The structure of oline social networks and social movements: Evidence from the Black Lives Matter protests☆

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Fluckiger, Matthias; Ludwig, Markus
• 署名单位: University of York - UK; Braunschweig University of Technology
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2025.105373
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: collective action; online social networks; Black Lives Matter

摘要

This paper documents that online social networks-Facebook in particular-can facilitate the spread of social movements across space and time. Focusing on the largest protest movement in recent history, the wave of Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd on 25 May 2020, we show that protests are more likely to spill over between US counties when they are more closely connected within the Facebook network. To identify causal effects, we develop an instrumental variable approach that exploits local Facebook outages as a source of exogenous variation in the structure of the online network.