‘Facebook is a bit like a lost cause’: Reconsidering affordances and social movement actors

Abstract

As social movement actors (SMAs) campaign for the climate on social media, they face challenges in attaining visibility due to the algorithms and commercial business models that structure these platforms. I examine how NGOs and activists navigate these challenges, as they work to hold businesses accountable for misconduct. While research has brought insights about SMAs’ social media uses, we still need to disentangle how these uses are shaped by an interplay between technological features and media practices. Therefore, this article engages with this interplay by examining how different SMAs consider their constraints and possibilities for social media campaigning. Theoretically, this article draws on affordance theory and mobilises the distinction between low-level and high-level affordances, which I conceptualise as technological features and media practices, respectively. This article finds three high-level affordances, which SMAs identify for campaigning on social media. On this basis, I show how SMAs face different challenges and opportunities when navigating social media platforms, depending on their orientations and media practices. This article thus contributes to the conversation on affordances by demonstrating analytically how the interplay between technological features and media practices becomes relevant for different actors.