Do Social Movements Adapt to Offline Repression by using Social Media? Evidence from Police Repression of Climate Protestors in Finland

Emergence of new technology constantly reshapes the way the government and civil society actors compete for public support. Social media platforms have become an important venue for this type of political contestation. The emerging work in this area tends to focus on the tangible outcomes of social media usage, but less attention has been paid to the drivers of social media adaptation in the first place. We address this issue by looking at critical events that might lead to adaptation. Specifically, we examine how social movements respond to government repression, with a focus on social media use and political system openness. Prior work on government repression tends to find a chilling effect on movement activity, but these results have primarily come from closed systems or without particular focus on new technologies. We extend the literature by looking at the interactive effect of these two institutions. We argue that when faced with unexpected repression, movements look for alternative venues and repertoires. In open systems, one logical alternative is the increasingly legitimate social media sphere where repressive mechanisms have yet to reach. With this, we expect that when faced with offline repression, movements will adjust their work to the online sphere. To study this, we use causal inference methods for longitudinal and network dependent data to look at how unexpected repression impacts social media behaviour of activists. We focus on the case of police brutality against climate protesters in Finland in 2020. Our study produces new information by prioritising social media adaptation and usage to illustrate how new technologies shape and reflect movement strategies.