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Viewpoint
Beyond Viral
The proliferation of social media usage
has not resulted in significant social change.
and others show not a single instance
where analysis of social media predicted a social uprising or public movement. Social media has been much
better at providing the fuel for unpredictable, bursty mobilization than at
steady, thoughtful construction of sustainable social change.
Coordinated collective action is a
fundamental aspect of all collective in-
telligence and social decision-making
processes. However, despite progress
on understanding social mobiliza-
tion processes we are still a long way
from developing a reliable, quantita-
tive theory. In other words, we have
developed models able to predict the
In recent years, we have witnessed so-
cial media playing a major role in social
mobilization events of historic propor-
tions, such as the Arab Spring, the Oc-
cupy Wall Street movement, Ukraine’s
Euromaidan, and the chaos generated
by the England Riots and Boston Mar-
athon bombing manhunt. There has
been substantial emphasis on the role
of digital social media platforms, par-
ticularly Facebook and Twitter, as the
facilitators of these mobilizations. Data
availability has made it possible, for the
first time, to observe the evolution of
these events in detail.
10, 11, 13, 33 Analysis of
these events makes it clear that politi-
cal activists find it difficult to use social
media to create mass mobilization; and
even when they succeed it is difficult to
sustain the focus of the protest until it
is able to mobilize politicians, institu-
tions, and society at large. As a result,
most of these events burst upon the
scene, occupy our attention for a few
days, and then fade into oblivion with
nothing substantial having been ac-
complished. Given all we have learned
about social mobilization, why isn’t
social media a more reliable channel
for constructive social change?
A related observation is that national intelligence agencies are failing to
anticipate social uprisings, even when
they extensively monitor personal social media networks. Recent global surveillance leaks from Edward Snowden
DOI: 10.1145/2818992