Political protest 2.0: Social media and the 2012 student strike in the province of Quebec, Canada

Abstract

Recent years have been marked by the emergence of a new breed of

Canada is #IdleNoMore: exploring dynamics of Indigenous political and civic protest in the Twitterverse

“…Tweets related to #IdleNoMore served primarily a mass information dispersion function, and to a lesser extent, a mobilization function, an opinion sharing function, and a criticism function. The findings of this project are somewhat similar to a recent study focusing on the 2012 student strike in the province of Quebec (Raynauld et al, 2016). However, it should be noted that some tweets could serve multiple functions.…”

“…5 As noted previously, the #IdleNoMore hashtag was used heavily by Indigenous and non-Indigenous individuals and organizations supporting or opposing the movement to express themselves and be active politically. 6 More generally, hashtags have also been used as a sampling mechanism by several scholars who have taken interest in social media-based political and civic engagement phenomena over the last five years (e.g., Dubois & Ford, 2015;Gruzd & Roy, 2014;Raynauld et al, 2016).…”

“…To explore the specificities of #IdleNoMore tweeting, we use a three-pronged quantitative and qualitative content analysis approach modeled after recent academic work on social media-based political action (e.g., Raynauld et al, 2016;Scherman et al, 2015; Theocharis, Lowe, van Deth, & García-Albacete, 2015). First, we identify the basic content of #IdleNoMore tweets considered for this study, such as the handle of their author, the date and time of their publication, their language, or the presence of hyperlinks or other social and content interactive mechanisms (e.g., hashtags, social interactions through the @mention 8 or @retweet 9 mechanisms).…”

“…First, we identify the basic content of #IdleNoMore tweets considered for this study, such as the handle of their author, the date and time of their publication, their language, or the presence of hyperlinks or other social and content interactive mechanisms (e.g., hashtags, social interactions through the @mention 8 or @retweet 9 mechanisms). Second, we investigate the purpose of those #IdleNoMore tweets, following a methodological approach developed in previous work by Raynauld et al (2016). Specifically, we determine if they serve an information dispersion function, an opinion sharing function, a mobilization function, and/or a criticism function.…”

“…Over the last 10 years, social media have contributed to the expansion, diversification, deepening, and informalization of the digital protest repertoire. This digital 'protest repertoire' can be defined as a diverse collection of digital political and civic engagement practices outside more institutionalizedor traditionalpaths of political action seeking to question, contest or, conversely, support established media, governmental, and political entities' decisions or actions (see also Raynauld et al, 2016;Van Laer & Van Aelst, 2010). Often shaping the actions of social movements and other members of civil society at the peripheries of the formal political arena, this set of protest tactics comprises an eclectic mixture of offline-inspired modes of protest (e.g., non-violent direct actions, social disobedience) and newer forms of political action shaped by digital media's affordances, including interactive features like hashtags which can be used to tag content or articulate conversations around issues and events at the root of protest initiatives and can lead to the emergence of crowdsourced narratives (della Porta & Tarrow, 2012;Van Laer & Van Aelst, 2010;Yang, 2016).…”