Facebook Causes Protests

Abstract

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Profiling Insurrection: Characterizing Collective Action Using Mobile Device Data

“…Prior work has emphasized the role of social media and (dis)information dynamics in driving involvement in collective action, especially protests (Christensen and Garfias, 2018;Fergusson and Molina, 2020;Manacorda and Tesei, 2020). Indeed, we find that protest involvement is also increasing with Parler video uploads, suggesting a likely correlation between slanted social media engagement and MASA participation.…”

“…Prior work has demonstrated the role of economic conditions, political repression, exclusion of racial, ethnic, or economic minorities, use of force, (mis)information campaigns and social media in explaining when and where protests (Steinert-Threlkeld, 2017;Chyzh and Labzina, 2018;Justino and Martorano, 2019;Fergusson and Molina, 2020;Martinez, Jessen and Xu, 2020;Manacorda and Tesei, 2020), riots (Sullivan, 2019;Hsiao and Radnitz, 2020), violence (Müller and Schwarz, 2020), and armed opposition movements emerge (Oppenheim et al, 2015;Dippel and Heblich, 2021). A significant body of research has also provided evidence that these instances of collective action have affected political reforms (Tarrow, 1994;Rasler, 1996;Kurzman, 1996;Chenoweth and Stephan, 2008;Gillion, 2013;Andrews and Gaby, 2015;Klein and Regan, 2018;De Vogel, 2020), voting patterns (Wasow, 2020;Enos, Kaufman and Sands, 2019;Larreboure and González, 2019), social attitudes and cohesion (Branton et al, 2015;Muñoz and Anduiza, 2019;Mazumder, 2019), and economic activity.…”

Media and Social Capital

“…This supports the view that social media facilitated coordination itself, rather than spreading information critical of the government. Fergusson et al (2020) take a more aggregate approach to exploring the link between online social media and political engagement, using data on a large number of countries over more than a decade. For identification, they exploit the arguably exogenous timing of the release of Facebook versions in different languages.…”

Social Media and Mental Health

“…The empirical strategy adopted in this paper is closely related to the one in Armona (2019), who leverages the staggered introduction of Facebook across U.S. colleges to study labor market outcomes more than a decade later. Enikolopov et al (2020) and Fergusson and Molina (2020) exploit the expansion of social media platform VK in Russia and of Facebook worldwide, respectively, to show that social media use increases protest participation. Bursztyn et al (2019) and Müller and Schwarz (2020) exploit the expansion of VK and Twitter, respectively, and find that social media use increases the prevalence of hate crimes.…”