Keywords: Political behavior, participation and culture

In January 2017, a user on the social media site reddit posted a link to a news story about how the administration of the newly inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump had deleted all references to climate change from the White House website. In response, another user wrote, “There needs to be a Scientists’ March on Washington.” This comment prompted other readers to create a Facebook page for just such a march. Within four months, the page had received more than half a million likes. A Twitter feed and website followed, along with hundreds of other social media sites devoted to planning events in cities around the world. On April 22, 2017, more than one million people participated in more than 600 March for Science events in 66 countries. The developments surrounding these events drew extensive media coverage and prompted considerable debate.

Research has examined how the U.S. public responded to the March for Science, finding that reactions split along party lines (Pew Research Center, 2017). In addition, studies have explored what reasons drove March participants to support the movement, finding a mix of pro-science and anti-Trump motivations (Newman, 2017; Travis, 2017; University of Delaware Center for Political Communication, 2017; Yong, 2017). However, little research to date has examined how participants used social media to learn and communicate about the March, or how such uses shaped participants’ intentions to undertake future actions. Addressing these questions provides an opportunity to illuminate our understanding of how “networked movements” (Tufekci, 2017) use social media to raise awareness and mobilize supporters. Furthermore, the March for Science offers a new context in which to extend research on how social media use can shape participation in protest movements (Macafee & De Simone, 2012; Tufekci & Wilson, 2012; Valenzuela, 2013).

To these ends, the present study draws on data from two surveys: an online survey distributed on March 30-April 20, 2017 through 40 March for Science Facebook groups (N = 1,200), and an in-person survey conducted at the Washington, DC March for Science event on April 22, 2017 (N = 184). Facebook was the leading channel for learning about the March among respondents in both the online and in-person surveys. Among online respondents, Facebook was also the leading channel for communicating about the March, followed by face-to-face conversations. In-person respondents were almost equally likely to communicate about the March through face-to-face conversations and Facebook. Majorities of respondents in both surveys reported that their engagement with the March had made them more likely to undertake a range of future online and offline activities, including reading, sharing, and writing social media messages; following science news; discussing science; and contacting public officials. A series of regression analyses found that uses of social media to learn about the March played little role in explaining future behavioral intentions whereas uses of Facebook and Twitter to communicate about the March predicted self-reported intentions to engage in multiple forms of future action.