Date of Award

12-5-2024

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Information Science

First Advisor

Nitin Agarwal

Abstract

In the digital age, social media platforms have become vital for political mobilization, enabling rapid information dissemination, real-time engagement, and virtual community formation. This dissertation presents a novel multi-method framework to analyze mobilization dynamics on multimedia-centric platforms, focusing on Instagram, X (formally Twitter), and TikTok. The study examines Brazilian political protests (November 2022–February 2023) and disinformation and anti-disinformation campaigns during Taiwan's 2024 presidential elections. The research applies a multi-method framework to analyze mobilization characteristics in Brazilian and Taiwanese social movements, grounded in the Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) theory. This approach assesses how multimedia formats—images, sidecars, and videos—influence cognitive mobilization at various mobilization stages: initialization, amplification, and sustainment. Using data from Instagram (68,569 images, 9,512 sidecars, 7,716 videos) and X (664,865 tweets, 76,867 images, 51,913 videos, 1,256,884 retweets), distinct multimedia usage patterns emerge. On Instagram, multimedia adoption is examined across DOI stages, focusing on cognitive mobilization through engagement rates. In Brazil’s anti-government protests, videos were favored across stages, while sidecars generated higher engagement. In pro-government movements, sidecars consistently outperformed videos, highlighting the roles of different multimedia types in mobilization. Co-occurring words, identified from 950,954 terms and 54,127 mentions, further elucidate communication dynamics, showing that Conative, Emotive, Expressive, and Referential words influenced engagement differently across DOI stages. For instance, Conative language had delayed yet impactful effects on engagement, while Emotive and Expressive words sustained culturally resonant mobilization. In a parallel analysis, the study investigates multimedia’s role on X in Brazil’s political protests. This analysis reveals that multimedia content—especially images and videos—enhanced cognitive mobilization, with different multimedia types influencing engagement patterns. Anti-government movements initially relied on images, shifting to videos during critical events, while pro-government protests primarily used images to drive engagement. Network analysis underscores multimedia's role, revealing that images and videos exhibited high betweenness centrality, facilitating the diffusion of information within the movements. The linguistic analysis showed that Conative and Referential words fostered both immediate and prolonged engagement, with Emotive and Expressive words proving essential for sustained mobilization, highlighting X’s effectiveness for movements requiring rapid and culturally driven mobilization. The framework is further applied to Taiwan’s 2024 election, focusing on TikTok's disinformation and anti-disinformation campaigns. Analysis of 343 videos, 46,551 comments, and a network dataset of 2,955 nodes and 25,830 edges shows that engagement and network cohesion during amplification stages, rather than content volume, were key to campaign success. Anti-disinformation efforts benefited from high network cohesion and stances aligned with the audience, particularly during the amplification stage. Conative language in disinformation had immediate but short-lived effects, while anti-disinformation strategies showed longer-lasting engagement, suggesting credibility-building as essential for impact. This research advances understanding of multimedia’s role in political mobilization, offering insights into how social movement theory, network analysis, and socio-computational methods contribute to modern activism and countering disinformation. By analyzing multimedia and linguistic strategies across platforms, this dissertation underscores multimedia's strategic roles in shaping mobilization and informs effective approaches to political activism and disinformation prevention.

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