Social media and the transformation of activist communication: exploring the social media ecology of the 2010 Toronto G20 protests

Abstract

How does the massive use of social media in contemporary protests affect the character of activist communication? Moving away from the conceptualization of social media as tools, this research explores how activist social media communication is entangled with and shaped by heterogeneous techno-cultural and political economic relations. This exploration is pursued through a case study on the social media reporting efforts of the Toronto Community Mobilization Network, which coordinated and facilitated the protests against the 2010 Toronto G-20 summit. The network urged activists to report about the protests on Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr, tagging their contributions #g20report. In addition, it set up a Facebook group and used a blog. The investigation, first, traces the hyperlink network in which the protest communication was embedded. The hyperlink analysis provides a window on the online ecology in which this communication unfolded. In addition, the examination interrogates how the particular technological architectures, related user practices, and business models of the various social platforms steered communication. This investigation shows that the use of social media brings about an acceleration of activist communication, and greatly enhances its visual character. Moreover, as activists massively embrace corporate social media, they increasingly lose control over the data they collective produce, as well as over the very architectures of the spaces through which they communicate.

Keywords:

• social media
• activist communication
• hyperlink analysis
• political economy
• technological architectures

Acknowledgements

I'm grateful to Erik Borra for his valuable suggestions and help in collecting and visualizing the data for this research project. Furthermore, I want to thank José van Dijck for her useful comments. Finally, the paper benefited from the comments received on an earlier version presented at the Platform Politics – A Multidisciplinary Conference 2011.

Notes on contributor

Thomas Poell is Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the Department of Media Studies (Faculty of Humanities) at the University of Amsterdam. His research focuses on social media and political contention. He has published among others on social media as platforms of alternative journalism (Journalism), Twitter and the Tunisian revolution (Necsus), and Android and the political economy of the mobile Internet (First Monday). For full list of publications see: http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/t.poell/ [email: [email protected]]

Notes

1. This was a custom scraper built by the Digital Methods Intiative (https://www.digitalmethods.net/, last accessed 15 February 2011), which harvested results from Google Real Time Search (http://www.google.com/realtime/). The scraper extracted all the tweets with hashtag #g20report and stored them in a database for further analysis. Since then, the Google Real Time Search service has been discontinued. For a methodological overview of the retrieval and analysis of Twitter data for academic purposes, see Bruns and Liang (2012).

2. A YouTube crawling and data extraction toolkit (http://www.tubekit.org/, last accessed 10 February 2011), which allows for the collection of up to 16 different attributes per video.

3. A scraper that retrieves all the inlinks to a webpage, according to Yahoo! (https://tools.issuecrawler.net/beta/yahoo/, last accessed, 11 February 2011). Since Yahoo! has discontinued its service, the scraper no longer functions.

4. See for example: TheSecretStore (2010); Jehsin (2010); Smutton 1874 (2010).