Abstract
Online platforms are being increasingly appropriated for setting socio-political narratives (both offline and online). We investigate one such case study from India where a nationalist rhetoric took the form of a call to boycott an e-commerce company, Snapdeal, endorsed by Aamir Khan, an Indian celebrity. We term this a case of online collective action where Twitter users banded together to uninstall/downvote the Snapdeal app on Playstore. Through the use of "frame analysis" - a sociological device, we seek to understand the different "arguments" and "calls to action" that appear in the process of online collective action and how effective were they in terms of user engagement. We investigate these through a deductive coding process. We identify six major logical fallacies and three primary calls to action strategies and present their engagement metrics. We also discuss the role of frames in setting political narratives online and offer learnings for designing online civic media tools.
Recommended Citation
Prabhat, Shantanu; Motwani, Aditya; Mangurkar, Isha; and Rangaswamy, Nimmi, "Framings in collective action: Case of online #boycott" (2019). AMCIS 2019 Proceedings. 13.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/amcis2019/social_computing/social_computing/13
Framings in collective action: Case of online #boycott
Online platforms are being increasingly appropriated for setting socio-political narratives (both offline and online). We investigate one such case study from India where a nationalist rhetoric took the form of a call to boycott an e-commerce company, Snapdeal, endorsed by Aamir Khan, an Indian celebrity. We term this a case of online collective action where Twitter users banded together to uninstall/downvote the Snapdeal app on Playstore. Through the use of "frame analysis" - a sociological device, we seek to understand the different "arguments" and "calls to action" that appear in the process of online collective action and how effective were they in terms of user engagement. We investigate these through a deductive coding process. We identify six major logical fallacies and three primary calls to action strategies and present their engagement metrics. We also discuss the role of frames in setting political narratives online and offer learnings for designing online civic media tools.