Commitment in the cloud? Social media participation in the sunflower movement

ABSTRACT

Social media participants in digitally enabled protests have long been criticized for their lack of commitment. Many bypassed this issue and argued that social media’s positive impact on protests does not require high commitment. We empirically test the lack of commitment claim in the case of the 2014 Sunflower Movement in Taiwan. Using survey data from a sample of 801 participants, we find a group of highly active social media participants – what we described as the ‘cloud activists’ – who operated exclusively online during the movement. We find that the commitment of the ‘cloud activists’, in terms of both identification and sense of efficacy, is at least in par with, if not always necessarily higher than, most offline participants. Furthermore, contrasting previous findings on the positive linear relationship between social media use and offline participation, we find the effect of social media can be either positive or negative, depending on the level of social media activity. We suggest that production in virtual space of contentious politics may consist of different processes – peer production by the online crowd and connective leadership by the ‘cloud activists’ who shoulder extra responsibilities. Identifying ‘cloud activists’ may help us achieve a better understanding of these two interrelated processes as well as the way in which digitally enabled protests persist and transform over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Social media
• social movements
• cloud activists
• commitment
• digital activism
• protest

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the organizers and participants of the ‘Digital Media, Political Polarization, and Challenges to Democracy’ symposium for a great environment to discuss and improve our paper. We would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their useful comments. We are grateful for the thoughtful and constructive feedback on our earlier drafts from Prof. Steven Pfaff and Prof. Lance Bennett. Finally, we thank the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology of the University of Washington for supporting the computing environment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Yuan Hsiao is a Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and a Master's student in Statistics at the University of Washington. His areas of specialization are quantitative methods, social media, collective action, social networks, and social psychology. He has recently published in New Media & Society and the Routledge Taiwan Series on Taiwan's Social Movements.

Yunkang Yang is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. His research areas include political communication, information and communication technology, and journalism. His dissertation is on disinformation and right wing media in the US. His research has been published on the International Journal of Communication, Asian Journal of Communication, and various Chinese academic journals.

ORCID

Yuan Hsiao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-8342-4938

Notes

1 Changing the threshold to 1.5 SD does not change results.

2 The mean of the normalized index is set to zero.

3 The reduction of sample size is mainly because certain respondents were not sure about their commitment level, resulting in missing values.

4 See Adolph (2016). simcf: Counterfactuals and confidence intervals for estimated regression models. R package version 0.2.15.