The psychology of online activism and social movements: relations between online and offline collective action

Greijdanus, Hedy; Fernandes, Carlos A. de Matos; Turner-Zwinkels, Felicity Mary; Honari, Ali; Roos, Carla Anne; Rosenbusch, Hannes; Postmes, Tom

doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2020.03.003

Cited by 78 publications

(53 citation statements)

References 49 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…This measure was not an “active” measure of online involvement with the Yellow Vest movement (e.g., sharing/liking Yellow Vest political posts or news). Indeed, to the extent that seemingly trivial online behaviors could be considered as online activism, we opted for using “passive” measures of news uptake to avoid confounding with our outcome variable (i.e., offline activism, see Greijdanus et al., 2020).…”

Section: Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of social identity in the explanation of collective action: An intergroup perspective on the Yellow Vests movement

Mahfud

Urbanska

Guimond

2021

J Applied Social Pyschol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Social psychologists have developed influential theoretical models to understand intergroup conflicts, radicalism, and collective action. November 2018 saw the emergence of a new powerful movement in France named the Yellow Vests. Born on social media, the movement has sustained an unprecedented period of intense protests and violent clashes with the police, challenging the French government. As such, this movement offers an ideal context to examine the real‐world relevance of current social‐psychological theorizing. Using a social identity and self‐categorization perspective, two correlational studies (three samples, N = 1,849) tested the role of self‐categorization as a group member, or social identity, in accounting for individual participation in normative and nonnormative collective action. Using different operationalizations of identification, both studies confirm a powerful role of identification as a Yellow Vest and provided evidence that the effect of social media use on collective action is fully mediated by self‐categorization as a Yellow Vest. An alternative model suggesting that social media use mediated the relation between social identity and collective action was not supported by the data.

show abstract

Section: Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

The role of social identity in the explanation of collective action: An intergroup perspective on the Yellow Vests movement

Mahfud

Urbanska

Guimond

2021

J Applied Social Pyschol

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…‘annoyed’, ‘angry’, and ‘stupid’), with relative frequencies being interpreted as regional levels of hostility on social media. The LIWC measures of anger and swearing were used previously for assessing hostility (Hancock, Woodworth, & Boochever, 2018; Ksiazek, 2015; Matsumoto, Hwang, & Frank, 2016). While we believe that the validation procedures for the hostility measures should generally be conducted on the individual level (see citations), we ascertain their validity on the collective level in the Supporting Information (see file ‘validity of hostility measure.R’).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Notice that the reverse effect, offline behaviour affecting online behaviour, has also been observed across a range of studies and that the order and interaction of both spheres are ongoing issues of debate (e.g. Greijdanus et al, 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Interregional and intraregional variability of intergroup attitudes predict online hostility

2020

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

To what extent are intergroup attitudes associated with regional differences in online aggression and hostility? We test whether regional attitude biases towards minorities and their local variability (i.e. intraregional polarization) independently predict verbal hostility on social media. We measure online hostility using large US American samples from Twitter and measure regional attitudes using nationwide survey data from Project Implicit. Average regional biases against Black people, White people, and gay people are associated with regional differences in social media hostility, and this effect is confounded with regional racial and ideological opposition. In addition, intraregional variability in interracial attitudes is also positively associated with online hostility. In other words, there is greater online hostility in regions where residents disagree in their interracial attitudes. This effect is present both for the full resident sample and when restricting the sample to White attitude holders. We find that this relationship is also, in part, confounded with regional proportions of ideological and racial groups (attitudes are more heterogeneous in regions with greater ideological and racial diversity). We discuss potential mechanisms underlying these relationships, as well as the dangers of escalating conflict and hostility when individuals with diverging intergroup attitudes interact. © 2020 The Authors. European Journal of Personality published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of European Association of Personality Psychology

show abstract

“…Social media platforms enable online social cohesion by offering distributed information-gathering and realtime information dissemination. Given its accessibility and proficiency as an information exchange tool, Twitter has provided social and political activists an opportunity to complement [8], and not hinder participation in [9,10], real-world social mobilization. During the 2012 Italian protests for global economic change, tweeting was determined to be more effective locally in discussing real-world, real-time events than traditional mainstream media platforms [11].…”

Section: Social Media and Social Movementsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…RR was consistently below chance for the 29th-39th windows. DET showed aboveor nearly above-chance values in windows [7][8][9][10][11].…”

Section: Plos Onementioning

confidence: 99%

Online social cohesion reflects real-world group action in Syria during the Arab Spring

Chiovaro

Windsor

et al. 2021

PLoS ONE

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In recent years, political activists have taken to social media platforms to rapidly reach broad audiences. Despite the prevalence of micro-blogging in these sociopolitical movements, the degree to which virtual mobilization reflects or drives real-world movements is unclear. Here, we explore the dynamics of real-world events and Twitter social cohesion in Syria during the Arab Spring. Using the nonlinear methods cross-recurrence quantification analysis and windowed cross-recurrence quantification analysis, we investigate if frequency of events of different intensities are coupled with social cohesion found in Syrian tweets. Results indicate that online social cohesion is coupled with the counts of all, positive, and negative events each day but shows a decreased connection to negative events when outwardly directed events (i.e., source events) were considered. We conclude with a discussion of implications and applications of nonlinear methods in political science research.

show abstract

The psychology of online activism and social movements: relations between online and offline collective action

Cited by 78 publications

References 49 publications

The role of social identity in the explanation of collective action: An intergroup perspective on the Yellow Vests movement

The role of social identity in the explanation of collective action: An intergroup perspective on the Yellow Vests movement

Interregional and intraregional variability of intergroup attitudes predict online hostility

Online social cohesion reflects real-world group action in Syria during the Arab Spring

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About