The Role of Social Media in Collective Action and The Capitol Insurrection
In this class we have discussed how acts of protest large and small constitute ‘high risk’ activities, and how individuals choose whether or not to engage in rebellious behavior based on the support that they find within their own communities. In the case of reporting a coworker to a superior or confronting someone about cheating in a sporting event that might involve a few hushed conversations and strategizing between friends to gauge if enough people are ‘with you’, but in the case of national political unrest, people cast a wider net to gather information. This begs the question: how does the involvement of social media platforms affect our model of collective action? In particular, if we examine the events leading to the siege of the US capitol on January 6th, 2020, we can see how platforms like Facebook distort perceptions of risk and the popularity or validity of anti-establishment sentiments.
The Vox article linked below by Rebecca Heilweil and Shirin Ghaffary discusses how the algorithms on sites like Facebook and Twitter boosted the content of violent political-extremist organizers and others spreading misinformation because of its potential for virality and high levels of interaction. Additionally, the membership of political groups on Facebook like #StopTheSteal (which was eventually banned but only to be replaced by many similar groups) swelled in the lead up to the election (as discussed in the linked article from the Washington Post). These groups as well as the communities on other sites that became popular planning hubs for the insurrection on sites like Gab and Parler with less administrative oversight constitute clusters, in which behavior and information spreads quickly. Also, crucially, clusters are more resistant to the adoption of new behaviors or ideas.
This digital context for the uprising in January 2020 adds an interesting dynamic to our in-class model of collective action, especially when considered in light of Stefania Milan’s 2015 article, “When Algorithms Shape Collective Action: Social Media and the Dynamics of Could Protesting.” Stephania discusses how networking platforms enhance the power of certain messages by “enabl[ing] each participant to contribute in the first person to the definition of the situation while echoing with its ‘reverberating’ mechanism.” In other words, peoples communities of support for collective action are dramatically expanded on social media because of the way that platforms like Facebook both encourage and also provide structure to the way that people express their opinions. People who may not have said anything themselves ‘like’ and ‘share’ posts, demonstrating their support for a cause with only the spread of a button and removing the nuance of having to put your thoughts into your own words.
Stefania also discusses the role of networking platforms as unseen content coordinators. Their algorithms search for content that will be affirming to the viewer, filtering for things that they ‘want to see,’ which can have the effect of making other viewpoints seem much less mainstream. How high risk might the siege on the capital have seemed when people’s newsfeeds were dominated by an outraged subsection of content creators that had been delegitimizing the election, when all their friends seemed to be liking the same posts calling for action? When even political leaders themselves seemed to be echoing that call? All in all these platforms served to distort our class model by vastly increasing both the number of social connections that the participants had access to, and the amount of information that they could gather about who else might support the cause, while inhibiting how ‘risky’ the behavior might seem at all by filtering out opposing opinions.
With a lack of tangible, lasting consequences for the platforms that harbored and misled these communities in the months and weeks leading to the election-related unrest, it seems unlikely that the changes will take place to prevent this cycle from repeating itself in the future. Social networks may not generate content, but they do decide which content we see, and I encourage people to view them as publishers that are sending you a message, rather than just facilitators that allow you to receive them.
Sources:
https://www.vox.com/recode/22221285/trump-online-capitol-riot-far-right-parler-twitter-facebook
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/22/jan-6-capitol-riot-facebook/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2056305115622481