The Social Media Overture of the Pan-European Anti-ACTA Protest: An Empirical Examination of Coordination in Connective Action

In the current political climate marked by deep economic transformation, social upheaval is fast becoming a preferred avenue for voicing angst and opposition to austerity and the retrenchment of the welfare state. The latest instalments of street protests that have swept the European Union from Greece to France and Spain, Bulgaria to the UK have signalled a deep preoccupation of the European citizenry with social justice whilst also underscoring the centrality of horizontal digital media in sparking and fanning protest. Not least, protest has been directed at preserving the existing scope of digital media for unencumbered information and communication, as witnessed in the cross-national mobilisations against the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (henceforth ACTA). In this presentation, I review an investigation of an ostensible process of networked coordination with Facebook and Twitter, which were both used in the pan-European protests against ACTA. The aim of the underlying study has been to conceptualize and scrutinize the scope for two modes of coordination it has identified -motivational and resource coordination- by way of a mixed-method review of data retrieved in the run-up to the last Europe-wide anti-ACTA demonstrations of 9 June 2012.