David vs. Goliath: transnational grassroots outreach and empirical evidence from the #HongKongProtests Twitter network

ABSTRACT

This study analyzes the digital transnational advocacy network of the 2019 Hong Kong Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) movement on Twitter. We present how grassroots users strategically utilize social media for achieving diplomatic engagement with foreign actors. The Twitter network analysis and natural language processing of tweets (N = 88,800) identify the key opinion leaders and their three core grassroots frames: universal values, humanitarian concerns, and geopolitics. We find that the low threshold of Twitter participation provides additional direct channels for ordinary users to engage with foreign politicians and create their own public opinion wave. The Anti-ELAB digital transnational grassroots advocacy network was found to have more high-profile actors, such as corporations and celebrities, due to pressure from grassroots users to stand with them. Though the two traditional frames, universal values and humanitarian concerns, adopted from the organizational-centered outreach remain prevalent, grassroots users extend geopolitical frames to incorporate their cultural capital and economic power.

KEYWORDS:

• social movement
• grassroots
• transnational communication
• network analysis
• natural language processing

Notes

1 Joy Sharon Yi and Christian Caryl, “Opinion | The Year of the Street Protest,” Washington Post, December 10, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/opinions/global-opinions/2019-was-the-year-of-the-street/.

2 Francis Lee et al., “Affordances, Movement Dynamics, and a Centralized Digital Communication Platform in a Networked Movement,” Information, Communication & Society (2021): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118x.2021.1877772.

3 Isabella Steger, “Hong Kong's Fast-Learning, Dexterous Protesters Are Stumped by Twitter,” Quartz, September 1, 2019, https://qz.com/1698002/hong-kong-protesters-flock-to-twitter-to-shape-global-message/.

4 Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

5 Dhiraj Murthy, Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 11.

6 Michael Colaresi, “A Boom with Review: How Retrospective Oversight Increases the Foreign Policy Ability of Democracies,” American Journal of Political Science 56, no. 3 (2012): 671–89.

7 Maria Bakardjieva, Mylynn Felt, and Delia Dumitrica, “The Mediatization of Leadership: Grassroots Digital Facilitators as Organic Intellectuals, Sociometric Stars and Caretakers,” Information, Communication & Society 21, no. 6 (2018): 899–914; Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2018), 111–40.

8 Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 2–21.

9 Ibid., 2.

10 Bridget L. Coggins, “Rebel Diplomacy: Theorizing Violent Non-State Actors’ Strategic Use of Talk,” in Rebel Governance in Civil War, ed. Ana Arjona, Nelson Kasfir, and Zachariah Mampilly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 98–118; Daniel W. Drezner and Henry Farrell, “Introduction: Blogs, Politics and Power: A Special Issue of Public Choice,” Public Choice 134, nos. 1–2 (2007): 1–13.

11 Michèle Bos and Jan Melissen, “Rebel Diplomacy and Digital Communication: Public Diplomacy in the Sahel,” International Affairs 95, no. 6 (2019): 1331–48; Benjamin T. Jones and Eleonora Mattiacci, “A Manifesto, in 140 Characters or Fewer: Social Media as a Tool of Rebel Diplomacy,” British Journal of Political Science 49, no. 2 (2017): 739–61.

12 Linda Hon, “Digital Social Advocacy in the Justice for Trayvon Campaign,” Journal of Public Relations Research 27, no. 4 (2015): 299–321.

13 Donatella della Porta and Lorenzo Mosca, “Global-Net for Global Movements? A Network of Networks for a Movement of Movements,” Journal of Public Policy 25, no. 1 (2005): 165–90; Kelly Garrett, “Protest in an Information Society: A Review of Literature on Social Movements and New ICTs,” Information, Communication & Society 9, no. 2 (2006): 202–24.

14 Colaresi, “A Boom with Review.”

15 Jon Western, “Sources of Humanitarian Intervention: Beliefs, Information, and Advocacy in the U.S. Decisions on Somalia and Bosnia,” International Security 26, no. 4 (2002): 112–42.

16 Cheryl S. Y. Shea and Francis L. F. Lee, “Public Diplomacy via Twitter: Opportunities and Tensions,” Chinese Journal of Communication (2022): https://doi.org/10.1080/17544750.2022.2081988.

17 Sebastián Valenzuela, Teresa Correa, and Homero Gil de Zúñiga, “Ties, Likes, and Tweets: Using Strong and Weak Ties to Explain Differences in Protest Participation across Facebook and Twitter Use,” in Studying Politics Across Media, ed. Leticia Bode and Emily K. Vraga (London: Routledge, 2020), 117–34.

18 Garrett, “Protest in an Information Society.”

19 Hermann Maiba, “Grassroots Transnational Social Movement Activism: The Case of Peoples’ Global Action,” Sociological Focus 38, no. 1 (2005): 41–63.

20 Ibid.

21 Kevin Wallsten, “Non-Elite Twitter Sources Rarely Cited in Coverage,” Newspaper Research Journal 36, no. 1 (2015): 24–41.

22 Feliz Solomon, “Hong Kong Is on the Frontline of a Global Battle,” Time, June 12, 2019, https://time.com/longform/hong-kong-protests/.

23 Brian Fong, “How Should Hong Kong as the Weak Survive at the Prime Time of the New Cold War?” Initium Media Interview, June 16, 2020, https://theinitium.com/article/20200616-hongkong-interview-brian-fong-chi-hang/.

24 Clifford Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media, and International Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

25 Lawrence B. Glickman, “The American Tradition of Consumer Politics,” The American Historian, n.d., https://www.oah.org/tah/issues/2017/may/the-american-tradition-of-consumer-politics/ (accessed October 14, 2021).

26 “A Plea for Fair Play,” Buffalo Commercial, August 27, 1907, 6, originally in Philadelphia Ledger, qtd. in Glickman, “The American Tradition of Consumer Politics.”

27 Robert M. Entman, “Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm,” Journal of Communication 43, no. 4 (1993): 51–58.

28 William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “Media Discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach,” American Journal of Sociology 95, no. 1 (1989): 1–37; Francis L. F. Lee and Joseph M. Chan, Media and Protest Logics in the Digital Era: The Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

29 Jutta Joachim, “Framing Issues and Seizing Opportunities: The UN, NGOs, and Women's Rights,” International Studies Quarterly 47, no. 2 (2003): 247–74; Caroline Fleay, “Transnational Activism, Amnesty International and Human Rights in China: The Implications of Consistent Civil and Political Rights Framing,” The International Journal of Human Rights 16, no. 7 (2012): 915–30.

30 For example, see Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 2–19; Kiyoteru Tsutsui and Jackie Smith, “Human Rights and Social Movements,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 2nd. ed., ed. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Holly J. McCammon (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2018), 586–601; Yun Wang, “Quiet Confrontations: Transnational Advocacy Networks, Local Churches, and the Pursuit of Religious Freedoms in China” (Ph.D. diss., University of California Riverside, 2013).

31 Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion.

32 Sam McFarland and Melissa Mathews, “Do Americans Care about Human Rights?” Journal of Human Rights 4, no. 3 (2005): 305–19.

33 Jones and Mattiacci, “A Manifesto, in 140 Characters or Fewer.”

34 Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 2–21.

35 Katherine Elliott Bynum, “Multiple Discourses: The Mobilization of Trauma Narratives within Burma's Transnational Advocacy Network” (M.A. thesis, Arizona State University, 2011), 1.

36 Clifford Bob, ed., The International Struggle for New Human Rights (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).

37 Paul Chilton, Analysing Political Discourse: Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2004), 154–72.

38 Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion.

39 Keck and Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders, 2–19.

40 Itai Himelboim, Stephen McCreery, and Marc Smith, “Birds of a Feather Tweet Together: Integrating Network and Content Analyses to Examine Cross-Ideology Exposure on Twitter,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18, no. 2 (2013): 40–60.

41 Lei Guo, Jacob A. Rohde, and H. Denis Wu, “Who Is Responsible for Twitter's Echo Chamber Problem? Evidence from 2016 U.S. Election Networks,” Information, Communication & Society 23, no. 2 (2018): 234–51.

42 Lu Guan, Yafei Zhang, and Jonathan Zhu, “Segmenting and Characterizing Adopters of e-Books and Paper Books Based on Amazon Book Reviews,” in Social Media Processing: SMP 2016, ed. Yuming Li, Guoxiong Xiang, Hongfei Lin, and Mingwen Wang, Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol. 669 (Singapore: Springer, 2016), 85–97.

43 Janardan Bhatta et al., “Efficient Estimation of Nepali Word Representations in Vector Space,” Journal of Innovations in Engineering Education 3, no. 1 (2020): 71–77.

44 Navid Rekabsaz, Mihai Lupu, and Allan Hanbury, “Exploration of a Threshold for Similarity Based on Uncertainty in Word Embedding,” in ECIR 2017: Advances in Information Retrieval, ed. Joemon M. Jose et al., Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 10193 (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2017), 396–409.

45 Dror Walter and Yotam Ophir, “News Frame Analysis: An Inductive Mixed-Method Computational Approach,” Communication Methods and Measures 13, no. 4 (2019): 248–66; Baldwin Van Gorp, “Strategies to Take Subjectivity out of Framing Analysis,” in Doing News Framing Analysis: Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives, ed. Paul D’Angelo and Jim A. Kuypers (London: Routledge, 2010), 84–109.

46 Our dataset and appendices can be accessed online: Yanru Jiang, Cheryl S. Y. Shea, and Wendy L. Y. Leung, “Replication Data for: Transnational Grassroots Outreach and Empirical Evidence from the #HongKongProtests Twitter Network,” Harvard Dataverse, October 14, 2021, https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/FDRGFX.

47 Lei, Rohde, and Wu, “Who Is Responsible for Twitter's Echo Chamber Problem?”

48 Ibid.

49 Zhongying Zhao et al., “Topic Oriented Community Detection through Social Objects and Link Analysis in Social Networks,” Knowledge-Based Systems 26 (2012): 164–73.

50 Agnes S. Ku, “New Forms of Youth Activism—Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Bill Movement in the Local–National–Global Nexus,” Space and Polity 24, no. 1 (2020): 111–17.

51 Francis L. F. Lee, Samson Yuen, Gary Tang, and Edmund W. Cheng, “Hong Kong's Summer of Uprising: From Anti-Extradition to Anti-Authoritarian Protests,” China Review 19, no. 4 (2019): 1–32.

52 Francis L. F. Lee et al., “Dynamics of Tactical Radicalisation and Public Receptiveness in Hong Kong's Anti-Extradition Bill Movement,” Journal of Contemporary Asia 52, no. 3 (2022): 429–31.

53 Garrett, “Protest in an Information Society”; Drezner and Farrell, “Introduction.”

54 Denny Roy, “The ‘China Threat’ Issue: Major Arguments,” Asian Survey 36, no. 8 (1996): 758–71.

55 Igor Rogelja and Konstantinos Tsimonis, “Narrating the China Threat: Securitising Chinese Economic Presence in Europe,” The Chinese Journal of International Politics 13, no. 1 (2020): 103–33.

56 Ibid.

57 See W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).

58 Drezner and Farrell, “Introduction”; Garrett, “Protest in an Information Society.”

59 Jones and Mattiacci, “A Manifesto, in 140 Characters or Fewer.”

60 See “A Plea for Fair Play,” Buffalo Commercial, qtd. in Glickman, “The American Tradition of Consumer Politics.”

61 Keck and Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, 2–21; Coggins, “Rebel Diplomacy”; Bos and Melissen, “Rebel Diplomacy and Digital Communication.”

62 Suzanne C. Makarem and Haeran Jae, “Consumer Boycott Behavior: An Exploratory Analysis of Twitter Feeds,” Journal of Consumer Affairs 50, no. 1 (2016): 193–223.