Unpacking the Political Effects of Social Movements With a Strong Digital Component: The Case of #IdleNoMore in Canada

Abstract

While many scholars have studied collective action with a strong social media component led by marginalized groups, few have unpacked how this form of political engagement captures the attention of established political elites and, in some cases, influences the mainstream political narrative and policy outcomes. Fewer have focused on the political impact of social media-intensive Indigenous protest movements. This article addresses these gaps in the academic literature. It does so by examining the online and offline impact of the Indigenous-led Idle No More movement at the federal level in Canada. To evaluate the movement’s effects on the public political narrative on Indigenous-related issues, this article reviews the content of the House of Commons Question Period before and after the emergence of the movement in December 2012. To measure Idle No More’s impact on policy outcomes, this article compares federal budgets and the volume of policy proposals pertaining to Indigenous Affairs introduced in the years preceding the beginning of the movement to those that came in the years following it. Semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders are also conducted to better comprehend the political impact of the movement. The study posits that protests coincided with momentary changes to the salience of Indigenous policy issues, but not with significant policy outcomes in that area.

Introduction: Marginality and Social Media

“…Every article in this collection focuses on a population that is significantly under-represented in scholarly research more generally. Populations of study include people of color (Davis, this issue; Smith et al, this issue), refugees (Udwan et al, this issue), LGBTQ + people (Birnholtz et al, this issue), people with disabilities (Trevisan, this issue), indigenous people (Carlson & Frazer, this issue; Lupien, this issue; Richez et al, this issue), and people from the Global South (Birnholtz et al, this issue; Soriano & Cabañes, this issue). Although social media have many limitations (centralized corporate control, limited reach to some parts of the world, and financial barriers to entry, to name just a few), the possibility to expand populations of study through techniques like observation, asynchronous participation, and flexible interview scheduling was embraced by most in this collection.…”

“…Sometimes, these traditions are united under topic areas and other times they point to specific theoretical constructs. As an example of the former, Epstein and Quinn (this issue) elaborate understanding of disparities in privacy literacy, and Richez et al (this issue) explore social media effects on policy through a lens of political narratives. These ideas are not primarily theoretical per se, but are situated in long-standing conceptual traditions on privacy, narrative, and so on.…”

“…Finally, we note that many of the pieces published in this special issue reveal insights that can and should be brought back to the communities that informed them. How, for example, can knowledge gained from the relationship (or lack thereof) between social media campaigns and policy change alter the course of future campaigns (see Richez et al, this issue)? How can knowledge of location-aware systems inform future design for individuals from marginalized communities (see Birnholtz et al, this issue)?…”

Weaving Indigenous and Western ways of knowing in ecotoxicology and wildlife health: a review of Canadian studies

“…Lastly, Indigenous resistance movements, like Idle No More (2012), have received significant mainstream and social media coverage, which can create a ripple effect that positively influences public perceptions of historical, social, and environmental issues facing Indigenous communities and Peoples in Canada, thus creating a greater societal interest and awareness in these topics (Moscato 2016;Wilson and Zheng 2021). In turn, awareness of critical issues related to Indigenous Peoples has been suggested to drive social change by impacting the political narrative at a federal level in Canada (Richez et al 2020) and is likely to play a role in informing "what funders, researchers, NGOs and settler activists support, sharpening the focus on where time, labour and money is invested" (Gobby et al 2022).…”

Framing Indigenous protest in the online public sphere: A comparative frame analysis

“…There is a growing body of research on how Indigenous actors use social media for political communication (Carlson and Dreher, 2018; Carlson et al, 2017; Ginsburg, 2016; Pace, 2018; Raynauld et al, 2018). Yet there is less work on the extent to which their messages resonate in the online world (Dreher et al, 2016; Raynauld et al, 2018; Richez et al, 2020). There remains a gap in our theoretical and empirical knowledge with respect to the impact of social media on the capacity of Indigenous CSOs to shape the narrative in the public sphere through strategic framing.…”