Public relations and social movements: dilemmas of visibility on digital platforms

Abstract

Social movements, like other social actors, actively and deliberately seek to create events, argumentative moves, and communicative products that can capture the attention of specific audiences or society as a whole. Thus, they engage in public relations activities focused on inserting their agendas, positions, or opinions into the broader debate unfolding in the public sphere, promoting inclusion and plurality in the formation of public opinion.

Understanding the new dynamics and rules of mediatized visibility is crucial for social movements and activists who previously concerned themselves with newsworthiness criteria, editorial lines, and professional journalism standards but now must deal with the ways content is prioritized on social media platforms and search engines. We consider that visibility constitutes a dynamic field of disputes—both shaped by and shaping the social actors involved.

We aim to discuss how social movements adapt their communication to the same interactional context that provides logics—rules and resources—for interactions, strategically negotiating to achieve better visibility outcomes. To do so, we analyze Facebook posts from two opposing Brazilian social movement organizations that mobilize young people around politics: Levante Popular da Juventude, aligned with struggles for social justice, democratization, and the strengthening of popular power; and Movimento Brasil Livre, a reactionary force with a conservative moral stance.

Through this analysis, we seek to reflect on how the communication of opposing social movements either converges—by adhering to the platform's visibility criteria—or diverges, highlighting their distinct identities. In the theoretical framework, we present key concepts for the research, addressing transformations in collective action repertoires due to mediatization processes and the strategic choices social movements make in different arenas and in response to other players. We establish the foundation for our research objects through documentary and bibliographic analysis,

To conduct this research, we used the Content Analysis technique. We collected posts made during the same month, July, in different years from 2017 to 2020, using Fanpage Karma, a platform monitoring tool that allows exporting post data from a selected period into Excel spreadsheets.

We selected for our corpus the ten posts from each movement that achieved the highest visibility on the platform, identified through the number of shares. The corpus consists of 80 publications. We seek to identify differences and similarities in the posts published by the two organizations on the platform over different years, looking for signs of how these two opposing movements behave within the same subarena. We aim to identify the resources used, image characteristics, recurring tactics, and indications of typical forms of movement action.

Results shows that posts that gain visibility predominantly respond to platform logics. Among the posts with the most shares—those that grant access to visibility—there is no explicit display of the movements’ different logics, identities, or societal projects. In this sense, platform logics constrain movements' actions in this space, while at the same time, as the posts demonstrate, adaptations can be made to reconcile the movement’s overall strategic orientation with the interaction rules governing this subarena. Therefore, rather than a passive assimilation of platform logics, there is an ongoing process of experimentation, where over time, movements assess advantages and risks, informing their decisions regarding public relations activities in the social media environment.