Political Participation Online

This chapter presents a model of how individuals move from being nonparticipants to online participants to protesters on the street and how, by combining forces, opposition groups encourage non-group members to protest. The chapter explores the role of social media in protest participation, using interview data, tables, and models to demonstrate how sources of information affected individual mobilization leading up to the revolutionary protests. The chapter shows how Facebook facilitated the building of a politically conscious civil society leading up to the Egyptian Revolution, contributed to reinforcing grievances and mobilizing opposition to the regime, and lowered the threshold for engaging in political participation. In this chapter, new theoretical concepts, such as “online preference” and “revolutionary bandwagoning online,” are presented.