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CHAPTER SIX

Come Together, Right Now: Retweeting in the Social Model of Protest Mobilization

AARON S. VEENSTRA, NARAYANAN IYER, WENJING XIE, BENJAMIN A. LYONS, CHANG SUP PARK, AND YANG FENG

Collective action associated with social movement organizations has often been modeled as a top-down group behavior (Oberschall, 1973). Formal organizations mobilize membership and sympathetic individuals to protest by taking advantage of formal organizational ties and communicating from the organization to the public (Oliver & Marwell, 1992). This model has held true for both physical protest gatherings and other types of activist behavior organized by social movement organizations (Oliver, 1983).

This formal model is challenged by the low-cost, informal networking potential of the Internet, particularly social media platforms. These technologies allow informal groups to form and mobilize apart from formal organizations, with no continued movement structure. They also afford greater incidental participation, such as information redistribution, lobbying of public and private interests, and network bridging.

The possibilities afforded by these technologies have been most dramatically put on display in recent uprisings in several Middle Eastern countries where formal social movement organizations play a restricted role. While there is no consensus about social media’s impact on these events, it is clear that the speed and distributed informality of social media allowed for quick, secret mobilization. As such, examining communication patterns within these new, sometimes ephemeral networks is a key part of reassessing our understanding of how protest movements...