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An Evaluation on the Use of Social Media in Organizing Protests

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An Evaluation on the Use of Social Media in Organizing Protests
RUNNING HEAD: THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN ORGANIZING PROTESTS

An Evaluation on the Use of Social Media in Organizing Protests
Alexander P. T. Greven
Tilburg University

Author Note
Alexander Greven, Bachelor student at Department of Humanities of Tilburg University.
This thesis is part of the Bachelor program Communication and Information Sciences.
Supervisors are Dr. S. Milan and Dr. R. Cozijn.
Contact: a.p.t.greven@tilburguniversity.edu
February 2014

THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN ORGANIZING PROTESTS

ii

Abstract
This paper explores the use of social media in online protesting, looking at protests related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people rights emerging around the Sochi 2014
Winter Olympics. Whereas earlier research focused on one social media platform alone (Ye,
Fang, He & Hsieh, 2012; Valenzuela, Park & Kee, 2009) or on social media users as a single group (Hogan & Quan-Haase, 2010), this research tries to find differences between protesters using Twitter and those favoring Facebook. A survey was conducted to obtain insights on which of the two social media platforms is favored, on protest commitment of its users and on the level and modalities of content contribution. This study found that protesters using Twitter viewed, shared and created content more often than those using Facebook, but that Facebook proved to be the platform where the amount of viewed LGBT-related content was higher for those that had participated in a protest before as well as for those that had not.
Keywords: Social media, online protesting, LGBT, cloud protesting.

THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA IN ORGANIZING PROTESTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

iii

PAGE

Abstract .....................................................................................................................................................ii
CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 1


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