“Facebook is a bit like a lost cause”: Social Movement Actors’ Perspectives on Social Media Affordances

Social movement actors working to hold businesses accountable for misconduct face challenges as they operate in the digital media environment characterised by unequal power relations. Previous work has provided insights into media practices and campaigning, but little is known about the underlying understandings social movement actors have of the platforms that enable much if not most of their work. It is also unclear how these understandings shape their activism. Filling this gap, this article takes its starting point in the interplay between technology and practices that make up affordances. It examines how social movement actors understand the affordances offered by the social media platforms they operate on. It also sheds light on differences between anti-systemic and reformist social movement actors’ understandings of these affordances. Thus, it considers opportunities and challenges, and, ultimately, power, as the way social movement actors perceive affordances impacts how they strategically utilise them. Theoretically, I draw on affordance theory and the notion of media ecologies. I suggest that to apply affordance theory to the study of social movements productively, we must use media ecologies as a starting point to avoid a too narrow lens of platform-specific affordance theory that encourages research on only one platform at the time. This theoretical approach helps highlight the distinctive particularities of the struggles faced by anti-systemic and reformist social movement actors despite them operating within similar political and cultural contexts. Empirically, I draw on interviews with communication experts from anti-systemic and reformist environmental organisations. 22 communication experts have participated in in-depth qualitative interviews from organisations such as: WWF, Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion, and Danish Society for Nature Conservation. The article finds differences in understandings of affordances between anti-systemic and reformist social movement actors. While both generally reject Facebook as a productive site for communication, anti-systemic actors tend to favour Twitter and Instagram and their possibilities to reach the wider public while reformist actors prefer taking advantage of the access to companies which LinkedIn offers. In addition to the environmental organisations’ selection of these platforms marking a strategic communicative choice, this further signals an understanding and navigation of the wider power relations these commercial platforms are embedded within. Such a consideration of power further hints that while some platforms may die and others become popular, what remains is the profit-driven infrastructure. While different actors have different conditions and goals for successful communication, some actors will still find that some infrastructures limit them while others may not. This understanding raises the question what about media ecologies? It is widely accepted in social movement and media studies literature that no social movement operates on one platform in isolation. In answer, this research critically engages with the particularities of platforms while accounting for ecologies as well, thereby responding to an emerging point of view in this research.