Online activism: Facebook as continuous action frame The Women’s March on Facebook as continuous event

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MA New Media and Digital Culture

Online activism: Facebook as continuous action

frame

The Women’s March on Facebook as continuous event

________________________________________________________________

Name: Mintsje de Witte

Address: Herengracht 384 GK4

1016 CJ Amsterdam

Telephone: 06-46002909

Student number: 10452478

E-mail address: mintsjedewitte@hotmail.com

Supervisor: Natalia Sánchez-Querubín

Second reader: Sabine Niederer

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Abstract

Social movements and social media seem inherently connected nowadays. Therefore, social media have often been studied for the role they play in recent social movements. Some scholars argue that social media changed the formation of protest movements; social media can function as organizing agents with a strong personalization aspect. These new types of action networks are defined as connective action networks . This thesis builds on to the concept of connective action and suggests that there can be distinguished a new phenomenon: Facebook as continuous action frame. In order to make this claim, it presents a case study of a relevant social issue – the endangering of women’s rights within the Trump presidency – and poses a straightforward question: ‘how is the Internet enabling this fight?’ The network of Facebook pages organized around the so-called Women’s March, has been analyzed and approached as continuous event. Two aspects of this event are worthy of attention: the spread of a local event into an allegedly global phenomenon and the Women’s March as a multi-issue event. To analyze the continues activity of the Women’s March on Facebook, a digital methods approach was chosen including a content analysis of the main Women’s March Facebook page. The results suggest that the continuity of activity on the Facebook page is due to the fact that the organizers constantly changed the direction and agenda of the movement and provided easy shareable, personalized content. Although the movement started as a protest with women related topics, it snowballed into a broad ‘anti-Trump’ movement with a diverse range of topics. Although the Women’s March includes a lot of connective action aspects (e.g. personal action frameworks and loose organizational coordination of action), it becomes clear that some sort of organizational structure is

necessary to create a continuous action frame. Therefore, one can conclude that a continuous action frame cannot be a self-organizing network.

Keywords

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1. Introduction

1.1. The Women’s March: A protest to resist president Trump

“Planned Parenthood has to stop with the abortions. A lot of people consider it an abortion clinic. I think those tapes that I saw were outrageous and disgusting by any standpoint. And they have to stop” (President Donald Trump during the Meet the Press Interviews on August 16, 2016).

Donald J. Trump, the 45th and current president of the United Stated of America, made during his political campaign for the United States presidency and beyond, several statements that were considered as sexist and misogynistic. Not only did he occur disrespectful against women in official interviews, he also used his social media channels to insult them multiple times. According to several advocacy groups for women, “his cabinet is shaping up to be one of the most hostile in recent memory to issues affecting women” (Chira). Although many encourage his ideas about tax credits for childcare and the prospect of paid maternity leave, there is a lot of resistance to many of his other ideas. Ideas that could lead to new constraints on abortion and less access to contraception, limits on health care that disproportionately affect women and minorities but also in the case of raising the minimum wage or making progress on equal pay (Frothingham and Phadke). His ideas have led to the inevitable discussion whether president Trump truly opposes women’s right, such as for example reproductive freedom. NARAL Pro-Choice America (National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League), one the oldest abortion rights advocacy groups in the United States, expressed their concern and stated on their website: “he’s voiced support for a number of anti-choice policies that would have a devastating impact on women nationwide” (NARAL). It comes as no surprise then, that president Trump faced sufficient opposition from the whole country. Maybe even from the whole world. An important question arose: how is the Internet enabling this fight?

1.2. The Women’s March as example of connective action

Despite all his controversial statements some regarded as anti-women or in other ways reprehensible, along with the fact that 50.4% of the United States population are women,

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Trump took office as the 45th President on January 20, 2017. In order to stand up against his ideas, several protests were organized throughout the country.

The biggest protest was the so-called Women’s March on Washington. On January 21, 2017 a worldwide protest took place in order to support women’s rights and other causes including LGBTQ-rights, racial justice, freedom of religion and so on. Thousands of people - especially women - marched in towns and cities around the world with the message that women's rights are human’s rights (Walters). Also, multiple organizations supported the protest, including Planned Parenthood1. The nonprofit organization, that provides

reproductive health services both in the United States and globally, was seen as one of the most prominent partners. According to Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood, the organization got involved because it thinks the march will “send a strong message to the incoming administration that millions of people across this country are prepared to fight attacks on reproductive health care, abortion services and access to Planned Parenthood” (Jamieson). Moreover, Trump stated in several interviews that Planned Parenthood should be defunded, since it provides abortion. His statements towards non-profit organizations such as Planned Parenthood, got a lot of resist and can be considered as one of the main causes of the Women’s March.

Since the first protest was planned in Washington, D.C., the movement is known as the Women’s March on Washington. The protest was organized as a grassroots movement and it is one of the largest one-day protests in United States history (Broomfield). What started as a viral idea on Facebook has snowballed into a worldwide protest with so-called sister marches all over the world. In total there were 673 marches with more than 4 million marchers and everything was streamed live on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter (Koh). One can therefore argue that a local event, turned into a worldwide movement. A very important part of their strategy to achieve this was their social media account on Facebook. Some scholars argue that the rise of new media caused a change in the nature of protests (Siapera 93). They approach new media as organizing agents, instead of a strong organizationally

1_{Planned Parenthood is the biggest single provider of reproductive health services in the U.S. and operates}

globally with organizations in 12 countries. It consists of almost 160 medical and non-medical affiliates, which provide health care over 650 clinics in the U.S. The organization is responsible for several reproductive health services and sexual education, it is devoted to research within reproductive technology, and it advocates for the protection and development of reproductive rights. Planned Parenthood is a member association of the

International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), a worldwide non-governmental institution with the goal to promote sexual and reproductive health, and campaigns for the individual right to make sovereign choices in family planning (Planned Parenthood).

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coordination of action what it was before new media. Together with a strong personalization aspect, this has caused them to be described as “connective action networks” (Bennett & Segerberg 752). These networks establish themselves through social media, which has as a result that strong hierarchies and collective identities are no longer needed (King 967). Also the concept of ‘self-motivated participation’ as personally expressive content shared with others in the network is important. This idea of self-motivated contribution to a common good becomes a way of personal expression in connective action movements (Bennett & Segerberg 752). In order to understand the Women’s March, one can think about it as an example of a connective action network. Women used the Internet - more specifically Facebook - to fight for their rights and to connect worldwide. One can argue that they used Facebook in order to organize the movement, with two clear components: an offline component and an online component. Although the Facebook page was created in order to mobilize people for the offline component, the actual march, one can argue that it was in the end more about online resistance.

1.3. The Women’s March: an offline- and online event

Although there is perhaps much written about social movements and the related role of the internet, there can be argued that the present situation in the United States calls for an revised evaluation of the existing theories. The Women’s March can be understood both as an

offline- and online event, of which the latter becomes the focal point of this thesis.

Furthermore, this thesis suggests that the network of Facebook pages constitute or sustain a ‘continuous action frame.’ Taking this into account, two aspects of the Women’s March are worthy of attention: the spread of a local event into an allegedly global phenomenon and the movement as a multi-issue event.

The research questions of this thesis have been formulated around aforementioned issues. A first objective is to find out whether the term ‘global’ is an accurate term to describe the geographical spread of the movement. In order to answer this question, the aim was to find out how Facebook sustained this grow, this worldwide activity. In extension to this, a second objective was to find out what the agenda was of the Women’s March. The movement appeared to aim for reproductive rights in the beginning, but turned into a multi-topic event. An interesting question hereby is: has this played a part in the continuity of the event?

This thesis will form an empirical analysis of the main Facebook page of the Women’s March. Therefore, it will form a data driven analysis. The thesis aims to critique

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existing ideas about social movements and the related role of the Internet. Moreover, this thesis attempts to identify how activists used social media to empower people worldwide. It aims to understand how activists managed to create an event that was so effective and continuous, that it turned into a social movement. In order to answer this question, the widely discussed and accepted concept of connective action will be proposed. In this thesis, the claim will be made that real activism - in the context of the Women’s March - took place online and that it was not about being collective, but rather about being connective.

1.4. Facebook as continuous action frame

The empirical contribution of this thesis aims to study the Women’s March as ‘continuous event’, sustained by Facebook. The framework of connective action is used in order to analyze this new form.

This thesis spins the notion of connective action further and likes to suggest that there can be detected a new phenomenon when talking about online activism: Facebook as

continuous action frame. Therefore one can argue that a new logic of organizationally enabled networks emerged alongside ‘regular’ connective action networks and shifted into a phenomenon what is called ‘continuous action’ in this thesis. Both the geographical spread and the multi-issue agenda of the event can be explained by the continuous activity on the Women’s March Facebook page and therefore will be discussed. Facebook entails multiple features making it easy to motivate people to continue to pursue action.

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2. Literature Review: The Development of Action Frames

The following chapter will contain an objective, critical review of published research literature that is considered relevant to this thesis. It intends to collate contemporary knowledge about earlier trends of resistance, and offers a framework intended to explain social movement’s emergence and development. The theoretical framework aims to position the Women’s March and the ‘continuous Facebook event’ both as product of a larger history of women-lead protests and as example of current trends in activism, namely, of connective action. The first part of this literature review will focus on women’s rights and collective action networks. Two examples of previous movements will illustrate how this logic operates. The second part will focus on women rights and connective action. In this part a review of social media and activism will be given, as well as the definition of connective action. In the last part of this review, connective action will be theorized and the notion of Facebook pages as continuous action frame will be discussed. The objective here is to characterize old women’s rights movements in comparison with a new women’s rights movement, respectively the Women’s March.

2.1. Women’s rights movements and the logic of collective action

To understand the significance and the role of social media within the Women’s March movement, it can be useful to gain an in-depth knowledge of the action frameworks used in previous social movements. Therefore it is interesting to ask the following question: In what way do previous women’s rights movements fit into the logic of collective action?

Previous women’s rights social movements can be approached as examples of collective action frameworks. The central claim of these kinds of action frameworks is the idea of bringing people together with the goal to achieve some kind of collective good. Thus, instead of taking action alone, the goal was to be collective. This influential concept came from Charles Tilly, an American sociologist, historian and political scientist who wrote primarily about the relationship between politics and society (NYU Journalism). He introduced in his book From Mobilization to Revolution (1977) the term collective action, by which he meant that people act together in pursuit of common interests. According to him “collective action results from changing combinations of interests, organization, mobilization and opportunity” (11). These four - actually five since it includes ‘connective action’ as the fifth one - are according to Tilly of great

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importance within the mobilization of a group. He describes connective action in its simplest form as follows:

...the main determinants of s group's mobilization are its organization, its interest in possible interactions with other contenders, the current opportunity and threat of those interactions and the group's subjection to repression. The diagram says that the group's subjection to repression is mainly a function of the sort of interest it represents. It treats the extent of a contender's collective action as a resultant of its power, its mobilization, and the current opportunities and threats confronting its interests. And so on (48).

Before he proposed his version, the common view of social movements was a “rather static understanding of protest politics centered on the analysis of organizations” (Passy 353). Tilly thinks about protest politics in a much more complicated way, considering the fact that he stated that it is about interaction (353). With Tilly’s ideas about social movements, the understanding of it changed entirely.

Mancur Olson, an American economist and sociologist, wrote in his book The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups that what encourages people to act in groups is incentive (60). According to his observations, people cannot be expected to act as a group only because they share something in common, such as a problem or a goal. He claimed that when individual contributions are less noticeable in large groups, rational individuals will not contribute, when they are able to enjoy the good without contributing (Bennett and Segerberg 749). In the case the action would fail, they had not misused their time in a failure (Wright 416). He uses the term collective action as well, which “emphasizes the problems of getting individuals to contribute to the collective endeavor that typically involves seeking some sort of public good (e.g.

democratic reforms) that may be better attained through forging a common cause” (749). This can only be realized through high hierarchical structures; organizations that are involved play an important role uniting individuals and bridging the gap between different ideas.

In order to illustrate how this logic operates, it is interesting to look at two previous women’s rights related social movements. Women’s rights contain all kinds of rights and entitlements claimed for women all over the world. They formed the foundation for several women’s rights movements in the nineteenth century and the bigger feminist movement in the twentieth century (Hosken 3). However, not everywhere in the world are the same perspectives on women’s rights. Some countries support or institutionalized women related rights by law while other countries ignore or suppress these rights. The

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United Nations (UN)2 still has not agreed on what women’s rights exactly entail, because some countries (in particular Islamic countries) think different about such rights than others. Therefore, there are many ideas and definitions of several aspects of women’s rights (e.g. reproductive rights), often based on cultural background or religion

(Obermeyer 366). Although the area of women’s rights includes plenty of topics, issues usually associated with women’s rights are the following: the right to vote, the right to work (and to have fair incomes or equal pay), the right to have equal rights in family law, the right to be free from sexual violence and to have bodily integrity and autonomy and the right to have reproductive rights (Lockwood).

When looking at the history of women’s rights, there can be distinguished several trends and topics within the larger women’s rights movement. The movement started in 1848 in the United States and the objective was for women to achieve full civil rights (Eisenberg and Ruthsdotter). Although there were multiple protests in order to stand up for all kinds of women’s rights, this thesis will only focus on two major and very influential social movements, respectively: the woman suffrage movement and the birth control movement (in a broader sense, the fight for reproductive rights). Therefore, it will shortly discuss the social movement that took place in order to receive the right to vote and it will in somewhat extended way highlight the social movements around

reproductive rights. The aim hereby is to find out how they organized themselves and how they used the logic of connective action.

2.1.1. Woman suffrage

Around the nineteenth century, women began to advocate for the right to vote in elections, also known as “woman suffrage”. In the late years of the nineteenth century, some countries gave women this right. However, in most countries it was not until the beginning of the twentieth century. In 1893, women got the right to vote in New Zealand and this extended in many countries in the years that followed (History).

The group who advocated for this right was a wide-ranging one including women and men with different backgrounds and views (History). Matters related to the suffrage movement often included the belief that women were more troubled with children and elderly and therefore had a civilizing and calming effect on politics. For black women,

2_{UN: United Nations. An international organization founded in 1945 which main objectives include among}

other things maintaining international peace and security, the promotion and protection of human rights and protecting the environment (UN.org).

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however, there was much more at stake. They wanted to achieve suffrage in order to oppose the disfranchisement of black man. Whilst they received a lot of opposition, they insisted on equal political rights for both white and black women's (History).

Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women’s rights pioneers led the suffrage movement. In order to spread the word and mobilize women to take action, they “circulated petitions and lobbied Congress to pass a Constitutional Amendment to enfranchise women” (NWHM). Later on, in the twentieth century, this leadership was taken over by two umbrella organizations, being the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) and the National Woman’s Party (NWP). These two

organizations connected people over a collective cause. Due to the fact that both

organizations combined their efforts, women in the United States got finally the right to vote in 1920 (NWHM). Receiving the right to vote is considered the most noteworthy achievement of women during the women’s rights movement, essentially because it was the “singlest largest extension of democratic voting rights in our nation’s [United States] history, and it was achieved peacefully, through democratic processes” (NWHM). When looking at this social movement, clear components of collective action networks can be identified. The movement relied on ‘brokering organizations’ - such as NAWSA and NWHM - that facilitated cooperation or bridged differences. Since the group who advocated for this right was a diverse one, each with own motives, it was important that there was a strong organizational coordination of action. Although they did not use social media technologies to manage participation and coordinate goals, they instead used older social technologies such as petitions and lobbying.

2.1.2. Reproductive rights

The other major theme within the women’s rights movement was the so-called birth control movement, which entailed more than only the demand for birth control. When looking at the Women’s March movement, one can argue that one of the direct causes were president Trumps ideas about reproductive rights, and especially his ideas and statements about abortion. On the official website of the Women’s March, they state:

We believe in Reproductive Freedom. We do not accept any federal, state or local rollbacks, cuts or restrictions on our ability to access quality reproductive healthcare services, birth control, HIV/AIDS care and prevention, or medically accurate sexuality education. This means open access to safe, legal, affordable abortion and birth control for all people, regardless of income, location of education (Women’s March on Washington).

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Despite the fact that some argue that women’s health is in greater danger at the moment than it has been since a while (Kaufman), reproductive rights have always been

controversial. It is one of the major themes in the women’s rights area and for decennia now, women have to fight for these rights. Within the handbook for National Human Rights Institutions, provided by the OHCHR3, the following definition is used in relation to reproductive rights, consistent with the ICPD Programme of Action4, the Beijing Platform for Action5 and other international sources:

Reproductive Rights embrace certain human rights that are already recognized in national laws, international laws and international human rights documents and other consensus documents. These rights rest on the recognition of the basic rights of all couples and individuals to decide freely and responsibly the number, spacing and timing of their children and to have the information and means to do so, and the right to attain the highest standard of sexual and reproductive health. It also includes the right to make decisions concerning reproduction free of discrimination, coercion and violence, as expressed in human rights documents (International Conference on Population and Development, Programme of Action, Para 7.3).

Inherently associated with the right to make own decisions, is the requirement for individuals to have access to information about reproductive issues and have the capability and resources needed to carry out their decisions. Reproductive rights are an assembly of liberties and rights that are already recognized in national (human rights) or other documents on which agreement has been reached. “Reproductive rights refer to a diversity of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights affecting the sexual and reproductive life of individuals and couples” (NHRI handbook 22). In other words “reproductive rights are dependent on individuals' ability to exercise their basic rights as human beings” (Obermeyer 369).

Reproduction can be treated as ‘women’s domain’; when reproductive rights are violated, women are often the injured party (Amnesty). For that reason, they have been always a key item on the agenda of the women’s rights movement. Reproductive rights were not always as embedded as they are now. Previously, it was not about reproductive

3_{OHCHR: The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. A UN agency that serves}

to protect and promote human rights as they are guaranteed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 (OHCHR.org).

4_{ICPD Programme of Action: In 1994 the UN coordinated an International Conference on Population and}

Development (ICPD) in Cairo, Egypt. It resulted in a Program of Action, a leading document for the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Within the conference, the attendees achieved consensus on four main objectives: universal education, reduction of infant and child mortality, reduction of maternal mortality and access to reproductive and sexual health services including family planning

5_{Beijing Platform for Action: A progressive draft for advancing women’s rights. The main objectives were}

freedom of choice for each women and girl and realisation of rights such as equal pay for equal work and live free from violence (UN Women).

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comfort or free choice, but instead reproductive health connected issues only

concentrated on regulating women’s fertility with the objective to reduce population growth (NHRI handbook 25). However, as Davis describes in her essay “Racism, birth control and reproductive rights”, the wish for women to make their own decisions when it belongs to reproductive health has always been there (356). Although it was much

different from now - in 1814, for example, you could find a ‘birth control-recipe’ in a receipt book - women had the same need for reproductive freedom. Women wanted to find reliable birth control, abortions that did not result in permanently injure clients and legislation against sexual assault. Nonetheless, it was only after women’s right in general became an important focal point of social movements that reproductive rights could emerge as a rightful and accepted demand (356). The actual movements for reproductive rights did not really start until the 20th and 21st century. Advocates of the First Wave of Feminism fought for birth control, but until the years before World War I, there was not a real movement in the field of reproduction (Badore 4). The movement started with a prominent focus on birth control, but expanded more and more with other focus points such as eugenics, sterilization movements and eventually abortion rights (Badore 4).

On June 1914, the magazine Women Rebel first “used the phrase ‘birth control’ and first cited the existence of a birth control movement” (Badore 4). Main activist of the movement was feminist Margaret Sanger, a woman who worked several times with working class women and knew about their desire for birth control. The main objective of the movement was to give women the possibility to have birth control, but in order to do so they had to change the way society looked at contraception (Badore 4). The

introduction of the new term, birth control, was an important aspect to create this

renewed perception. It implied that women could take control over their own bodies and led to the fact that it was publically acceptable by 1923 and widely practiced and

approved of by 1925 (Badore 7). This idea of framing how society looks at contraception fits within the logic of collective action. The media - Women Rebel - was used as a tool to mobilize; more women would protest when they believed that they could take control over their own bodies. However, in the years that followed birth control remained somewhat controversial. In 1942 the Birth Control League of America changed its name in “Planned Parenthood” since it sounded less feminist and more family oriented. The organization stated that it: “committing itself to ‘planned parenthood in the widest sense’ [and] declaring that it was ‘the duty and responsibility of parents to have as many

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Parenthood became a major player in organizing protests and spreading information. Since Planned Parenthood worked together with all kinds of smaller protest groups, it became an organization that bridged the differences between different ideals and goals. Also, it acted as ‘brokering organization’ that facilitated cooperation between for example those who advocated for birth control but also for those who wanted legalized abortion. Thus, there was more emphasis on interpersonal networks to build relationships in order to create collective action, which is according to Bennett and Segerberg a key element of the logic of collective action (756).

With the acceptance of birth control, matters such as abuses, sterilization and abortion rights became increasingly important. Alongside with birth control, women saw sterilization as the perfect solution for when they were done with having children (Cline 6). Around 1967 arose a feminist movement that was advocating for abortion rights. They fought for equal rights: “Abortion was a right… essential to their right to equality - the right to be treated as individuals rather than as potential mothers” (Luker 92). They used the word ‘rights’ in order to frame the issue of abortion about the demand of women to control their own body to be completely free. As Badore states, they talked about

abortion as something that every women had to deal with, instead of talking about it as a medical procedure. Within the Second Wave of Feminism, the focus was primarily on individual women and individual rights. Hereby as well, the framing was part of a bigger media strategy. In order to mobilize women to take action, protesters used media to gather women together. More concrete, protesters used media to be collective.

About the same time the so-called ‘pro-choice’ and ‘pro-life’ movements advanced. Pro-life supporters were often very Christian en believed that the unborn life was a gift from God and that man did not have the right to kill this gift (Karrer 528). The pro-life movement in general is strongly connected to religious organizations, which associate anti-abortion with the idea of being a good, god-fearing person (Badore 17). In extension, many pro-life groups claim that sex is only for procreative purposes within a marriage, whereby they are mostly against birth control as well. Pro-choice supporters, however, thought of abortion as a legal right for women to terminate their pregnancy. They argued that women had the individual right to make their own medical decisions. In 1967, a couple of states in the United States decriminalized abortion in specific cases such as rape or incest and in 1970, Hawaii became the first state to legalize abortions on the request of the women (Schultz and Van Assendelft 195). The discussion about the legalization of abortion reached its peak when the Roe vs. Wade case occurred in 1973. It

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was a substantially changing interpretation of existing law by the United States Supreme Court on the issue of abortion. The court ruled that a right to privacy included that women should have to right to have an abortion.

Although feminists have been fighting for decades in order to earn reproductive rights, only quite recently binding laws are prescribed. Since the 1950s the UN has been adopting several legal document to delineate human rights, such as the UDHR6. However it was not until 1968 when reproductive rights were formally embedded within human rights. The Final Act of the Tehran Conference on Human rights indicated: “Parents have a basic human right to decide freely and responsibly on the number and spacing of children and a right to adequate education and information in this respect” (NHRI

handbook 26). After the Roe vs. Wade case, several international declarations have been made. Within these declarations, there was more and more attention for equal access and right for sexual healthcare.

One can argue that the birth control movement was in a way more complex than the suffrage movement. There was not only a demand for birth control, but also for legalized abortion, legislation for sexual violation and so on. Thus, the movement was in the end about all kinds or reproductive rights and the demand for women to control their own bodies and their reproductive system. Therefore, there can be spoken about a shared agenda between the different protests. Social technologies, such as for example

magazines, were used by organizations to manage participation and to mobilize women. In many situations, there was a strong organizational coordination of action.

2.2. Current women’s rights movements and the logic of connective action

Internet changed the way of thinking about activism. The notion of social media became increasingly important. Both previous women’s rights related movements and the Women’s March were about being collective about some kind of common interest. However, the role of the Internet cannot be subordinated in the Women’s March and therefore, one can argue that it was more about being connective than about being collective. Therefore, this thesis builds on the specific theory of connective action. First

6_{Universal Declaration of Human Rights: The first international legal document adopted by the United Nations}

General Assembly on 10 December 1948. It was the first international interpretation on what many people believed to be the rights to which all human being are entitled.

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will follow a short understanding of social media and social movements. After this, the logic of connective action will be explained.

2.2.1. Scholarly views on the role of social media within social movements

Clay Shirky (2011), an American writer and teacher specialized in the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, was one of the first scholars who wrote about social media as a social networking tool for collective action (NYU Journalism). One of his major statements was that over the years, people received greater access to

information, better chances to engage in public speech and an improved capacity to undertake collective action (Shirky). According to him, this is a result of the fact that the world communication system has gotten more complicated and allowed more

participation. Unlike first, when social hubs were used as tools to organize people, social media have become coordinating tools for nearly all of the world’s political movements (Shirky).

Social networks contained five important aspects that contributed to the formation of social movements (which are still relevant), respectively: communication,

organization, mobilization, validation and scope enlargement (Lopes 8). The central claim Shirky made was his idea that social media replaces old mobilization structures and turned into a new tool that coordinated almost all recent popular social movements, since it had the capability to encompass all of these aspects (8). Social media were faster and more interactive than traditional media and they could reach millions of people from all over the world. Social media offered a new form of spread ability; it facilitated the fast spread of information especially on an international level, which helped with “validation, mobilization and scope enlargement” (9). According to Eric Clark (2012), also cited in the article of Lopes, one of the most noteworthy aspects of this new form of

communication is the fact that it could help ordinary citizens in transforming the political landscape in order to give them a voice (Clark in Lopes 9).

Social media such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have all been pointed out as important elements in recent social revolutions (Kidd and McIntosh). To what extent social media is important and essential for social movements, is an important topic that many scholars have written about. Dustin Kidd, an Associate Professor of Sociology at Temple University in Philadelphia and Keith McIntosh, doctoral student in Sociology at the Temple University as well, illustrate in their article “Social Media and Social

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Movements” (2016) how different scholars look at this. According to them, the basic question for academic research is if social media can create the tipping point that leads to a movement’s success. However, there are many different opinions about this, which can be divided in three subsections: ambivalent, optimistic and pessimistic.

Ambivalent

Kidd and McIntosh believe in a techno-ambivalence approach, which is “characterized by the willingness to make claims of newness, and hence possibility, but to position such claims within a serious assessment of the limitations, sometimes deemed quite critical, of such technology” (789). They refer to the Egyptian Revolution, a social movement whose success is often linked to social media. According to Dhiraj Murthy, an Associate

Professor in the School of Journalism and the Department of Sociology, Twitter was neither unconnected nor did it cause the revolution. Instead, Twitter played a more practical role and served three different aims for Egyptian activists: it was a real-time information stream managed by Egyptian journalists, a way to reach an international audience and a way to organize divergent activist groups on the ground (Murthy in Kidd and McIntosh 789). Murthy highlights that despite these practical requirements, the revolution was driven by the activity on the streets of Cairo. Other scholars that see themselves as techno-ambivalent agree with Murthy and see social media as a powerful and crucial tool rather than something exhaustive (790). The ambivalence character of social media is also illustrated by Thomas Poell (2014), an Assistant Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He looked into the different platforms and discovered that each platform had a different architecture and related business model, which “played an active role in shaping the communication that occurs within them” (791). For example, Twitter focused on real-time events, meanwhile YouTube hosted relevant material to which other sites referred. Thus, the more ambivalence approach regarding the role of social media within social movements “refuses to romanticize either the past or the future, and instead awaits the accumulation of evidence of the actual outcomes of social media and its impact on activism. Techno-ambivalent recognizes both the power of existing hegemonies and the agency of

individual actors. Finally, it allows for the possibility of social change without presuming it to be an automatic outcome of new technology” (792).

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Optimistic

A more optimistic point of view regarding social change through social media comes among others from Manuel Castells, a Spanish sociologist that is especially related with research in the field of the information society, communication and globalization. He emphasizes in his book Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (2012) the potential of social media technologies in order to solve social problems. According to him, the real power is nowadays in the hands of those who make

connections (technology professionals but also the ones who “metaphorically act as programmers and switchers for social institutions and social movements” (Kidd and McIntosh 786). Although we live in a society build on information and networking, and social media is the most logical form to communicate, even Castells claims that we need “real-world connection and collaboration for social movements, particularly in the form of what he calls ‘occupied space,’ referring to the squares and parks in which protesters gather, organize, and take action” (Kidd and McIntosh 786). Nonetheless, Castells

remains to be an optimist about the transformative power that social movements can have when online activism results in and correlates to real-world activism.

Castells based his ideas on a number of social movements that have, according to him, a number of parallels that help clarifying their success. He states that they have “a kind of multimodal networking which encompasses online and offline networks” (Kidd and McIntosh 786). Although the occupy takes place in the urban space, this is in a way strongly connected to cyber spatial. He calls this connection - between urban- and cyberspace - a space of autonomy. Finally and perhaps most important, Castells claims that these new social movements are leaderless for these two reasons: they do not trust power and because of the flattening of organizational hierarchies through network society (Kidd and McIntosh 787). Castells is mentioning the Egyptian revolution as well and recognizes that the grouping of the masses through Internet communication turned into something so effectively threatening that the Egyptian government decided to block all social media sites (Butcher 95). This does not only mean that the Internet has enough power to bring activists together, but also that it can organize legitimate social change as well. He also refers to other social movements such as the Arab Spring and the

Indignados in Spain, whereby he claims “the internet opens up autonomous space for mass self-communication to develop into the occupation of urban spaces by the masses” (Butcher 96).

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Tufekcsi and Wilson (2012) were also techno-optimistic about the role of social media within social movements. In their article “Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square” they stated that social media proposes new sources of information that a ruling regime cannot simply control (363). According to them, this can be a critical element of the social movement, since it can shape the individual choices of citizens about participating in protests and the

logistics of protest (363). Based on a survey of participants of the Egyptian Tahrir Square protests, they learned that citizens knew about the protests mainly through interpersonal communication and that social media increased the change that a respondent appeared at the protests (363). In extent to this, Shirky introduces a condition that he likes to call the dictator’s or conservative dilemma. Within this dilemma, there is a condition of “shared awareness” in a group of people who experience unhappiness about a certain situation (Lopes 10). This condition can arise because when people get access to new media, they have increased access to speech or assembly (10).

Pessimistic

Finally, there are those who are pessimistic about the role of social media within social movements. These so-called techno-pessimists admit that social media can be important, but claim on the other hand that it does not change how people interact in the real world (Kidd and McIntosh 788). For them, social media and social networking is only a influential set of tools whereby it is essential who makes and controls the tools and who has easily access to these tools. According to them, “cyber-utopians ignore or exaggerate the benefits of new technology with little use of evidence and a blind-eye to history” (788). Before the arrival of social media, there were successful social movements as well such as the civil rights movement. Also, there is the notion of ‘slacktivism’, a

combination between the words slacker and activism. This term describes the idea of supporting a social cause to feel good, while it has little or no effect. The only aim is to feel satisfied about ‘contributing’ to the case (McCafferty 18). Within previous

movements, involved parties had “strong tie” personal connections, while activism connected to social media builds on “weak tie” relationships (18). Closely linked to slacktivism is the notion of clicktivism, which allows organizations to measure their success by keeping track of the amount of ‘clicks’ on their online petition or other form of online action (White). Both slacktivism and clicktivism are accused of being a lazy option for those who have failed to engage with issues (Kingsley). Obviously, it is not

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very exhausting to sing an online petition or to click on a link. Some even go so far to say that slacktivism supports previously determined activists to become lazy and satisfied (Kingsley).

The above statements indicate that there is a lot of ambiguity about the role of social media within social movements. There is not an unambiguous answer to the question whether social networking is just a tool or instead so powerful that it can really change the outcome of social movements. However, all scholars agree that social media is indeed a really important and powerful tool for resistance and that it can contribute to the

outcome.

2.2.2. The Logic of Connective Action

This research of the Women’s March as global social movement, however, relies more on the concept of connective action. W. Lance Bennett, a Professor of Political Science and Alexandra Segerberg, an Associate Professor of Political Science interested in Digital Media and Civil Society Networks, go beyond the logic of collective action and discuss that a new logic has emerged in conjunction with collective action networks. This new logic, of self-organizing and organizationally enables connective action networks, is facilitated by communication technology and is called the logic of connective action (Wright 416). They claim:

The linchpin of connective action is the formative element of ‘sharing’: the

personalization that leads actions and content to be distributed widely across social networks. Communication technologies enable the growth and stabilization of network structures across these networks. Together, the technological agents that enable the constitutive role of sharing in these contexts displace the centrality of the free-rider calculus and, with it, by extension, the dynamic that flows from it – most obviously, the logical centrality of the resource-rich organization. In its stead, connective action brings the action dynamics of recombinant networks into focus, a situation in which networks and communication become something more than mere preconditions and information. What we observe in these networks are applications of communication technologies that contribute an organizational principle that is different from notions of collective action based on core assumptions about the role of resources, networks, and collective identity. We call this different structuring principle the logic of connective action (760).

In a broad sense, the concept refers to “individualized content and action frames (such as ‘we are the ninety-nine percent’) that are inclusive of different reasons as to why the thing in question needs changing and can be easily shared over digital media

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political action” (Bennett and Segerberg in Wright 416). Thus, connective action networks that are self-organizing can function on the organizational processes of social media, and they do not depend on firm organizational control or the symbolic idea of a unified ‘we’ (Bennett and Segerberg in Wright 416). It is a form of “contentious action based on sharing personalized contents through social media” which is in contrast to the earlier mentioned idea of collective action that depends more on the creation of collective identities (Postill 1). According to Bennett and Segerberg, the challenge of connective action is not how the mobilize individuals to contribute to a cause, but rather how to change this into “public engagement, policy focus, or mass media impact” (Postill 1).

Bennett and Segerberg write about several social movements such as the Arab Spring, Los Indignados in Spain and the Occupy movement, and the related role of social media that goes beyond sending and receiving messages. In their article “The logic of connective action. Digital media and the personalization of contentious politics” they examine the “organizational dynamics that emerge when communication becomes a prominent part of organizational structure” (739). They focus on the logic of connective action, which is based on sharing personalized content across media networks. According to them, we can recognize “digital media as organizing agents” (752). Persons do not longer need strong hierarchies to link them, but rather unify themselves through the use of social media. Another central element is the idea that “participation becomes self-motivating as personally expressive content is shared with, and recognized by, others who, in turn, repeat these networked sharing activities” (752). These actions enabled by technology platforms, can have similar features as collective action, but without this role played by formal organizations. Instead of content that is distributed by hierarchical and formal institutions, social networking concerns co-production and co-distribution, which is based on a different economic or psychological logic: co-production and sharing based on personalized expression (752). A last notable aspect of connective action is the idea of public action or the contribution to a common good as an act of “ personal expression and recognition or self-validation achieved by sharing ideas and actions in trusted

relationships” (752). With this idea, Bennett and Segerberg intend people who do not need a shared frame make a connection. Instead of this, the starting point is the self-motivated sharing of personalized ideas, plans, images or resources within a network with other people, mostly via social network sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (753). To realize that individuals with different backgrounds and ideas support the

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is achievable that people personalize and spreading an idea for all kinds of different reasons.

Figure 1: Elements of connective- and collective action networks (Bennett & Segerberg 756)

In order to explain the shift from collective action to connective action in more detail, Bennett and Segerberg give a typology of large-scale action networks. The one on the right represents the logic of collective action, identified by organizationally brokered networks, while the two on the left are two different variations on action networks through the lens of the logic of connective action (755). With the typology, Bennett and Segerberg wanted to emphasize “the rise of two forms of digitally networked connective action that differ from some common assumptions about collective action in social movements, and, in particular, that rely on mediated networks for substantial aspects of their organization” (755).

In short, the notion of collective action describes action networks that rely on ‘brokering organizations’ that facilitate cooperation or bridge differences when it is possible. Although they may use social media, they will only use it as a tool to mobilize and manage participation instead of “inviting personalized interpretations of problems and self-organization of action” (755). The total opposite can be found on the left side of the figure, where they describe connective action networks “that self-organize largely without central or ‘lead’ organizational actors, using technologies as important

organizational agents” (755). Despite the fact that sometimes formal organizations can be present, the idea is that they tend to remain low profile and exist equal in both online and offline forms. Also, there are no collective- but more personal action frames. Finally, Bennett and Segerberg focus on the form of connective action, presented in the middle of

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the figure. This middle type, already introduced in the section above, “involves formal organizational actors stepping back from projecting strong agendas, political brands, and collective identities in favor of using resources to deploy social technologies enabling loose public networks to form around personalized action themes” (575). Besides this, these organizationally enabled networks can include more informal organization actors that “develop some capacities of conventional organizations in terms of resource mobilization and coalition building without imposing strong brands and collective identities” (575).

2.3. Theorizing connective action: Facebook pages and the continuous event The different types of connective action can be used to analyze the Women’s March movement. Due to the fact that social media was of major importance in the spread and success of the movement, one can argue that it has at first sight many characteristics of connective action. Social technologies offered a platform on which women could connect in an ongoing way. It became a continuous event. Therefore, it is interesting to ask the following question: what features of continuity has Facebook?

Social networking sites such as Facebook are known for their persuasive technology. They persuade millions of users each day to adopt specific behavior (Fogg and Lizawa 35). This can be the persuasion the buy something, but also the persuasion to take action. Facebook offers multiple features that sustain this persuasion to take action: push

notifications, content that is easy to share with the ‘share-button’, the demand for contribution and so on. When something is posted on the Women’s March page, followers get a push notification making them thinking about the movement again. Mostly because it is so easy to join a movement (e.g. by clicking a link or sharing a image) people are persuade to continue action. Facebook offers all kinds of features making it easy to share content such as graphics and personalized action frames, which persuade people to continue to pursue action. According to Fogg and Lizawa people gain satisfaction from posting content online, but they likely get more satisfaction from seeing others responding positively to what they have posted (42). They want to contribute to the cause, partly because they want positive responses from others. Facebook offers an infrastructure on which it is easy to contribute. For example, the use of hash tags creates a linked group and it invites people to respond to each other and to encourage each other.

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The Women’s March Facebook page uses a lot of hash tags and invites people to be connective by means of using hash tags.

Thus, one can argue that the success of the Women’s March was mainly because of the online activism. Although the Facebook page was initially created in order to mobilize women, it evolved in a long-term and extended continuous event. Women were not only encouraged to join the actual march, but also to take action online. Via different downloadable graphics, online petitions, hash tags and other online activities promoted by the Women’s March Facebook page, women were encourages and in a sense, persuade continuing the protest.

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3. Methodology

3.1. Overall approach

In this section the methodology of this research will be described. This thesis included one main objective, namely to analyze Facebook pages as continuous action frame. Two aspects of this are worthy of attention: the spread of a local event into an allegedly global phenomenon and the Women’s March as a multi-issue event. An important concept in order to get a better understanding of the Women’s March was the concept of connective action.

This thesis forms a data driven analysis and made therefore use of digital research methods. Richard Rogers (2010) calls digital methods “the repurposing of methods in media for social and cultural research” (243). In a later published article, Rogers (2015) adds that it seeks to “introduce a sociological imagination or a social research outlook to the study of online devices” (2). This research approach is now used for well over a decade, and has a number of advantages in comparison with other more traditional research methods (e.g. advantages regarding the costs, speed, details etc. as well as close association between data and properties of media) (Rieder 1).

3.2. Object of study: the continuous event

The object of study of this research is the main Facebook page of the Women’s March, a so-called march that has grown into a true social movement for women’s rights. The Facebook page is seen as the starting point of the movement, created by the retired attorney and grandmother Teresa Shook. She felt devastated about the fact that president Trump had won the presidency, and together with a few friends, she made a Facebook event calling for a march on Washington (Agrawal). In no time, she received thousands responses and it was the starting point of one of the largest inauguration demonstrations in history. In order to make the event a success, Shook got help from others. One of them was Bob Bland, a fashion designer who created the “Nasty Women” and “Bad Hombre” t-shirts (based on president Trumps previous statements). Besides that, he proposed a “Million Pussy March” which was part of the Women’s March and aimed to make “a unique collective visual statement which will help activists be better heard, and provide women’s rights supporters a way to come together in a virtual march to represent themselves, connect, and support women’s rights, whether or not they are physically

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marching” (Pussyhat Project). Within this campaign, women could do several things. They could knit a hat and give it to the marchers, but they could also “wear, share and declare” which meant that the marchers were encouraged to share it on social media and to declare why they marched (Pussyhat Project). This contributed to the continuity of the event; through all kinds of online action, women were encouraged to continue to take action. Finally, Bland included three long time activists to be co-chairs of the national march in order to help organize the movement: Carmen Perez, Tamika Mallory and Linda Sarsour (Agrawal). Together, they became spokesperson of the Women’s March and advocated for women’s rights, including the fight for reproductive rights. The movement stated in their mission and visions the following:

The rhetoric of the past election cycle has insulted, demonized, and threatened many of us - immigrants of all statuses, Muslims and those of diverse religious faiths, people who identify as LGBTQIA, Native people, Black and Brown people, people with disabilities, survivors of sexual assault - and our communities are hurting and scared. We are confronted with the question of how to move forward in the face of national and

international concern and fear. In the spirit of democracy and honoring the champions of human rights, dignity, and justice who have come before us, we join in diversity to show our presence in numbers too great to ignore. The Women’s March on Washington will send a bold message to our new government on their first day in office, and to the world that women's rights are human rights. We stand together, recognizing that defending the most marginalized among us is defending all of us.

We support the advocacy and resistance movements that reflect our multiple and intersecting identities. We call on all defenders of human rights to join us. This march is the first step towards unifying our communities, grounded in new relationships, to create change from the grassroots level up. We will not rest until women have parity and equity at all levels of leadership in society. We work peacefully while recognizing there is no true peace without justice and equity for all (Women’s March).

The movement uses the contour of three different faces as its icon, apparently faces of women (defined by the shape of their eyelashes, hair and lips). The three faces have each a different color and stand next to each other, which implies that the movement is about connecting women with different backgrounds. The movement uses three different colors in their typography as well, being white, pink and dark blue.

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Image 1: Symbol of the Women's March movement worldwide

The object of study is worth analyzing, since the goal of this thesis is to find out if Facebook pages sustain a continuous action frame. The Women’s March has proven to be more than the initial idea, namely mobilizing women for an actual real-life march. It became an assembly point for all kinds of campaigns conducted in the context of the Women’s March, spread over an ongoing period of time. There was no need to be

physically present during the march; plenty of other things (both offline- and online) were organized. On Facebook followers were asked to support the cause by donating and posting about the march on their social media accounts with hash tags like #WhyIMarch (Women’s March on Washington). With easy accessibly and shareable content, the march became also something globally. Through Facebook the event spread throughout the world; similar protests were organized in various countries, all with similar event pages on Facebook and corresponding hash tags. Even after the march on January 21, the Facebook page continued to be an event on itself. Several campaigns were announced and the organizers continued to call on people to take action against their new president and his statements and ideas. They proposed their “Women’s March’s 10 actions/100 Days Campaign, Pledge of Liberation”, a six months during event - with several specific protests - in response to attacks on their health care, identities and lives (Women’s March). Facebook became a gathering point for people who did not agree with president Trump and wanted to take action against it.

In order to examine the Women’s March as continuous event, the main Women’s March page will be analyzed. The main page of the Women’s March (@women’smarchonwash) was the first official page of the movement and has at the moment of writing this thesis 743,143 likes and 779,907 followers. The cover photo of the main page draws attention for their “Pledge for Liberation”-protest (see appendix 1.1).

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3.3. Data collection

The data collection used in this research will be described in the following section. The analysis that is conducted forms a platform analysis of the social media network

Facebook. Social media networking sites such as Facebook are popular platforms for the opportunities they offer for both social and cultural research (Rogers 35). Social media accounts do not only offer traditional demographic information (e.g. age, gender and location) but also ‘post demographic’ information (e.g. people's interests such as favorite music or favorite television shows), which is interesting for research (35).

Facebook was founded on February 4, 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg and now has more than 1.9 billion active users from all parts of the world (Statista). It is therefore not very surprising that it is said to have enormous impact on social behavior in general and in extension on social movements. In order to extract all data of the Facebook pages, this research made use of Netvizz. Bernhard Rieder, an Associate Professor of New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam and a collaborator with the Digital Methods Initiative, introduced this tool as “a data collection and extraction application that allows researchers to export data in standard file formats from different sections of the Facebook social networking service” (1). Therefore the tool can perform both quantitatively and qualitatively analysis of networks, groups and pages towards demographical, post-demographic and relational characteristics (1). The tool was invented in 2009 with the aim to study Facebook’s Application Programming Interfaces (API) as a new media object but because of its positive reception, it was refined into a “veritable data extractor that provides outputs for different sections of Facebook in standard formats” (3). It provides “raw” data for different interfaces on Facebook, such as personal networks, pages and groups. A final noteworthy aspect of Netvizz is the fact that it functions as a Web application.

3.3.1. Netvizz Search Module: making a list of the Women’s March pages

For this research, an important aspect was to create a list of all the different Facebook pages belonging to the Women’s March movement. One significant focus point of this thesis was the spread of a local event into an allegedly global phenomenon. An important question hereby was: is global an accurate description? The query “women’s march” was used in the search bar with the aim to find out how many pages existed with this name and what the nature of these pages was. This resulted in a list of 529 pages and contained

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the following information: id, name, category, fan_count (i.e. likes), check_ins, talking_about_count and description.

A first step was to manually filter out all the non-relevant pages, which resulted in a remaining list of 490 pages. In order to create this second list, the description and the category have been analyzed. The next step was to analyze the names of the pages. Since most pages were event-pages of a march in a specific place, it was interesting to look at the places mentioned in the name of the page. For example, “Women’s March New York” is an event page for the march in New York, thus a gathering point for all those interested in the march in New York.

In order to map the spread of the Women’s March as social movement throughout the world, several heat maps has been created. This way of visualizing the spread of a

movement is also done by several others. Leonie Herma used in her thesis “Social media: An effective instrument for an antisocial movement. Mapping the rise of the German anti-Islam movement Pegida on Facebook” several similar concepts and formed therefore an important inspiration for this thesis. A heat map forms a graphical representation of data in two dimensions, with the third dimension represented by color (Freedman and Osicka 249). This visualization tool is frequently used in gene expression experiments for data examination, looking for clusters of similarity (249). The heat map used in this thesis demonstrates in graphic form a selection of data. The data are arrayed according to two main characteristics, density and the amount of likes. A range of colors displays intensity: red indicated a high value, yellow a low value and orange a medium value.

3.3.2. Netvizz Page Data Module: creating the agenda of the Women’s March

After visualizing the spread and popularity of the Women’s March movement, a second aim was to approach the movement as a multi-issue event. Therefore, an agenda of the Women’s March has been created. In order to do so, a more in-depth analysis of the Women’s March main Facebook page has been done. Via the Netvizz Page Data Module, the main page was scraped in order to receive more detailed information about the (popular) posts, the

engagement with these posts and their strategy to create a continuous action frame. The goal of this was to find out in what extension Facebook pages constitute or sustain a continuous action frame.

This module is also used in order to map the agenda of the most important or influential topics and/or actors. Therefore, it can be seen as ‘mapping the social.’ After

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scraping the Women’s March main page, a tabular file with all the needed information was received. The file contained the following information: type of post (photo, video, link, event, status), by whom the post was made, the ID and link of the post, the post message, the

corresponding picture, the full picture, the link (+ domain), when the post was published, and the engagement (likes count, comments count, reactions count, shares count and the actual engagement). This information was used in order to analyze the Facebook page and to make claims about the content and the engagement, as well as to create an agenda of the Women’s March movement. In order to create this agenda, posts with corresponding images and hash tags have been analyzed.

Online activism: Facebook as continuous action frame The Women’s March on Facebook as continuous event