Exploring the Relationship Between Social Networking Site Usage and Participation in Protest Activities

Abstract

A methodological approach is developed for exploring the relationship between the use of social networking sites and participation in protest activities. Although a recent meta-analysis study demonstrated that there is a positive association between the two, little work examining this association further appears to have been published. The methodology proposed here studies the patterns of the relationship between nine social media and five types of protest activity using the techniques of multiple correspondence analysis, hierarchical cluster analysis and induction of decision rules. The results give insights into the relationship in different segments of individuals' profiles defined as non-activist, offline activist, social media user (two types) and online activist. Significantly, this last segment proves to be a small and heterogeneous group. The results also show that the proposed approach is useful for exploring the patterns of the relationship in a low-dimensional space. Limitations of the methodology and possible extensions are discussed.