Social Media Affordances Sustain Social Movements Facing Repression: Evidence from Climate Activism

Prior studies have demonstrated social media's role in post-repression backlash mobilization but have yet to consider how they can sustain movements through long term repression. We explore this possibility by studying how Finnish climate activists responded to government repression in their social media behavior. We first conducted in-depth interviews to see how activists understand the interplay between activism, repression, and social media affordances. Findings from our interviews suggest that activists continue their movement participation despite repression because the risk of social media amplifying individual chilling into movement-wide cascading demobilization outweighs risks from repression. We looked for evidence of this mechanism in the networked communication of Finnish climate activists on Twitter using time series and temporal network analyses. Our findings show that activists' Twitter participation remained remarkably consistent despite offline repression, and that their communication patterns exhibited centralization tendencies that likely sustain the movement.