The Role of New Media in Protest Organisation

Qualitative content analysis of social network sites

In addition to the expert interviews, a further research method was necessary to receive a full picture of the use of social media by the organisations. Therefore, content analysis of the most popular social network sites Facebook and Twitter were conducted.

As all of the above organisations own a Twitter account, the decision was made to analyse the respective Twitter entries that were concerned with The Wave march. For this the individual Twitter pages of the organisations were sieved through for those entries that explicitly mentioned The Wave or the SCCC. All entries of an account were scaned, starting with the very first entry to the very last one at the time of research (May 2010). Those entries that mentioned the protest or the coalition either following a hashtag (e.g. #thewave, #SCCC), as a retweet of another post or as the organisation’s own posts were selected. These Twitter entries lie between the time period of February 2009 and January 2010.

Regarding Facebook, only the pages occupied by the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition were analysed, as they on their own produced sufficient useful data in terms of numbers of discussion board entries. In this case the discussion boards of the group page of SCCC and the discussion board of the event page for The Wave were the focus of attention. Here, the entries span a time frame from July 2009 to January 2010.

The collection and analysis of Tweets and Facebook entries that was generated about The Wave was subject of a coding system, which was established in relation to the research question and the related themes³. The coding frame was constructed after modules that were reoccurring in the texts. Modules are a building block of a coding frame, which are then sustained by codes. Following this schema of modularity facilitates the efficiency and coherence of coding (Bauer, 2003: 142). Regarding this case, in order to illustrate the modularity, the module mobilisation for example is build up with the codes of “solidarity”, “blame” and “call for action”.

As Twitter and Facebook have different functions and purposes, the coding was adapted to each platform individually, although the main modules remain the same.

The modules that are resulting from the research question and the respective theoretical background are divided into the three concepts of interactivity, awareness and mobilisation. These three categories combined give important insight into the potential use of social media from an organisational perspective, in order to engage users with a certain issue.

Module 1. Interactivity

Interactivity is one of the most prominent characteristics of social networking sites and is the main difference to the static websites of the Web 1.0 information culture of the previous internet era. As users get the possibility to engage and communicate with the organisations online through social media platforms, the possibility for identification and interest in the cause can potentially be increased. The possibility to answer questions and keep the constituency updated with new information in real time, offers organisations to bind the users and followers by providing interesting links, pictures and other information.

Interactivity has been divided into three levels by McMillan (2006), user-to-user interactivity, user-to-document interactivity and user-to-system interactivity. Looking at the ways in which the organisations make use of these forms of interactivity, should show whether they fully exploit all opportuninities of interactivity and thus make use of the maximal involvement of users. With regard to Twitter, interactivity is scanned with the codes of ‘Links posted’, ‘Retweets’ (re-posting a Tweet from another user on Twitter), ‘Calls for Retweets’, ‘Twitter Actions’ (such as ‘Twitterstorm’ or ‘Twilence’), ‘During the march’ and ‘User-to-user’.

Concerning Facebook, the module is divided into different codes, as different forms of messaging and possibilities for interaction exist. Especially the viral spread of messages is common, when certain items are shared and passed forward among members of a social network (Bennett & Segerberg, 2009:4). Therefore it had to be distinguished whether a message was created by the organisation or by the users. The coding of Facebook was thus divided into: ‘Links posted’, “User posts – positive and negative’, ‘Organisation posts’, ‘References to other SNS’ and ‘During the march’.

Module 2. Awareness

Without awareness for a cause among the public, in this case the consequences of climate change, any protest organisation would be redundant. It is therefore necessary for the organisation to spread information about the issue that is in the focus of the protest, as well as about the protest event itself. The social network sites Facebook and Twitter allow the SCCC to publish information in a personalised way directed at the target group (Ward, et al., 2005: 654) The code of “information” looks for entries that are plainly informative about the taking place of the protest march and the issue of climate change. It has also been established that movement organisations are still dependent on traditional media, despite the possibilities of social media in terms of raising awareness. Therefore, the code “reference to traditional media” (includes websites of traditional media outlets, such as bbcnews.co.uk or guardian.co.uk) is useful to discover the relationship with traditional media by the organisations. Furthermore, organisation-to-follower communication, meaning that the SCCC for example directly relates posts to requests by followers has a binding effect on the user and shows him that his request is taken seriously. This makes raising awareness more effective, as also other users might acknowledge this act of communication. “Organisation-to-follower communication” is thus also a code for awareness.

Especially regarding interaction on Facebook, the concept of direct communication between organisation and user plays an important role, as the structure of the discussion board is build towards this form, rather than the structure of Twitter, which is more a tool for one-to-many communication.

Module 3. Mobilisation

Mobilisation is a crucial part of protest organisation, as a protest that is only attend by a small number of people, arguably has less impact on the targeted group. It can be seen as the most difficult process in the protest organisation, because here people are required to leave their living rooms and actually step on the street and raise their voices.

The raising of emotions (Jasper, 1998), such as dissent (blame) and the creation of a feeling of solidarity (Fenton, 2008) facilitate the process of mobilisation and are thus important assets in the process. Blame and solidarity are thus turned into codes for Twitter and Facebook. The SCCC has created additional activities that are representative of the Wave march and are calling for action, such as the Mexican wave videos submitted by users and the Splash Dance, a form of flashmob. These projects encourage users to engage with the march and mobilise their participation not only for a classic street protest, but also for more active and fun involvement. Therefore, a code for each of these activities was established, together with a code for general calls for action, which includes calls for attending the march itself or events organised by the member organisations.

1. T
   
   witter

Twitter is a social network site and microblogging service, based on the concepts of Web 2.0 and user created content. Users create a short profile and can send a message of up to 140 characters called Tweets that are shown on the author’s page and can be read by his followers, or subscribers. The short length of the messages is created to resemble SMS (short message service) of mobile phones and allows for quick updates. Tweets can be posted over the Twitter website, or through external devices, such as mobile phones, usually smart phones, with the help of special applications. Twitter describes itself as “a real-time information network powered by people all around the world that lets you share and discover what’s happening now” (Twitter.com, 2010). Users can communicate with other users through Twitter or simply post information, yet their posts are always also accessible to the wider public and can come up in keyword searches, unless an account is privatised. A key theme of the Twitter concept is the openness that is a part of Web 2.0 and promotes the accessibility for all.

All five organisations own Twitter accounts, but post messages with varying frequency.

Envision for example has only been active on Twitter since the 19^th of March, 2009, whereas Action Aid’ Bollocks to Poverty has posted its first tweet on the 9^th of May, 2008.

The five organisations also used Twitter to promote The Wave protest. In order to understand how the organisations engaged with Twitter as a social medium, the Twitter accounts of all five organisations are analysed in relation to the research question and the modules that have been mentioned above. The number of Tweets posted about the protest varies considerably from organisation to organisation. While the large organisations, and especially the main organising body SCCC, post a large number of Tweets (#TheWave etc.), the smaller organisations are less active regarding the promotion of The Wave. Table 3 below represents the number of Tweets by each organisation over the time period from which they have been posted.

Table 3. Number of Tweets by organisation

Organisation	No. of Tweets	Time period
SCCC	347	February 3^rd, 2009 – January 8^th, 2010
Oxfam	58	October 23^rd, 2009 – December 11^th, 2009
Action Aid – Bollocks to Poverty	37	December 10^th, 2009 – October 14^th, 2009
Envision	4	November 5^th, 2009 – December 10^th, 2009
Campaign Against Climate Change	10	August 11^th, 2009 – December 29^th, 2009
Total number of Tweets analysed	456

In order to facilitate the analysis of these Twitter entries, as mentioned above, a coding system was established, based on reoccurring themes in the posts and in relation to the concepts resulting from the research question. Fourteen codes were used for the analysis of Twitter, creating the three modules.

Table 4. The Coding System for Twitter

Module	Code
Interactivity	Links posted
	Retweets
	Call for Retweets
	Twitter Action
	During the march
	One-to-one interactivity
Awareness	Information
	Reference to traditional media
	Organisation-to-follower communication
Mobilisation	Solidarity
	Call for Action
	Blame
	The Wave video participation
	Splash Dance

2. F
   
   acebook

This social network site was founded in February 2004, allowing people to connect and communicate with their friends and family and has 400 million active users by 2010 (Facebook Statistics, 2010), which makes it the largest and most frequented social network site worldwide (Alexa, 2010). Facebook originally was directed at University students and their networks, but has been opened for everybody a few years ago, thus also follows the concept of openness and accessibility. The average user has connection to around 130 friends and the possibility to engage with 160 million objects on the site, which includes pages, groups and events (Facebook Factsheet, 2010). Users create personal profiles, disclosing information such as name, date of birth, gender, personal interests. Users befriend other users and can send open and private messages to their friends and other users to communicate with them. Users have a lot of control about the privacy of their profiles and can restrict who can see what types of information about them on their profiles. The interactive features of Facebook are found on the “wall”, a message board on the user’s profile, on which users post messages or links and pictures. Other activities for users include pokes, the possibility to upload and create photo albums, tag users in pictures and comment on them, updating a status. An interesting feature is the Mini-Feed, a log on which users can see each other’s actions, updates of group- or fanpages that they have subscribed to, status updates, new photo albums etc.

The SCCC is also represented on Facebook, on the one hand in form of a group page, on the other it had created an event page for The Wave protest. On both pages discussions about The Wave protest were taking place. As both profiles were visited by large numbers of users and the coalition was the main organiser of the protest, only these two profiles were subject of analysis. The other four organisation’s profiles were excluded, as either there were multiple profiles of one organisation, which made it difficult to distinguish which was the main page and because The Wave was not represented much on these profiles. Furthermore, the discussion board entries on the group and the event page of the SCCC and The Wave generate a large enough number for an appropriate sample. Thus, only those entries that were related to The Wave were selected for analysis, in which entries by the coalition itself and normal users were included. It has to be kept in mind that the discussion pages of both profiles allow for different degrees of interactivity. The group profile page allows users to post pictures, links and videos; additionally users can “like” certain entries and comment on them directly in relation to the post. These comments, referring to posts that were published, were not counted as separate posts (as shown in Table 5 below). The event page is less interactive. Users can only post simple comments and links, but users can not “like” or comment directly on a post. All posts on both profiles are shown organised by date.

Table 5. Number of Facebook posts by profile

Profile	Posted by	No. of posts	Time period
SCCC - Group Profile	SCCC	82	July 21^st 2009 – January 11^th 2010
	Individual users	55
	Total entries	137
The Wave - Event Profile	SCCC	30	July 21^st 2009 – December 8^th, 2009
	Individual users	310
	Total entries	340
Overall total of entries analysed		477

The coding system that was used for the analysis of the Facebook discussion threads differs slightly from the one used for Twitter, because different function are available and the social network sites serve different purposes. Direct, one-to-one communication plays a more prominent role on Facebook, because users and the organisation can communicate more easily and for other users more comprehensibly than on Twitter. Therefore, in reference to interactivity, a distinction in the coding was made between posts by users and posts by the organisation. Within the category of user posts, it was looked at whether the posts were positive or negative or general questions about the march. Kavada (2010: 111) points out that the threshold for conflict seems lower in online communication than face-to-face. Thus discussion threats often involve insults and no only sensible discussion. This is called ‘flaming’. Flaming is also present in the Facebook discussion threats and is included in negative posts of users. Posts from the organisation were distinguished between answers to questions, or general information. A further code that was added is ‘Reference to other SNS’, in order to look at how other channels that are used, are being promoted. The analysis of Facebook posts came with some difficulties. A simple post can easily develop into a thread of comments by users and the organisation. This results in too large an amount of comments for analysis. Therefore threads were only counted as one post and attributed to the orginial author.

Table 6. The coding system for Facebook

Module	Code
Interactivity	Links posted
	References to other SNS
	User posts – negative vs. positive remarks/ Questions
	Organisation posts (incl. Tom Allen) / Answers
	During the march
Awareness	Information
	Reference to traditional media
	One-to-one communication
Mobilisation	Solidarity – We (organisation) vs. We (people)
	Direct communication
	Call for Action
	Blame
	The Wave video participation
	Splash Dance