The Arab Spring has drawn a host of inquiries into the role of the Internet and social media during protest, leading many to question the links between online communication and offline activity. Evidence suggests that much of the information sharing about the protest events happened via online networks. Building on these observations and the literature of citizen journalism, this paper provides a new perspective on Internet communication technologies (ICTs) and protest. It advances the concept of protest observation as a distinct level of collective action involvement. This level of involvement holds particular importance in the digital age because witnessing protest and sharing experiences can have a larger impact than ever before on shaping the meaning and reach of a given demonstrations.

In the winter of 2011-12, Russian citizens participated in their first large street demonstrations since the early 1990s. This paper looks at a specific element of the internet’s role in these protests by examining different news frames in state-run television news, commercial news, and online content for the protests on December 10, December 24, and February 4. The research finds that state-run news admitted only that people were dissatisfied with the political process, while commercial news and the internet were far more critical of political leaders and the regime. Overall, a ‘war of frames’ emerged, with all of the news sources attempting to either dismiss or support the idea that the protests had significant grass-roots support and represented a legitimate threat to the Putin regime. Online news sources provided not only a broader range of voices and ideas, but also gave important details about the protest events themselves. What emerges from this study is that state-run news will struggle to contain future protests using the same post-Soviet propaganda methods, suggesting that the Russian state will either have to find a more effective way to control information challenges or experience change on the scale of the Arab Spring. This research was funded by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (The Internet and Everyday Rights in Russia, RES-000-22-4159).

During Egypt’s Arab Spring, unprecedented popular mobilization and protests brought down Hosni Mubarak’s government and ushered in an era of competition between three groups: elites associated with Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP), the military, and the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Street protests continued to play an important role during this power struggle. We show that these protests are associated with differential stock market returns for firms connected to the three groups. Using daily variation in the number of protesters, we document that more intense protests in Tahrir Square are associated with lower stock market valuations for firms connected to the group currently in power relative to non-connected firms, but have no impact on the relative valuations of firms connected to other powerful groups. We further show that activity on social media may have played an important role in mobilizing protesters, but had no direct effect on relative valuations. According to our preferred interpretation, these events provide evidence that, under weak institutions, popular mobilization and protests have a role in restricting the ability of connected firms to capture excess rents.