linked to some sponsored activity, which they then circulate to their own social networks.
The range of participatory acts is extended further through sites geared at encouraging citizens to seek redress or make contact with political institutions, such as those run by the social enterprise mySociety. Since the mid-2000s they have operated a number of sites that make it easy for citizens to undertake a number of collective activities, such as write to their political representatives (writetothem.com), find out what their representatives are doing (theyworkforyou.com), and complain about local infrastructure problems to their local council (fixmystreet.com). Similar sites run in many other European countries, while in the United States the equivalent SeeClickFix.com claims to have fixed over 1.2 million non-emergency issues for US citizens, and the application is now being adopted by cities across the world, including in India.
With so much political activity around on social media, there is some evidence that Internet skills are joining the traditional resources of time, income, and civic skills,53 in predicting whether people will participate politically.54 Norris, in an analysis of nineteen countries, used the European Social Survey to analyse the relationship between Internet use and political activism, finding that regular Internet users are significantly more politically active across all twenty-one indicators of activism captured in the survey;55 it was not possible to establish any causal effect, but use of the Internet continued to be significantly related to political activism even when controlling for prior social or attitudinal characteristics of Internet users such as age, education, and civic duty. After these factors, use of the Internet proved the next strongest predictor of activism, more important than other indicators such as social and political trust or use of any news media. Recent research from Spain has demonstrated an association between general Internet use and political participation, with the authors arguing that by reducing participation costs, use of the Internet diminishes the role of political motivation in participation, leading frequent and skilled Internet users to participate in politics even without political motivation.56
All the social media and campaigning platforms described above play a role in extending the ladder of political participation that was described in Chapter 1. That is, they introduce new ‘micro-acts’ of participation, such as updating a status on Facebook, sending a tweet or retweet, signing of an electronic petition, sharing a political news item, posting a comment on a blog or discussion thread, making a micro-donation of funds to a political cause or campaign, uploading or sharing a political video on YouTube, and so on. All these are tiny acts of participation that for most people were not available until the advent of social media. Taken individually they may seem insignificant, but as we shall see later, they can scale up to large-scale mobilizations and campaigns for policy change.
The ease of micro-donation reduces the cost, in terms of time, effort, or money, of political participation. This cost is actually made up of two components. First, there is the actual expenditure of time, effort, or money (in expressing an opinion publicly, making a financial donation, or signing a petition, for example, to which can be added the risk of reputational damage if the participant cannot act anonymously). Second, there are transaction costs of the operation (which might include for these three examples transport costs to the venue, writing and posting a cheque, and acquiring information about the petition). We have seen that social media not only reduce the costs of participation, but also lower the transaction costs both in absolute terms and as a proportion of the participation costs. Take a poster by the canal side that asks passers-by to contribute to a campaign to save Britain’s canals by sending a text message, which will automatically trigger a donation of £3. Here the transaction costs, even for such a small donation, are very small, especially in comparison to sending the donation by post: the time to send the text message is probably less than locating the cheque book and addressing an envelope, and the cost to send the text message is usually less than a postage stamp and possibly free in a bundle. In addition, the electronic transaction can happen immediately and avoid the mental effort to remember the details on the poster. Without such a mechanism, the transaction costs of sending the £3 by post would have been much higher as a proportion of the donation; enough, indeed, to discourage the donation unless the prospective donor was willing to contribute more. Thus the mechanism for making the transaction facilitates a new sort of micro-donation, or tiny act of political participation. This lowering of transaction costs is accelerating all the time, even tending towards zero as potential participants receive requests for micro-donations of political resources in the course of their normal lives both online and offline. The start of this trend was highlighted in the 2007 Obama primary election campaign, in which Obama raised more than $35 million in individual contributions, 40 percent of which were $25 or less.57
SCALING UP
On its own, each individual micro-donation of time, effort, or money does nothing for the political cause that it is intended to support. One signature alone on a petition renders it worthless, a tweet that only one person sees is nothing more than pixels, a video that no one views will change nothing. But via interactions on social media, through downloading, sharing, viewing, following, retweeting, and so on, tiny acts of participation can scale up to make a major contribution to a political mobilization.
We show here four examples of this scaling up, in the form of attention paid to four campaigns or mobilizations that took place between 2012 and 2014. The first was in October 2012, after the Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai, a campaigner for the education of schoolgirls and a blogger on the BBC Urdu website, was shot by Taliban militants on her way back from school. Malala became one of the most famous teenagers in the world, showered with accolades including most famously the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014. Her resilience and actions are widely regarded as leading to the ratification of Pakistan’s first Right to Education Bill in 2013, after a petition sponsored by UN Special Envoy Gordon Brown was launched in her name, receiving more than one million signatures. Figure 2.2 shows the daily page views on the English version of the Wikipedia entry for Malala and the tweets mentioning ‘Malala’ from August 2012 to April 2013. Both show huge spikes in interest followed by periods of relative stasis. The largest spike occurs nearly immediately after she was shot, and further spikes are prompted by new events, such as being named as runner-up to Time magazine’s Person of the Year in December 2012 (an event that generates considerably more interest on Twitter than on Wikipedia).58 An even larger spike (not pictured) occurred when Malala was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
FIGURE 2.2 Daily page views of the Malala Yousafzai page on the English edition of Wikipedia and daily mentions of ‘Malala’ on Twitter
The second example is a campaign by several organizations to ‘Save Our Bees’, culminating in the successful passing of EU legislation banning for a period of two years three neonicotinoid pesticides that were tentatively linked with risks for bees. Figure 2.3 shows a steady increase, with the largest spike in tweets occurring on 29 April 2013, when the EU legislation was passed. Simultaneous efforts in the United States were less successful in achieving a change of policy.
In the third case, in 2013 the feminist activist Caroline Criado-Perez started a petition on change.org calling for the Bank of England to reconsider the decision to replace Elizabeth Fry with Winston Churchill on the five-pound note, which left no women, other than the queen, featured on UK bank notes. A combination of the petition, signed by thirty-five thousand petitioners with crowdfunded financial support, led the governor of the Bank of England to announce a change of plan in July 2013, with the eventual agreement that the image of Jane Austen would appear on the ten-pound note from 2017. The success of the campaign also resulted in threats and harassment of Criado-Perez, which in turn led to substantial public pressure for Twitter to make it easier to report hate speech followed by changes to the platform to ease the reporting of such tweets. Figure 2.4 shows the massive spike of interest, a pattern different from that of the Save Our Bees campaign, this time with a large leap in attention after the bank governor announced the change of plan.
FIGURE 2.4 Graph of the number of tweets about the Women on Banknotes campaign from April to September 2013
Note: Selected tweets mentioned one of the main accounts advocating for the campaign, linked to the campaign’s petition on change.org, or mentioned male/female/man/woman and banknote(s)/Bank of England in the same tweet.
FIGURE 2.5 Cumulative number of retweets of messages originally authored by users with different numbers of followers
The activities on Twitter around these three campaigns are shown together in Figure 2.5 to illustrate the key role that large numbers of ordinary people, with modest followings, play in the scaling up of mobilizations or campaigns. As noted above, Twitter users vary hugely in the number of followers that they accumulate: the celebrity Justin Bieber has 58 million, whereas the median number of Twitter followers was 61 in 2013, and that only if those who had been inactive for 30 days were excluded.59 In general, users on Twitter consume a personalized stream or timeline of content based on the users they choose to follow, so content authored by a given user generally reaches only the users who have chosen to follow that user, but can reach wider circulation through retweets. When users retweet a message on Twitter, they forward that message to all of their followers, enlarging the number of people who will have the tweet in their timeline. Within the three campaigns described above, most tweets (85 percent of those related to each topic) generated no retweets at all. Considering the 15 percent of tweets that generate at least one retweet, users with the largest number of followers generate the most retweets per tweet. For instance, Justin Bieber tweeted about Malala to his 28,960,137 followers at the time and generated 24,558 retweets. While Bieber’s tweet generated the most retweets of any single tweet, these retweets still account for only 2.6 percent of total retweeting that mentioned Malala. In all three campaigns, users with far smaller numbers of followers collectively generated the most retweets, as shown in Figure 2.5. Over three-quarters of all retweets were of content created by users with fewer than a hundred thousand followers in all three campaigns and over half of all retweets in the Bees and Banknotes campaigns were of content created by users with only a few thousand followers. For Malala, there were 956,885 retweets of 218,449 unique messages. For Women on Banknotes, there were 64,403 retweets of 20,759 unique messages. For Save Our Bees, there were 1,052,477 retweets of 323,110 unique messages.
Fourth and finally, we show how a mobilization played out across two social media platforms: Facebook and Twitter. As noted in Chapter 1, 2014 brought a wave of protest and demonstration against racist policing in the United States, after the deaths of two African American citizens by white police officers. Eric Garner died in New York on 17 July 2014 after a police officer put him in a chokehold. On 9 August 2014 Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri (a suburb of St. Louis). There was considerable unrest with protests and riots in Ferguson from August through December 2014. The protest activity increased again after 24 November 2014, when the grand jury announced that the officer who shot Michael Brown would not be indicted (charged with any crime), and shortly thereafter on 3 December, when a grand jury in New York similarly decided not to indict the officers involved in the death of Eric Garner. Large-scale protests took place in New York City, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Washington DC, Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Atlanta in early December 2014.
FIGURE 2.7 Cumulative uses of hashtags related to the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown on Twitter and Facebook from 17 July 2014 to 31 January 2015
In response to the deaths of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, and even more so in response to the decisions of the grand juries to not press charges, citizens started using several hashtags to comment on the developments: #Ferguson, #MikeBrown, and #HandsUpDontShoot for the death of Michael Brown, and #EricGarner and #ICantBreathe for the death of Eric Garner, while #BlackLivesMatter was used to raise attention to the more general issue of the disproportionate number of African American men dying in police custody, bringing together online activities from both these and previous deaths. Each hashtag has been used a substantial number of times on both Twitter and Facebook: Figure 2.6 shows the total number of uses of each hashtag in both original posts and tweets as well as in shares and retweets. The most used hashtag, #Ferguson, occurred approximately twenty-six million times on Twitter and two million times on Facebook between August 2014 and January 2015. Volumes for both platforms are estimated from a 10 percent sample of all public posts. The volume data for Facebook further include private reshares of public posts.
The cumulative growth of all these hashtags on both Facebook and Twitter is shown in Figure 2.7, indicating large and sharp rises in attention at the time of death, and the time of indictment. Most of the graphs show that Twitter activity slightly precedes activity on Facebook, although activity on both platforms exhibits a very similar pattern (the one exception being the death of Eric Garner, which seems to have gone almost unnoticed initially on Twitter), with a sharp rise at each new event. This is a pattern that we observe and analyse extensively in Chapter 3, where we analyse mobilizations around petitions. The data were collected from 17 July 2014 to 31 January 2015 and include only public content. The Twitter data are based on a random 10 percent sample, while here the Facebook data include all public posts and public shares.
These visualizations illustrate the different patterns of mobilization that can take place on social media, and one of the tasks of this book is to understand the dynamics by which they rise (and fall). The following subsection considers the influence of the information environment on the individual participation patterns that scale up in this way.
HOW SOCIAL MEDIA EXERT SOCIAL INFLUENCE
In the short time since bursting onto the scene, social media have continued to evolve as they have competed for people’s attention and as individuals and organizations have continued to find innovative ways to develop new applications and uses. For today’s Internet users, social media provide an increasingly heterogeneous information environment within which people operate, a continually flowing stream of information about issues, actions, opinions, and the behaviour of others. As people move from searching for information, individuals, and organizations in online environments, to spending increasing quantities of time on social networking sites in which they have already preselected their information sources and informants, they start to exist in what some commentators have called a ‘time-based worldstream’60 or ‘stream of consciousness’61 or (with more negative connotations) ‘echo chamber’.62 In these lifestreams, where search models, operating systems, and even computer devices become secondary to the information environment that social media provide, ‘the goal is not to be a passive consumer of information or to simply tune in when the time is right, but rather to live in a world where information is everywhere. To be peripherally aware of information as it flows by, grabbing it at the right moment when it is most relevant and valuable, entertaining or insightful. Living with, in, and around information. … The idea is that you are living in a stream: adding to it, consuming it, redirecting it’.63 Political information and activity form a tiny proportion of most people’s information streams: any political issue must join the fight for limited attention and engagement, including time, money, and other resources. Individuals must choose from the many available possibilities when directing their (limited) political attention.
In the social media age then, individual citizens considering whether to undertake small acts of participation by making microdonations of time and effort are likely to undertake such a decision in a predominantly online environment and are susceptible to the influences presented to them by their participation in social media. They are increasingly unlikely to be susceptible to the offline influences of institutions or organizations to which they have a strong allegiance, through membership or some other significant and longstanding attachment. Their decision to participate with one small act is extremely low-cost, and therefore vulnerable to small shifts in their information environment, whereas in the pre-social-media era the decision to belong to a political party or interest group organization was much more significant and time-consuming, more likely to be shaped by social norms and pressure from peers or family and less vulnerable to small changes in political information.
There are three key ways in which we might expect this changed information environment to influence the participatory behaviour of individuals. First, the networks that develop through their participation in one or more social media platforms shape the social influences from people that they know, know of, or would like to know, termed here ‘network structure effects’. Second, by participating in social media, individuals are exposed to social information: information about the participatory behaviour of others, the number of people who have signed a petition, voted, or participated in a campaign, for example. Third, social media present them with an opportunity to publicize their actions to the outside world, through sharing information, for example, or making their name visible on some participatory platform. Each of these features of individuals’ personalized experience of social media has the capacity to influence their decisions whether and when to participate in a mobilization or collective action. The potential influence of network structure effects, social information, and visibility is discussed below. These influences will vary across social media platforms, so once individuals have made the decision to use one, the platforms themselves will further shape their information environment. These variations between platforms are therefore also very important.
NETWORK EFFECTS—WEAK TIES, STRONG TIES
Networks have always formed an important part of the context in which people operate politically,64 providing pathways to facilitate the spread of information (and other resources) and exerting social influence on the decisions of individuals. Earlier Internet-based technologies had limited network structure effects. An individual or organization either had a public presence online or not and was found generally by looking for the individual or organization directly by name with search engines or through links and email. Internet users then might make contact through email with the organization. Although there were network structure effects, they could be analysed only at a high level of abstraction.65 The advent of social networking sites made a far more substantive difference to the extent to which people were likely to be influenced by or share information with other people they know, ‘automating and accelerating the social signals that pulse through the human network on a daily basis’.66
The founder of the sociology of networks, Mark Granovetter, made a distinction between the different types of influence that social networks provide which has influenced the way networks have been perceived ever since.67 He argued that weak social ties were analytically distinct from strong ties, but were crucially important in spreading information across networks. He argued that the ‘personal experience of individuals is closely bound up with larger-scale aspects of social structure, well beyond the purview or control of particular individuals’,68 and that this finding revealed the paradox that, contrary to the sociological thinking of the time, ‘weak ties’ are ‘indispensable to individuals’ opportunities and to their integration into communities; strong ties, breeding local cohesion, lead to overall fragmentation’.69 This observation has been extremely influential in our understanding of online social networks, which lend themselves so well to the accumulation of weak ties. For example, in the 2010 US presidential election, the political scientist James Fowler collaborated with Facebook in a massive experiment (with sixty-one million subjects) to test the influence of Facebook on people’s decision whether or not to vote. About sixty million users (98 percent of their sample) received a message with social information at the top of their news feeds showing the profile pictures of up to six randomly selected Facebook friends who had clicked the ‘I voted’ button, as well as an ‘informational message’ encouraging them to vote, providing a link to information on polling stations and a counter of Facebook users who had clicked the ‘I voted’ button. Two control groups of 1 percent each received either nothing or the informational message about the election as a whole. The researchers then compared the groups’ online behaviour and matched six million users with voting records. The results showed that those who saw the social message were 2 percent more likely to click the ‘I voted button’ and 0.3 percent more likely to seek information about a polling place than those who just got the information and 0.4 percent more likely to vote.70 It did not make any difference whether the six friends shown were close friends or not, suggesting that even the weak ties between acquaintances could also send social signals strong enough to influence political behaviour.
In contrast, some of Granovetter’s followers have used his model to argue that mobilizations based on social media platforms could never attain political success. As we discussed earlier, Malcolm Gladwell in his 2010 New Yorker article argued that without the strong ties that characterized the civil rights movement, mobilizations relying on social media could never attain the same sort of importance—which was rather ill-timed given the events of the Arab Spring, which soon followed. Although there has been much empirical evidence to set against this argument, the view that weak ties are somehow inferior in their capacity to engender political change has been extremely pervasive, forming part of the politics-as-pain principle introduced in Chapter 1.
Different social media platforms vary in the type of network structure effects they produce. Facebook, for instance, started on college campuses with the goal of representing real-world friendships with most content being shared privately among friends or friends of friends and requires users to mutually accept each other’s friendship for a link to form (a symmetric or undirected network). In contrast, Twitter started with most messages being public, gaining notoriety with weak-tie conference co-attendees sharing messages on the platform during South by Southwest Interactive 2007. Twitter generally allows users to follow any user without requiring that user to approve the tie (forming an asymmetric or directed network). Old-fashioned email is still being used in large-scale mail-outs, which can be personalized (as in email from Barak Obama or 38 Degrees), but do not introduce peer-to-peer connections. Politically oriented social media platforms such as Avaaz or petition websites do not necessarily put individuals or peers in touch with each other at all, so network structure effects will rely on the dissemination of these activities on generic social media sites, for example through the sharing of a petition on Facebook, or the tweeting or retweeting of a petition to followers, or the forwarding of mass emails about the petition sent by the campaigning organization. These design differences engender different network structures and different diffusion patterns. Centola, for example, has shown that network structure has a significant effect on the dynamics of behavioural diffusion, with behaviour spreading farther and faster across clustered-lattice networks than across control random networks with the same degree distribution; that is, the reinforcement from locally clustered ties can be highly efficient for promoting behavioural diffusion.71 His study looked at the diffusion of health behaviours, but could equally well apply to the diffusion of political behaviour, particularly given the institutional constraints to geographically scattered policy influence.
We do not address network structure effects in this book: the kind of information received from online social networking platforms, such as the retweet of a retweet of a tweet or the sharing of a YouTube video from the friend of a friend, often comes from such a distant part of an individual’s personal network that the effects are reduced to the information provided in the shared content. So we do not explore the mechanisms by which information diffuses or spreads across networks, although we do present some secondary research on this topic. Rather, we view the weak tie influences that emerge from social media as just one more piece in the jigsaw of contemporary collective action, an aggregate ‘social other’ that people interpret without reference to the specific users from whence the information comes, as discussed in the next section.
Recent research from computational social science tends to support this view, such as the programme of research led by Duncan Watts, a key figure in the study of online social networks and the small worlds phenomenon,72 discussed in Chapter 1. Goel and Watts investigated generic patterns of Internet-based diffusion across communications platforms, networked games, and micro-blogging services, each involving distinct types of content and modes of sharing, including the diffusion of Twitter news stories and a third-party Facebook application asking about people’s political views.73 They found strikingly similar patterns across all the domains they looked at: multistep diffusion was rare across all the online domains, and the vast majority of adoptions occurred within one degree of a seed node. Even for those initiatives that do achieve a large number of participants, the vast majority are only a small distance away from the originator on the network.74 In follow-up work unpublished at the time of writing, Goel at al. found that the spread of petitions is comparatively more viral than that of videos, pictures, and news on Twitter, which they speculate as resulting from the lack of large broadcast channels for petitions. This fits with our preliminary analysis of the network of users who tweeted links to the petitions on the UK government site, which showed that the most central accounts belong to individual users not representing any organization. Although different organizations may be important for any one petition, there is no single organization that is central with many petitions, which reflects the diversity of inputs and underlying pluralism. Even so, Goel et al. found that ‘median structural virality remains surprisingly low and also surprisingly invariant with respect to [diffusion/cascade] size’ for petitions, images, and videos.75 Likewise, Suri and Watts investigated the relationship between the structure of social networks and aggregate levels of cooperative behaviour,76 a relationship hypothesized to be positive through contagion, based on the phenomenon of conditional cooperation (discussed below).77 They do not find evidence of positive contagion in the sense of multistep propagation along a sequence of ties in a static network. Their explanation of this result suggests that network structure is a far less clear determinant of collective action behaviour than previously hypothesized.
A CORNUCOPIA OF SOCIAL INFORMATION
Another way in which social media shape the context of collective action is by providing real-time information about whether and when other people are participating. As outlined in Chapter 1 and discussed in Chapter 4, we use the term ‘social information’ to indicate information about what others intend to do, are doing, or have done. Potential participants take this information (or, lacking this information, their perception of what it might be) into account when they are deciding whether to participate. When such participation takes place online, there is a far greater possibility of the potential participants receiving real-time feedback information about how many other people have participated, something that someone who signs a petition in the street or throws money into a charity collector’s bucket is unlikely to receive.
If you sign a paper-based petition in the street, you don’t know how many other people have signed it. You are reliant on proxy signals, such as the number of signatures on the particular sheet you yourself are signing or the numbers of people queuing to sign it; the assurances of the person with the clipboard who tells you it is going really well; or some kind of gut feeling that other people will sign. When you sign an electronic petition, chances are you will be provided with real-time information about how many others have already signed it. You may well also be provided with a real-time chart showing how many more signatures are required to attain some sort of success, such as to receive the attention of policy makers, or the remaining time until the petition closes. On social media, when you decide whether or not to sign a petition, donate money to a political cause, or participate in an email campaign, the chances are that you will know how many other people have already done so.
We know that social information is an important influence on social behaviour. Through experimental work on conditional cooperation, economists have shown the importance of information about the contributions of others on any person’s willingness to cooperate. This work has shown that people are more likely to contribute to a campaign if they are provided with information that other people are also doing so, and that increasing the numbers of other participants enhances this effect.78 In sociology and political science, a number of experimental studies have shown the importance of social information on people’s willingness to contribute to public goods by undertaking activities such as recycling,79 and voting.80 Social information also provides a crucial signal of viability for a mobilization, that is, evidence of whether or not it has reached or will reach ‘critical mass’.81
As noted above, there is a sense in which network structure effects also act as social information. As network ties become increasingly diffuse as a result of the inclusion of many weak ties, it can be argued that they become more like other sorts of information signals about people’s behaviour, such as the number of people who have signed a petition or voted, rather than providing the stronger social pressure that ‘strong ties’ would engender.
VISIBILITY
Just as social media make individuals aware of what other people are doing, they also have the potential to make other people aware of what the user herself is doing. If a user tweets on Twitter, posts a status or comments on someone else’s status on Facebook, signs an electronic petition that shows the names of signatories, or posts a video on YouTube and disseminates it on other social media, that user is increasing her public profile and making herself visible to a wider audience. Andy Warhol’s ‘fifteen minutes of fame’ may not be any easier to attain today, but the chances of getting a photograph or video viewed by over a million people are almost infinitely higher now than they used to be in the pre-Internet era. In the context of collective action, if a user undertakes some participatory act, it is more likely to be visible to others and therefore to influence them in their own participatory decision making, as we investigate in Chapter 5.
The flipside of visibility is anonymity, and Internet-based platforms vary in the extent to which they provide visibility or anonymity. The most famous cartoon from the early days of the Internet showed a dog typing at a computer screen with the caption ‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’.82 This theme has been taken up at various points since, notably in a play by Alan Perkins, Nobody Knows I’m a Dog, about the lives of six people who find refuge in the anonymity of the Internet. For political action, the extent to which a platform provides visibility or anonymity can be crucially important, and the potential influence of this characteristic varies widely with context. Various experiments have tested the effect of visibility on political participation in liberal democracies, showing that people are more likely to make charitable donations when visible,83 and more likely to vote when other people know whether they vote or not.84 In other contexts however, anonymity may be crucial to whether people feel safe to participate in political action. In the revolutions against authoritarian regimes that constituted the Arab Spring of 2011, for example, early protestors who aligned themselves with online protest groups (such as the Facebook page ‘We Are All Khaled Said’ in Egypt) early on faced risks that most would not have been willing to undertake. Those joining later could hide in the swelling numbers of people who clicked ‘like’ on the page—over five hundred thousand by the time the regime opted to turn off the Internet at the height of the protest—sending a crucial signal of viability to those who came later. But for the earliest joiners, the potential costs of showing themselves to be supportive of the protest could have been tragically high.
Indeed, in the era of social media, it can be argued that the ability to remain anonymous is severely and even dangerously circumscribed on the Internet. In his book Delete, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger argues that Internet-based platforms are endangering society’s ability to forget because of the traces of activity that often remain on computer systems.85 In Mayer-Schönberger’s world of everlasting digital memory, no one will be able to forget that you are—or at one time were—a dog. Such arguments have led to the prospect of policy change at the European level: expiration dates on personal data, after which time they would be removed unless explicit consent were given for them to remain.
As with social information, social media platforms vary in the extent to which they offer visibility or anonymity, and the extent to which they allow your previous contributions to expire or be erased. On most platforms, visibility is vital to operation; people post things on Facebook because they want their friends to see them, tweet because they want their followers to know about something, upload a video to YouTube because they want it to be viewed, and edit an article on Wikipedia (in part, at least) because they want in some way their view of a subject to be widely accepted. But all these platforms have restrictions that will shape any kind of political activity that takes place. On Facebook, most people want only their friends to see most things, meaning that people must befriend someone and have that person approve the friendship if they want to be notified of status changes, whereas on Twitter, a user wishing to follow someone generally requires no approval and is faced with a looser and more public arrangement.
Civic engagement sites also vary in the extent to which they offer visibility or anonymity. The No. 10 Downing Street petition platform that operated from 2006 to 2010, for example, published the names of the most recent five hundred signatories, but the redesigned platform introduced in 2011 shows only the name of the petition initiator. The German petition platform requires the name of all signatories to be public, while the US petition site allows petition signers to list just their zip codes and initials. Some charitable giving platforms, such as JustGiving, offer the option of anonymity for contributors, whereas others do not. Some groups have emerged based entirely on the premise of anonymity, such as the loosely formed Anonymous, discussed above.
BRINGING ORGANIZATIONS BACK IN?
We have argued here that social media individualize the information environment for collective action, highlighting three forms of social influence: network structure effects, social information about the participation of others, and visibility of one’s own actions. In so doing, we have given ourselves a different focus from other work in this field. Academic work on Internet-mediated participation has emphasized the importance of bringing back organizations into the collective action sphere. Bimber and Bimber et al. explored the possibilities for what they call organizationless collective action and introduced the idea of ‘postbureaucratic’ or ‘accelerated’ pluralism,86 but returned to the idea that we will not see ‘an end of the organization in civic life, but rather its transformation’.87 Bimber et al.’s 2012 work Collective Action in Organizations aims to ‘bring the relevance of formal organization back into contemporary collective action’, arguing that digital media enable formal organizations to offer much broader opportunities for people to establish their own participatory styles. David Karpf’s The MoveOn Effect argues that rather than ‘organizing without organizations’, the new media environment has given rise to ‘organizing through different organizations’, and that it is on organizational innovation that we should focus.88 Both works differ from this book by taking successful collective action organizations as the unit of analysis.
In contrast, a long-running programme of research conducted by Bennett and Segerberg has explored the ‘personalization of collective action’.89 Their focus of analysis is the networks of individuals and organizations that make up contemporary protest movements, and they develop a new model of the ‘connective’ action with networks at the core.90 They define three ideal types of contemporary mobilization, of which one is based on the traditional logic of collective action with formal organizations at its core—that is, large organizations seeking to overcome the tendency for members to free ride by providing leadership and individualized goods and services to members. The other two either are based on self-organized networks of individuals with digital media platforms as organizing agents, or are hybrid forms composed of both informal organizational actors and individuals. Their work shares with this book a focus on individuals, but their focus on the network as a unit of analysis and an organizational form in itself moves away from our focus on individual motivations to participate.91
We have seen that a decade of exploding social media use has brought important changes to the information environment in which citizens decide whether or not to participate politically. Most importantly, it has facilitated new tiny acts of participation, microdonations of resources such as time or effort, which were not available before. Both the costs of participation and transaction costs continue to decrease, rendering political participation ever more susceptible to the influences that abound on social media. As rising numbers of citizens spend increasing amounts of time in an information environment that provides them with a continuous stream of consciousness, they are susceptible to different types of social influence on their decision to participate: network structure effects, social information, and visibility. These influences vary across platforms and the contexts in which individuals operate (such as their physical location), which in turn will influence their choice of platform and the way in which they use it. Social media, then, are a permanent, evolving feature of the political weather, in terms of the interconnected system of communication about political events that affects everyone. While the political weather has always been turbulent, subject to changes and frequent squalls, social media draw people into political events in much more surprising and sometimes dramatic ways, from YouTube elections to Twitter storms.
