#DestroyRegimes: How Social Media Affects Protests in Nondemocratic States

• In Event: Research in Five (Undergraduate Students)

Abstract

Can Facebook destroy regimes? While it is obvious that social media platforms, alone, cannot topple governments, their effects on people’s ability to advocate for change in states where they would normally be silenced has been remarkable. There has been a great deal of analysis regarding specific cases where social media has had a clear effect on a protest’s ability to create a regime change, but there has been little research looking for general trends using large data sets. This paper attempts to bridge that gap by looking at a dataset of 63 protests that occurred between 2010 and 2015 across 40 states. By then measuring a protest’s ability to create structural change within the state, both in the short term and the long term, we will be able to find trends in how social media may affect a population's ability to be civically engaged in states that discourage their engagement. To further ground the results of this analysis, we will take an in-depth look at three case studies as representative samples of the different ways that social media has affected protests in non-democratic states. The implications of this analysis are threefold. First, researchers interested in the ability of protests to create structural change will need to consider social media’s effect on these outcomes. Secondly, quantitative methods allow us to examine a large number of cases to reveal broadly how social media affects protests' ability to create structural change in the short term and long term. Finally, using case studies, we will be able to observe how cultural and regime differences change social media’s ability to affect a protest movement.

Author

• Jeremy Knapp, Pacific Lutheran University