ABSTRACT
This paper unfolds how informal civil society quickly mobilised citizen-to-citizen support when government and non-government organisations locked down during the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper focuses on two elements of the mobilisation: the role of social networks and social media groups. It reveals that the vast majority of this support was distributed through existing social networks and, therefore, not available to those lacking social connections. However, we also find that social media groups played an important role in the mobilisation, that support organised on social media does not diverge significantly in commitment or kind from support organised in other settings. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of social media to mitigate the impact of social networks on the distribution of support, pointing to some of the potential barriers to social media groups’ successful facilitation of support to those without a social network.
Acknowledgments
We are grateful to our research assistant Mia Lunding Christensen as well as student research assistants Esben Brøgger Lemminger, Marie Haarmark Nielsen and Jonathan Holm Salka for their skillful work on collecting and preparing data for this study.
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Notes on contributors
Hjalmar Bang Carlsen
Hjalmar Bang Carlsen, Ph.D., is a postdoctoral researcher at SODAS and Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. His research interests are political sociology, especially social movements and issue politics, and digital social research methodologies that combine quantitative and qualitative approaches in the study of social interaction and social change.
Jonas Toubøl
Jonas Toubøl, Ph.D., is a political sociologist at Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. His area of research encompasses social movements, civil society, unionization and social class. In addition, Jonas explores new approaches to mixed methods and data triangulation of both quantitative and qualitative data combining interview, ethnography, register, survey and social media data.
Benedikte Brincker
Benedikte Brincker, Ph.D., is the Head of Department at Department of Sociology, University of Copenhagen. She has published widely in the field of political and historical sociology, especially in the area of state-nation relations. She has applied this body of theory to European nation states and to the Arctic Region and has combined it with research in the field of sociology of education and public administration.