Occupy, Idle No More and Red Squares – Waves of Protest, Diffusion and Facebook

Since 2011 new waves of protest have rippled around the globe. Limiting those that have impacted Canada and the US, we can track Occupy Wall Street to the “Printemps Erable” (Maple Spring), and the latest Idle No More movement of December 2012. These waves spread symbols, tactics, frames and identities to new participants and new sites. Each wave builds off of earlier and ongoing waves of anti-austerity protests in Europe and pro-democracy movements in North Africa and the Middle East. Each wave also utilizes the power of social media. But the power of these media is not contained in the technology themselves, but because of the way that their form and operation intersect with micro-processes of diffusion. Looking at these three waves of protest, this paper shows how different elements within the social networking platform of Facebook intersect with the sub-processes within diffusion that underlie waves of protest. It suggests that the Facebook 'walls', 'groups' and 'likes' can facilitate off-line experiments with new protest tactics.