Social Media as The Contagion of Protest: From Nation to Another

Just as the global pandemic put a hindrance on street protests, the death of George Floyd in US police custody thrusted a global protest movement against police brutality and racial injustice. Even in the last few days, the hashtag of #MosiTidakPercaya to Indonesia's UU Cipta Kerja issued by local parliament, triggered big demonstrations in many Indonesian cities. Following this, the hashtag of #WhatisHappeninginThailand has also triggered many student protests across Thailand against the country's injustice and systematic cruelty. Again, social media is the main channel of protest engagement.

Social Networks are The Catalyst of Contagious Protests

In the recent research published by Arezki et al., social media is found to be acting as the catalyst for spontaneous street protests spillovers across countries. The research uses data on non-violent and unorganized protests, as well as their coverage in news media for 207 countries for the period 2000 to 2020.

Technically, the research uses the number of Facebook subscribers as a fraction of the population to capture social media penetration in a country. This happens as Facebook accounts for the lion's share in pretty much all world regions among different social media platforms. The figure below shows the evolution of the street-protest frequency affected by the news coverage. The research's measure of normalized article counts is constructed by taking the ratio between the number of articles mentioning "street protests" and the total number of articles for each country-month pair multiplied by 100.

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The results point to significant spillovers of foreign protests to domestic protests with an important role from social media using the news-based measure. Between countries with social media penetration larger than 30% (measured in 2018), a one standard deviation increase in foreign protests, which is 3.1 more protests per million persons in the foreign country, leads to 1.2 more domestic protests per million persons. In short, news-based protests about neighboring countries in the previous months have significant effects on current month domestic news-based protests, with the consideration of how news circulate easier and faster through social network services or social media.

Sources: Dow Jones FACTIVA and calculation of Arezki et. al

Conclusion

When there is suppression of protests, either by the government or by the media, social media is increasingly used for spreading text, audio, photos, and videos of the riots. When repression is related to social media, as was the case in Egypt, ironically this action can exacerbate the revolt and make the citizens angrier, thus encouraging greater interaction between them and leading them to seek new hybrid communication tactics to overcome the barriers imposed by the repressive government.

Moreover, digital tools, including networks and mobile technology, are evidence of snowball effect, which is only possible because of the structure and design of modern digital communications that transcend the traditional geopolitical boundaries. At the end of the day, we can conclude that social media makes it much easier for protesters in one country to raise their voice, and for sympathizers in other countries to read, learn and emulate.  In other words, the coverage of a social movement on news through social media is the catalyst of contagious protests in other parts of the world.

Muhammad Akbar Putra | Undergraduate Economics Student Batch 2019 | Staff of Economic Studies Division at KANOPI FEB UI

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