Online Social Media Interaction and Offline Protest Movement: Patterns in 2019 Hong Kong

Abstract

In the recently, 2019 Hongkong protest movement, what kind of role does social media plays in the protest? Since the emergence of web 2.0 subverted the one-way information communication mode and provides more opportunity for public to express and interact online, social media platform has become the main battlefield for many protest movements, including those previously happened in Iceland, Spain, Egypt, and the global Occupy movement. In this movement in Hongkong, it is clear that public opinion on the social media has occupied the dominant position and also led the direction of social movement. In the study, we request data from public news pages of Facebook (FB), analyze the online sentiment and engagement pattern of Hongkong people during protest. Based on the data of FB in 2019, the study initially propose the model of social media engagement and offline protest: Sentiment aroused by news consumption could trigger online social media interaction, which reflect public opinion as well as attitude, and eventually promote the offline violent conflicts. It can be seen that connection between online social media engagement and offline protest movements is exist in 2019 Hongkong protest. Also, the sentiment tendency on social media could promote the emotional mobilization, which is a harbinger of the situation of movement and frequency of violent conflicts. According to this, we found that one of the factor that the government could not successfully grasp the opportunity to have public dialogue with citizen, is that they did not catch the “harbinger” on social media platform, and then failed to reverse the situation of public opinion.