Underline the role of social media in contemporary social movements and describe its challenges

Role in contemporary movements

Resource mobilisation theory, associated with Mayer Zald and others, already treated media as a resource. Digital platforms cheapen that resource. They help mobilise by spreading the time and place of protest. They help frame a grievance in a short visual story, which Snow and Benford’s framing approach would recognise. They create visibility for groups that official television ignores. They link local struggles to a transnational audience, as environmental and feminist campaigns have done. Manuel Castells wrote of networked social movements in a digital age. In India, anti-corruption protests, student movements, farmers’ protests and several identity campaigns have used WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and later Instagram and YouTube as organising tools. Diaspora money and attention can arrive through the same channels.

Social media also allow leaderless or loosely led forms. This can protect a movement from the arrest of a single head. It can also scatter strategy.

Challenges

Misinformation and rumour travel on the same rails as solidarity. Communal riots and panics have been linked to forwarded messages. States and opponents surveil and troll activists. Platform companies can mute a page or an account without a public trial. Slacktivism, a term for low-cost clicking, can substitute a like for organisation on the ground. Charles Tilly’s older stress on WUNC, worthiness, unity, numbers and commitment, is harder to sustain if the crowd exists only as a metric. The digital divide excludes those without phones or literacy in the campaign language. Algorithms reward outrage, which can radicalise a frame and split a coalition. Donatella della Porta and others note that digital tools do not abolish the need for organisations, allies and a political opportunity structure.

The sociological lesson is that social media are a new ecology for movements, not a replacement for the street, the union, the court or the party. They amplify both voice and noise.

Role and challenge on the same platform

A farmers’ sit-in can use live video to keep a national audience when television cameras leave. The same video stream can be clipped by opponents to invent a different story. A women’s safety campaign can find allies in another state overnight. It can also attract organised abuse that silences speakers. Leadership becomes harder to locate, which protects some activists and leaves others without a mandate to negotiate. Older movements had newspapers and cadres. New movements have metrics. The role of social media is therefore infrastructural: it is how many contemporary movements think, recruit and remember. The challenge is that this infrastructure is privately owned, easily flooded, and unevenly available. A complete answer underlines both, with the street and the organisation still in the sentence.