How Motivations Drive Individuals’ Contributions to Protest Mobilization: A Mixed Method Social Media Analysis

Social media's direct contributions to protest mobilization - the potential for fostering engagement and the inherent risk of promoting superficial activism - are equally important. We divide motivational forces into two broad classes - exogenous and endogenous - that drive an individual’s likelihood and commitment to mobilizing a protest in the social media (SM) platforms. Linguistic cues available in SM assist in identifying the synergy of thoughts, connectivity, and resources, promoting the likelihood of protest mobilization. SM also facilitates the investigation of participants’ commitment in terms of volume and quality of information they disseminate. Employing a mixed-methods approach – a survey and transformer-based language model - we analyze the interplay between the motivations and the likelihood and intensity of online protest mobilization. This study intends to contribute to understanding social movement dynamics in SM platforms and provide fresh insights for activists and policymakers on optimizing media strategies for effective civic engagement.