Facebook for Protest? The Value of Social Software for Political Activism in the Anti-FARC Rallies

 

Authors: Christina Neumayer, Celina Raffl

How do real and virtual spaces influence on another in the field of political activism? This R@D research product draws on the Facebook-mediated anti-FARC protests in Colombia to assess the potential of the Internet in globalizing geographically specific political contests. One of the key factors used in quantifying this relationship is access: who has the ability to express themselves politically in a virtual space? In order to bring quantitative analysis to bear on this question, this research cross-references rally locations to rankings on the Human Development Index and finds a high correlation between the incidence of rallies and high ranking on the index, implying that Internet-mediated activism is to some extent contingent on economic class (a proxy for technology access, among other things). The paper concludes by reaffirming that the use of social software for political protest is dependent on the ideologies and the cultural and political contexts of its users and developers.

 

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