The Development of Connective Action during Social Movements on Social Media

Abstract

In recent years, the development of information communication technologies, such as social media, has changed the way people communicate and engage in social movements. While conventional movements were fought in the streets, social media has enabled movements to take place online. In this article, we aim to investigate the role of social media during social movements that evolve online under the scope of the theory of connective action. Specifically, we examined Twitter communication during the #metoo debate. To this end, we examined two datasets (2017 and 2019) and combined methods from social media analytics to identify influential users, with a manual content analysis to classify influential users into roles. Likewise, a manual classification found distinct communication categories. Through regression analysis, we were able to gage the individual contribution of these categories and roles based on the retweet probability. This study introduces for the first time the terms of connective action starters and maintainers.