The role of social media in mobilizing social movements: a case study of the "Save the arctic" campaign

Wang, Chenfang (2019) The role of social media in mobilizing social movements: a case study of the "Save the arctic" campaign. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

Social media plays a vital role in mobilizing social movement actors to produce and respond to a variety of issues. The development of the Internet and social media has transformed traditional social movements and provided a new means for people in modern societies to mobilize. While social media presents contemporary social movements with new opportunities, they also bring challenges. This study examines the “Save The Arctic” campaign launched by Greenpeace as a typical case of contemporary movements to explore how environmental movements intertwine with social networking platforms. Qualitative textual analysis of campaign-related content on Twitter is used to analyze who plays a role in mobilizing the campaign, what discourses social movement actors produce, and how activists use Twitter to promote campaign-related messages. The findings of this study provide insights into the changing relationship between social movement organizations and digitally networked individuals, how protest strategies shift through social media activism, how visual communication is used as part of social movement framing in digital forms of mobilization, and how the media environment for social movements shifts in the social media era.

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