Protest Movements in the Era of Social Networks: The Chilean Case

The year 2011 was a turning point in the history of social movements in Chile. For the first time since the wave of demonstrations against the military regime in the 80s, thousands of citizens took over the streets to protest: students marched for quality of education and environmentalists against the construction of power plants in Patagonia. This paper provides an empirical examination of how social media, particularly the use of Facebook and Twitter, were related to student and environmental demonstrations in the Chilean winter of 2011. Specifically, it examines the link between the use of online social media and participation in these demonstrations. To test our hypotheses we relied on a probabilistic face-to-face survey on Youth, Participation and Media Consumption conducted in 2011 in three main cities of Chile. This survey asked in detail about people’s participation in these social movements as well as their consumption of media and online social media. Different models of regression were used that employed participation in the demonstrations as the dependant variable and mass media and social media use as explanatory variables, and a series of other political and social factors established by literature on political participation as relevant to this type of analysis. The analyses revealed that there is a positive relationship between the use of Facebook and Twitter and the participation of youth in student demonstrations and protests against the construction of the power plants in Patagonia. Controlled by relevant variables (e.g., political interest, ideology and trust in institutions), people with an active account in these online social media are more likely to protest and the use of online mass media for being informed –such as news sites and blogs– do show a positive incidence on the two movements under analysis. Implications of these results are discussed in the paper.