Can You Hear Me Now? How Communication Technology Affects Protest and Repression

Abstract

Commentators covering recent social movements, such as the Arab Spring, commonly claim that cell phones enable protests. Yet, existing empirical work does not conclusively support this contention: some studies find that these technologies actually reduce collective action; many others struggle to overcome the selection problems that dog observational research. We propose two mechanisms through which cell phones affect protests: (1) by enabling communication among would-be protesters, cell phones lower coordination costs; and (2) these technologies broadcast information about whether a protest is repressed. Knowing that a larger audience now witnesses and may be angered by repression, governments refrain from squashing demonstrations, further lowering the cost of protesting. We evaluate these mechanisms using high-resolution global data on the expansion of cell phone coverage and incidence of protest from 2007 to 2014. Our difference-in-differences estimates indicate that cell phone coverage increases the probability of protest by over half the mean. Consistent with our second mechanism, we also find that gaining coverage has a larger effect when it connects a locality to a large proportion of other citizens.

Partisan public health: how does political ideology influence support for COVID-19 related misinformation?

“…The data Twitter and other social media platforms produce has been increasingly looked to as a way to observe social and political phenomena in situ, limiting the informational and disclosure-related concerns associated with traditional social science research methods like the interview and survey [ 24 , 25 ]. Social media, and Twitter data, in particular, has been used to document social movement activity [ 26 – 29 ], conversations and discourse around social justice issues [ 30 – 32 ], and general public sentiment towards specific topics [ 33 – 36 ].…”

Facebook Causes Protests

“…Also related is the work of Manacorda and Tesei (in press) and Christensen and Garfias (2018), who evaluate the impact of cell phone access on protests in Africa and a panel of countries, respectively; both studies find a positive effect. 3 Like social media, cell phones provide access to information and connect individuals (smartphones also connect to the Internet and online social networks), but their impact can also reflect broader influences.…”

(Under What Conditions) Do Politicians Reward Their Supporters? Evidence from Kenya’s Constituencies Development Fund

“… 24 Although its implications are poorly recognized, this problem emerges in nearly all studies that employ point- or pixel-level data, such as night lights (Min 2015), conflict (Warren 2015), or cell phone coverage (Christensen and Garfias 2018). …”