Pursuing Social Change Online: The Use of Four Protest Tactics on the Internet

Online opportunities to engage in political action have been rising, including opportunities to participate in online petitioning, boycotting, and e-mailing and letter-writing campaigns. However, these specific activist tactics have not been the focus of scholastic attention. This paper investigates the distribution and architecture of websites hosting or directly linking to these four activist tactics online. Specifically, this paper addresses five basic structural questions: (1) Are opportunities to engage in these tactics usually organized around social movement organizations and/or actors? (2) Do sites tend to host or link to these four tactics? (3) On average, how tactically specialized or tactically diversified are sites? (4) How are these tactics distributed across different types of sites? and (5) How many implementations of each tactic were offered per website? Contributions include a clearer understanding of online opportunities to participate in the four tactics—particularly where tactics are not affiliated with social movement actors or organizations and where they are used for less political purposes—and the introduction of an innovative methodological technique that generates best approximations of reachable populations of online content, which can be randomly sampled when those populations are large.