Collective Identity Framing in a Digital Grassroots Movement An Affordance Perspective

Abstract: A fair share of today’s activism is taking place on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, which have made scholars call for a re-conceptualization of the definition and understanding of political struggle. Traditionally, social sciences have viewed collective identity framing alongside political opportunities and mobilizing structures as equally influential factors for engaging in protest. Since many movements have moved online it is important to understand how the digital environment affects these factors. Therefore, we conducted an interpretive case study to explore how social media affects the collective identity of a grassroots movement. By turning to collective identity frames, we viewed the goals and means of a Swedish political grassroots movement as indicators of a collective identity. We set out to investigate the following research question: How do social media affordances affect collective identity framing in a digital political grassroots movement? The key finding indicates that social media affordances were in favor of diagnostic framing, but hindered prognostic framing. The social media affordance of visibility seemed to overrule the affordance of persistence, which created an overexposure of an emotive frame that hurt the credibility of the grassroots movement. To handle this loss of credibility when facing opponents, the affordances of editability and association sustained a fact-based frame.