Abstract
Media attention is crucial for the success of social movements. In contemporary hybrid media ecology, news media, social media, and on-site protests interact with each other during social movements. The present study investigated the relationships among the scale of street protests, attention from news media, and social media in the Anti-ELAB movement in Hong Kong. The results show that attention from pro-democracy and nonlocal media significantly influences fluctuations in the protest scale. Moreover, they closely correlate with changes in protest size, highlighting the importance of political parallelism in media coverage during contentious movements. We also found a two-way relationship between the degree of social media attention in the LIHKG forum and the scale of on-site protests. This suggests that social media not only serves as a platform for public discourse on protest events but that it also acts as a mobilizing force for participants. Additionally, our results indicate that news media has a significant influence on shaping attention trends on social media, thus confirming the effectiveness of traditional media in driving social movements in Hong Kong, even amid the rise of social media platforms.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
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Jinjin Zhou
Jinjin Zhou is currently an assistant professor at the School of Journalism and Communication, Jinan University. Her research interests include computational communication and political communication.
Zhi-Jin Zhong
Zhi-Jin Zhong is a professor in the School of Journalism and Communication and a researcher at the Institute of Guangdong, Hong Kong, and Macao Development Studies at Sun Yat-sen University of China. Her research interests include public opinion and political communication.