This working paper looks at how social media 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.
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.