Movement social learning on Twitter: The case of the People's Assembly

Abstract

The article examines the UK movement People's Assembly against Austerity. It probes the extent to which opposition to austerity expressed on Twitter contributes to building bridges among disparate social groups affected by austerity politics and to enabling their joint collective action. The study aims to add to the scholarship on anti-austerity protests since the credit crunch. Numerous of those protests have been accompanied by vibrant activity on social media. Rather than to propose yet another examination of participant mobilisation on social media, the analysis delineates and seeks to evidence a process of social learning among the social media following of a social movement. Relying on a combination of social network, semantic and discourse analysis, the authors discuss movement social learning as a diffusion process transpiring in the communication over an extended period of substantive and organisational issues, strategy and critical reflections that crystallised a cohesive in-group among the participant entities in the People's Assembly.