Framing an Online Social Movement: How Do the Leadership and Participants of the Egyptian 6th of April Youth Movement Frame their Facebook Activism?

Abstract

The talks about the horizontality of Internet activism and the advent of social media applications have drawn great attention recently where leadership, organization and coordination are no longer tasks of a movement’s leadership, but also the general participants. This content analysis research attempts to show how the Egyptian 6 th of April Youth Movement framed its own activism and what this multiplicity of actors-based framing meant to social movement discourse. The significance of this study lies in its potential to contribute to the understanding of diverse frames by leaders and participants, with the latter rapidly emerging as new agents of social movements. The findings show that the leadership and participants used similar cause, motivational and consequence frames (the three social movement framing tasks), but the leadership used these frames more frequently than the participants and had a larger influence than the participants in the overall framing of the 6th of April Youth Movement.