The “Crowd-factor” in connective action: comparing protest communication styles of Thai Facebook pages

ABSTRACT

This study draws on theories of connective action and actualizing citizenship norms to explore online protest communication styles in hybrid social movements. We use a most-similar case comparison within a singular instance of large-scale anti-government mobilization in Thailand to investigate whether crowd-enabled elements of movements privilege a more “self-actualizing” communication pattern and how they interact with more formally organized movement elements. The results of a qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the posts of two Facebook pages are mixed, but do show that crowds use different language and – to an extent – more actualizing communications. They align their agenda with that of more formal social movement organizations, rather than steering away from them. This agenda-alignment is heightened during times of high-intensity and high-stakes mobilization. These results clarify the intertwinement of crowds and organizations in hybrid movements and suggest new avenues to measure connective action.

KEYWORDS:

• Connective action
• actualizing citizenship
• Facebook
• Thailand
• mobilization
• protest communication

Supplemental material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Acknowledgment

We wish to thank participants and organizers of the two workshops ’Political Organisations and Participation in the Digital Age’ on 19-21 May 2016, and ’Mobiles & Social Media in Southeast Asia & Pacific’ on 12-13 November 2015, both held at the University of Sydney, for their kind feedback. We also thank two anonymous reviewers who helped sharpen the argument significantly

Notes

^1. Although each organization does traverse along the continuum of organizational hybridity at some stage during their existence, during the particular period under observation for this study, one SMO occupied a traditional SMO position, while the other one was crowd-enabled.

^2. See for instance Benkler (2006), Bennett and Segerberg (2013), Earl and Kimport (2011), Karpf (2012), or Shirky (2008).

^3. See Snow, Worden, Rochford, and Benford (1986).

^4. See also the online appendix for a complete codebook and concrete examples for each of the categories of Table 1.

^5. https://www.facebook.com/suthep.fb.

^6. https://www.facebook.com/V.For.Thailand.

^7. We focus on Facebook, as it was (and is) the primary online platform for the coordination and mobilization of political action in Thailand. YouTube, Twitter, or other open platforms were neither widely used in 2013 nor promoted by SMOs in the anti-government movement. Secure platforms such as Telegram, FireChat or LINE – now commonly used by protesters in authoritarian settings – did either not exist or were negligible in reach during the time under observation.

^8. See also the online appendix for further details on case selection.

^9. One in Thai (https://www.facebook.com/PDRCFoundation), and one in English (www.facebook.com/PDRCThailand).

^10. http://www.pdrcfoundation.org/.

^11. Suthep discussed the reasons for the establishment of the PDRC and its structure in a speech televised on the PDRC-affiliated BlueSky TV channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuSjJEximhU. The PDRC Committee made official demands and statements largely on stage at the protest sites but they were also televised on BlueSky and the texts got reposted on Facebook through PDRC networks.

^12. V for Thailand’s first Facebook “event” took place on June 2, 2013, more than half a year before PDRC was established. The group was reported on as early as May 27, 2013 (http://www.komchadluek.net/news/politic/159534).

^13. For example, #vforthailand #anonymous #AnonymousThailand and #Thaiuprising. But not #pdrc.

^14. The Suthep page had an average of 82,357 cumulative likes, shares, comments, and comment-likes per post, while its V for Thailand ally had an average of 2,935. Normalized by the number of page followers, this translates into an average post engagement rate of 3.2% for Suthep, and 1.4% V for Thailand.

^15. Further data description, code book, coding examples, and description of inter-coder reliability tests are available in the online appendix.

^16. Indicators of inter-coder reliability are satisfactory for seven of the nine variables (Krippendorf’s α between .71 and .86). Two variables (presence of fan-driven action, Y/N; and presence of management activity, Y/N) fall below that threshold, likely because of exceedingly low number of observations in these variables, and because of linguistic ambiguities. Due to the exploratory character of our study, we nevertheless retain all nine variables. The online appendix discusses the implications for our analysis.

^17. https://www.facebook.com/209372495741907/posts/703268469685638 .

^18. https://www.facebook.com/V.For.Thailand/photos/a.387976661217802.109636.330738933608242/788838117798319/ .

^19. https://www.facebook.com/V.For.Thailand/posts/741793785836086 .

^20. https://www.facebook.com/209372495741907/posts/702073706471781 .

^21. https://www.facebook.com/209372495741907/posts/693969333948885 .

^22. https://www.facebook.com/209372495741907/posts/740543085958176 .

^23. https://www.facebook.com/V.For.Thailand/posts/742432315772233:0 .

^24. https://www.facebook.com/209372495741907/posts/703268469685638# .

^25. https://www.facebook.com/V.For.Thailand/posts/759102327438565:0 .

^26. https://www.facebook.com/V.For.Thailand/posts/741272042554927:0 .

^27. https://www.facebook.com/V.For.Thailand/posts/743648885650576 .

^28. https://www.facebook.com/V.For.Thailand/posts/761266783888786 .

^29. https://www.facebook.com/events/518221448226628.

^30. https://www.facebook.com/events/1391664091074096 .

^31. https://web.facebook.com/V.For.Thailand/posts/766089140073217.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre Collaborative Research Grant [Research Collaboration Grant (2015)].