Social Media and Protest: The Changing Dynamics of Contention in the Digital Ag

This dissertation tackles the question of how social media has an impact on protest movements from three different angles. My first paper takes a global approach, using aggregate-level data on protest emergence, and state responses to protest in order to test whether the introduction of social media is correlated with changes in the dynamics of protest. I find some initial evidence to suggest that as social media usage increases, controlling for other factors, levels of protest also go up. The second and third papers of the dissertation focus in on particular aspects how social media changes the dynamics of protest mobilization, organization and outcomes, exploring these questions in the context of the EuroMaidan protests in Ukraine from 2013-2014. In the second paper, I find that the structure of social media changes the dynamics of who can play influential roles in the transmission of information about protest. The evidence in my paper suggests that people who were not local to Ukraine during the protests both played structurally important roles in online networks of information about the protests, and also amplified the profile of different types of information than locals, in ways that might have important implications for international perceptions of protest movements, and the framing of information that becomes dominant. Finally, my third paper explores whether the shifts in how information is exchanged has led to new types of strategic behavior on the part of individuals during protest. I find that language use online shifted in interesting ways in relation to events on the ground during the Ukrainian protest, and suggest that individuals may be making strategic choices about how to share information in order to maximize the effectiveness of their communication. The three papers together represent an important contribution to our growing understanding of the impact of new and developing information technologies on political behavior, and how this may change the dynamics of political protest.