Special Issue on Digital Communication and Computational Approaches to Understanding Social Movements in the Social Media Era

Overview

Social media is a strong tool to convey messages. It not only allows to create and share information with its users, but it also reaches millions of individuals who increasingly rely on it for communication purposes. In the particular case of social movements, social media has become an indispensable tool for understanding and analyzing protest dynamics, logistics, and mobilization efforts, offering new insights into the workings and impact of these movements. As platforms such as X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram facilitate the rapid dissemination of both text and visual content, they enable activists to organize protests, share real-time updates, and coordinate logistics more effectively than traditional means (Barberá et al., 2015; Tufekci, 2017). Also rising platforms like TikTok and Weibo connect protesters with their audience. As such, there are numerous platforms protesters use to convey their messages and connect with their audience and other protesters alike.

The vast data generated on social media provides scholars with the opportunity to analyze protest dynamics at scale, from mapping participant networks to understanding the spread of protest- related discourse through both textual and visual narratives. As a tool for mobilization, social media accelerates the formation of collective identities and can sustain movements by keeping participants connected and informed over time, with the visual dimension offering an additional layer to the movement’s symbolic and persuasive power. The integration of these multimedia elements creates dynamic information flows that influence not only how movements organize but also how they are perceived and supported globally. At the same time, digital activism is nearly over a decades old and this special issue serves as an opportunity for reflection on what has been learned and what emerging questions remain. We will encourage all contributors to the special issue to also explore the transformation of political mobilization on social media over the last years. This also entails that the individual contributors address ethical challenges, including privacy concerns and potential misuse of data.

Therefore, in this special issue, we aim to look at the different ways in which text, images, and other information featured in social media content help a movement to communicate its goals, structure, composition, and efforts. We also aim to understand the role that this material plays on mobilisation efforts and the eventual success or failure of protest movements. In particular, we are looking for articles that not only explore the ways in which images and other types of social media data frame difficult political situations, but also provide information about the infrastructure and dynamics of protests.

Our objective is to link these relevant questions with innovative methodological approaches. Given that social media data are often collected through large-scale, automated methods, the use of advanced computational tools becomes highly desirable. Yet, communication studies as well as social science research have not yet embraced these approaches and the potential of these methods to extract valuable insights for the analysis of social and protest behaviour remains underestimated. With this special issue we bring together scholars from social movement studies as well as computational social science who can help us understand how social uprisings are communicated, distributed and framed on social media. This will open new avenues for research, both in terms of theory development, substantive inquiry and methodological advancements.

This Special Issue originated from a workshop “How Image-As-Data Approaches Can Help Analyzing Protest and Its Organization: Methods and Applications” which took place at the Free University of Berlin in October 2024. However, broader contributions in terms of methods and substantive focus are very much welcome.

Further information here: Call for Papers: CCR Special Issue on Digital Communication in Social Movement | Computational Communication Research