“Underline the role of social media in contemporary social movements and describe its challenges.” (2023)
Manuel Castells calls social media “mass self-communication”: many-to-many messaging that bypasses the gatekeepers of state and corporate media. India had over 1,007 million broadband subscribers in December 2025 (TRAI), so these platforms now form the basic infrastructure of protest. Social media can do a great deal for movements, but it also creates new vulnerabilities.
Role of social media
- Voice for the unheard. Groups ignored by mainstream media can set the agenda themselves. The 2016 video of Dalit youths being flogged at Una (Gujarat) went viral and led to a Dalit asmita march and a pledge to give up carcass-disposal work.
- Framing and emotion. Viral images turn private suffering into a shared injustice, the diagnostic framing of David Snow and Robert Benford. Castells’s Networks of Outrage and Hope (2012) shows how the Tunisian vendor Mohamed Bouazizi’s self-immolation, once filmed and shared, turned outrage into hope.
- Mobilisation without organisations. W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg (2012) call this connective action: people join through personalised frames rather than party or union membership. After the RG Kar hospital rape-murder in Kolkata, a single social-media call led to the “Reclaim the Night” marches of 14 August 2024 across West Bengal.
- Resources at low cost. In the terms of John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, crowdfunding, legal-aid appeals and volunteer networks cut the cost of mobilising.
- Counter-narrative and documentation. The Samyukt Kisan Morcha (2020–21) ran its own social-media teams to answer hostile coverage. Livestreams also record police excesses.
- Transnational solidarity. Fridays for Future, begun by Greta Thunberg in 2018, spread climate strikes to Indian cities.
Challenges
- State control. India imposed 65 internet shutdowns in 2025 (Access Now). The shutdown in Manipur from May 2023 hid the violence until a video surfaced in July 2023. Account-blocking orders under Section 69A of the IT Act were issued during the farmers’ protest, and climate activist Disha Ravi was arrested in the 2021 “toolkit” case. Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (2020) requires shutdowns to be proportionate, but the courts’ oversight is limited.
- Surveillance. Digital traces make participants identifiable. Hong Kong protesters in 2019 used masks and cash to avoid being tracked.
- Misinformation and counter-mobilisation. Organised troll networks, doctored videos and echo chambers divide publics and discredit movements.
- Weak ties and slacktivism. Malcolm Gladwell (2010) argued that clicks rarely produce the strong ties that high-risk activism needs.
- Fragility. Zeynep Tufekci (Twitter and Tear Gas, 2017) shows that fast, leaderless mobilisation lacks the capacity to negotiate or change tactics. Egypt’s 2011 uprising was later reversed by the military.
- Digital divide and platform power. NFHS-5 found that only 33.3% of women had ever used the internet, against 57.1% of men. Algorithms written by corporations decide what becomes visible, which Castells calls network-making power.
Conclusion
Social media amplifies movements but does not power them. Indian movements that lasted, like the farmers’ mobilisation, rested on village and union networks and used platforms only as a supplement. How much democratic value social media delivers depends on whether states protect digital dissent and whether movements turn online attention into organisation.