How Police Repression Moves Social Movements Online: Climate Protests in Finland

Technological developments reshape the way government and civil society actors compete for public support by shifting political contestation to social media platforms. We examine repression of social movements as a driver of this shift, focusing on the fluctuating circumstances under which political contestation makes use of social media, while also considering the impact of political system openness. We argue that when faced with unexpected repression, movements look for alternative platforms and repertoires. In open political systems, the increasingly legitimate online sphere offers a platform where repressive mechanisms have yet to reach. To study this, we look at how the climate movement in Finland changed their social media engagement and digital communication strategies following police brutality at an offline protest in October 2020. We conducted an exploratory survey and in-depth interviews with climate activists to obtain a rich understanding of how they perceived their activism and social media use in relation to repression. Building off of these accounts, we used observational data from Twitter to detect changes in their political communication strategies post repression. Specifically, we identified the Finnish climate movement on Twitter and studied changes using both temporal social network analysis and sentiment analysis. Initial results indicate that while climate activists do not see the online space as without dangers, the strongest of which is harassment by other civilians, they tend to view the state-related consequences to be lower online than offline. Further, statements from the activists demonstrate that they experienced a paradigm shift on the relationship between the state and civil society, suggesting a loss of trust in state institutions specifically. These results add to our understanding of government-civil society relations by showing how social movements adapt to changes in the level of repression, and the role of new technology in mediating this response.