Bridging Women Rights Networks: Analyzing Interconnected Online Collective Actions

In recent mass protests such as the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, protesters used social media to spread awareness, coordinate, and mobilize support. Social media-assisted collective action has attracted much attention from journalists, political observers, and researchers of various disciplines. In this article, the authors study transnational online collective action through the lens of inter-network cooperation. The authors analyze interaction and support between the women's rights networks of two online collective actions: 'Women to Drive' (primarily Saudi Arabia) and 'Sexual Harassment' (global). Methodologies used include: extracting each collective action's social network from blogs authored by female Muslim bloggers (23 countries), mapping interactions among network actors, and conducting sentiment analysis on observed interactions to provide a better understanding of inter-network support. The authors examine these two distinct but overlapped networks of collective actions and discover that brokering and bridging processes can facilitate the diffusion of information, coalition formation, and the expansion of the networks. The broader goal of the study is to examine the dynamics between interconnected collective actions. This research contributes to understanding the mobilization of social movements in digital activism and the role of cooperative networks in online collective action.