Posting Protest, Tweeting Turmoil. Probing the Social Media Overture of the Pan-European Anti-ACTA Protest

In the ongoing age of austerity, social upheaval seems to be fanned both by swinging cutbacks in public spending as well as an accelerated distribution of contentious politics via social media. The utilization of social media for protest has been portrayed as widening rifts in the collective solidarity of the old bonds around class and culture and, more ominously, corroding the links built around embodied socialization that have been central to recruitment into collective action and the construction of shared identities. Conversely, it has been suggested that collective action forms on the backbone of new, flexible and distributed organizational structures and modular identities fashioned by individuals that variably link in and out of protest networks. Such mediated participation represents an opportunity for the individual social media user to tap into a well of pooled digital resources such as memes (‘we are the 99%’), maps and manifestos that are co-constructed by loosely connected individuals with little or no coordinating support from the social movement organisations of the past. With this paper, we seek to investigate this ostensible process of co-construction of solidarity and shared identities on two of the most prominent social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter, which were both used in the pan-European protests against ACTA. The starting point for this analysis is thus the three-pronged question: what were the topics, the participatory scope and the purpose of the communication that ensued on 29 Facebook event pages and the 19,000 tweets collected two weeks ahead of the last Europe-wide anti-ACTA demonstrations of 9 June 2012? Drawing on social and concept network analysis and content analysis, the paper’s preliminary findings suggest such communication covered a multitude of topics to do with protest logistics, generating solidarity or engendering recruitment beyond the confines of the networks already ‘wired’ into the protest ecology.