{"title":"Social Media and Collective Action in China","authors":"Bei Qin, David Strömberg, Yanhui Wu","doi":"10.3982/ECTA20146","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<div>\n <p>This paper studies how social media affects the dynamics of protests and strikes in China during 2009–2017. Based on 13.2 billion microblog posts, we use tweets and retweets to measure social media communication across cities and exploit its rapid expansion for identification. We find that, despite strict government censorship, Chinese social media has a sizeable effect on the geographical spread of protests and strikes. Furthermore, social media communication considerably expands the scope of protests by spreading events across different causes (e.g., from anticorruption protests to environmental protests) and dramatically increases the probability of far-reaching protest waves with simultaneous events occurring in many cities. These effects arise even though Chinese social media barely circulates content that explicitly helps organize protests.</p>\n </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"92 6","pages":"1993-2026"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6000,"publicationDate":"2024-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA20146","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Econometrica","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.3982/ECTA20146","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"ECONOMICS","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
This paper studies how social media affects the dynamics of protests and strikes in China during 2009–2017. Based on 13.2 billion microblog posts, we use tweets and retweets to measure social media communication across cities and exploit its rapid expansion for identification. We find that, despite strict government censorship, Chinese social media has a sizeable effect on the geographical spread of protests and strikes. Furthermore, social media communication considerably expands the scope of protests by spreading events across different causes (e.g., from anticorruption protests to environmental protests) and dramatically increases the probability of far-reaching protest waves with simultaneous events occurring in many cities. These effects arise even though Chinese social media barely circulates content that explicitly helps organize protests.
期刊介绍：
Econometrica publishes original articles in all branches of economics - theoretical and empirical, abstract and applied, providing wide-ranging coverage across the subject area. It promotes studies that aim at the unification of the theoretical-quantitative and the empirical-quantitative approach to economic problems and that are penetrated by constructive and rigorous thinking. It explores a unique range of topics each year - from the frontier of theoretical developments in many new and important areas, to research on current and applied economic problems, to methodologically innovative, theoretical and applied studies in econometrics.
Econometrica maintains a long tradition that submitted articles are refereed carefully and that detailed and thoughtful referee reports are provided to the author as an aid to scientific research, thus ensuring the high calibre of papers found in Econometrica. An international board of editors, together with the referees it has selected, has succeeded in substantially reducing editorial turnaround time, thereby encouraging submissions of the highest quality.
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