The Rhythm of Communicative Styles: Advocacy Organizations, Social Media, and Mass Persuasion

• In Event: 094 - Regular Session. Sociology of Culture 1: Evolving Meanings and Messages in Organizational Settings

Abstract

Countless studies explain how advocacy organizations recruit new members. Yet very little is known about how such organizations shape public attitudes about social problems among the vast segment of the population that does not participate in collective behavior. Building upon classic theories of mass persuasion in the age of social media, we present a theory that explains why certain messages produced by advocacy organizations flow across activist conversation networks, attract new audiences, and persuade them to express support. We argue that the ebb and flow of cognitive, emotional, and social styles of communication across these conversation networks create a rhythm or opportunity structure that enables the viral spread of an advocacy organizations message towards new audiences. To test this theory, we developed an app that collects 457 variables that describe millions of interactions between a large group of organ donation advocacy organizations and individual Facebook users over 1.7 years. Multi-level negative binomial regression models reveal strong evidence for our theory net of alternative explanations of mass persuasion such as organizational capacity, tactics, external opportunity structures, and the demographic characteristics of social media audiences. We conclude by presenting several additional robustness checks and discussing the implications of our work for future studies of collective behavior, cultural sociology, computational social science, and the public sphere.

Author

• Christopher A. Bail, Duke University