Journal of Information Technology & Politics

ISSN: 1933-1681 (Print) 1933-169X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/witp20

The “Crowd-factor” in connective action:

comparing protest communication styles of Thai
Facebook pages

Max Grömping & Aim Sinpeng

To cite this article: Max Grömping & Aim Sinpeng (2018): The “Crowd-factor” in connective
action: comparing protest communication styles of Thai Facebook pages, Journal of Information
Technology & Politics, DOI: 10.1080/19331681.2018.1483857

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JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & POLITICS
https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2018.1483857

The “Crowd-factor” in connective action: comparing protest communication

styles of Thai Facebook pages
a
Max Grömping and Aim Sinpengb
a
Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany; bDepartment of Government and International Relations,
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

This study draws on theories of connective action and actualizing citizenship norms to explore online Received 27 May 2017
protest communication styles in hybrid social movements. We use a most-similar case comparison Revised 18 May 2018
within a singular instance of large-scale anti-government mobilization in Thailand to investigate Accepted 30 May 2018
whether crowd-enabled elements of movements privilege a more “self-actualizing” communication KEYWORDS
pattern and how they interact with more formally organized movement elements. The results of a Connective action;
qualitative and quantitative content analysis of the posts of two Facebook pages are mixed, but do actualizing citizenship;
show that crowds use different language and – to an extent – more actualizing communications. They Facebook; Thailand;
align their agenda with that of more formal social movement organizations, rather than steering away mobilization; protest
from them. This agenda-alignment is heightened during times of high-intensity and high-stakes communication
mobilization. These results clarify the intertwinement of crowds and organizations in hybrid move-
ments and suggest new avenues to measure connective action.

Introduction high-stake protest movements, crowds are easily

Much contemporary research investigates the central-
ity of organizational structures in digitally enabled or
hybrid movements. Some recent studies suggest that
technological transformations have greatly reduced
the importance of formal organizations for collective
action (Earl & Kimport, 2011). With the costs of
information and communication negligible and co-
presence no longer required, “crowds” can and do
self-mobilize protest, adhering to a new and qualita-
tively different logic of “connective action” (Bennett &
Segerberg, 2013). Other accounts hold that the “orga-
nizational layer” – far from becoming obsolete – is still
essential for competing in contemporary contentious
politics (Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2012). While this
ongoing debate focuses squarely on organizational
morphologies and activists’ strategies to affect engage-
ment, much less is known about organizational com-
munication styles that have developed in tandem as
an expression of these trends.
The present study addresses this gap by exploring
protest communication styles in hybrid movements.
We argue that when examining highly dynamic and
drawn into the top-down agenda of more traditional,
resource-rich entities in the movement, taking on
the role of auxiliary communicators and mobilizers.
This “agenda-alignment” heightens during times of
high-intensity mobilizations. We recognize that
movements are not static but rather dynamic and
that within the space of hybrid movements, we may
see organizations move from a more traditional
morphology at one stage toward a more crowd-
enabled morphology at another stage and back.
Still, crowds retain their distinct “self-actualizing”
and personalized communication patterns even dur-
ing agenda-alignment, making them well attuned to
the new citizenship norms of their audiences.
Drawing on the works of Bennett and Segerberg
(2013) and of Wells (2015) we develop a typology of
protest communication styles that maps onto the
organizational distinctions of the connective action
framework. We then explore the fit of this typology
with an empirical case of two Thai Facebook pages
which were both allied as parts of the same hybrid
anti-government movement in 2013/14 in that coun-
try. The pages are selected according to a “most-

CONTACT Max Grömping max.groemping@ipw.uni-heidelberg.de Institute of Political Science, Heidelberg University, Heidelberg, Germany
Color versions of one or more of the figures in the article can be found online at www.tandfonline.com/witp.
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.
© 2018 Taylor & Francis
2 M. GRÖMPING AND A. SINPENG
similar” logic (Seawright & Gerring, 2004). One of
them is effectively the online communication tool of
a resource-rich, centrally steered traditional social
movement organization (SMO), while the other is
largely a virtual entity that was created by activists
independently of and months prior to aforemen-
tioned SMO and is characterized by little formal
organizational coordination of action. As such, the
two cases present approximations of the organiza-
tionally brokered vs. the crowd-enabled category of
the connective action framework (Bennett &
Segerberg, 2013, p. 47).1 The theory of connective
action would expect a higher prevalence of actualiz-
ing communications and emergent personalized
action frames for the crowd-enabled entity. It
would expect the crowd to keep some distance
from formal organizations, and to rely more heavily
on the audience’s own suggestions for action.
However, the qualitative and quantitative analysis
of the posts of both pages yield mixed results.
Overall, actualizing communication patterns are
not very prevalent on either of the two pages. There
is some indication of more actualizing communica-
tions on the crowd-enabled page, in particular inter-
active sourcing of information, more network-
expressive action repertoires, and more horizontal
and less authoritative language. At the same time
that the crowd-enabled SMO solicits more audience
suggestions, it also aligns itself with the organization-
ally brokered SMO’s agenda in terms of aims and
events, in effect serving primarily as a add-on mobi-
lizing agent. This “agenda-alignment” is not cen-
trally steered but organically driven by the crowd
itself. It is furthermore temporally limited to the
large-scale and regime-threatening mobilization
under observation, as predicted by the connective
action framework.
In discussing these ambivalent results, the arti-
cle makes several theoretical and empirical contri-
butions. First, it speaks to the ongoing debate over
Bennett and Segerberg’s (2013) typology by focus-
ing upon the varying degrees of crowd-involve-
ment in different elements of one and the same
hybrid movement. In particular, crowds may
choose to align their agenda closely with the lat-
ter’s, in effect freeriding on their resources and
media attention. Through agenda-alignment,
crowds oscillate from the periphery of a hybrid
movement to its center and back. This finding
clarifies the intertwinement of crowds and organi-
zations in hybrid movements.
Second, even during times of agenda-alignment,
we confirm Wells’s (2015) expectation that crowd-
enabled collectives communicate in qualitatively
different ways than organizationally brokered
ones, although the quantitative coding scheme
proposed by Wells may not be best-suited to cap-
ture these differences. This makes the point for a
“division of labor” of sorts, in which crowds cater
to certain segments of the movement audience
with stronger self-actualizing citizenship norms.
Third, by locating the study empirically in a
non-OECD setting we hope to weigh in on the
generalizability of these debates. How well do con-
cepts such as “connective action” travel to emer-
ging democracies or even autocracies with less-
differentiated civil societies and real threats of
stark repression? Are there similar “self-actualiz-
ing” citizenship norms in culturally very different
contexts, or in places where the public sphere may
be functionally different? In addition, the study
broadens the empirics of digitally enabled activism
by studying a movement firmly located on the
political Right in terms of its preferences for a
tutelary and “guided” form of democracy, or its
moral – as opposed to procedural – narrative of
corruption and accountability. This is of particular
interest given the success of recent rightist move-
ments in Western Europe and North America, and
the simultaneous dearth of studies going beyond
the left-leaning movements typically examined by
scholars in this field.
The paper proceeds with a section discussing
different theories of protest communications in
online-to-offline mobilizations, outlining some
expectations derived from accounts of connective
action, and actualizing citizenship. The third sec-
tion introduces the case of the “Bangkok
Shutdown” of 2013/14 and related anti-govern-
ment protests in Thailand and details our empiri-
cal strategy. The fourth section presents findings
of a qualitative reading and a structured content
analysis of the communications of the two com-
pared Facebook pages. The fifth section concludes
by remarking on the implications of this research
for wider debates about hybrid movements.

Online-to-offline mobilization and protest
communication paradigms
How are street protests communicated in the digital
era, and what role do organizations and the “crowd”
play in this process, respectively? The idea that com-
puter-mediated protest communication is qualita-
tively different from its “traditional” counterparts
and thus changes modes of collective action has
been pervasive since long before Tahrir Square,
Gezi Park, 15M or the Hong Kong umbrella protests
(Dutton, Rogers, & Jun, 1987). Since then, an influ-
ential array of studies in both the rational-choice and
the constructivist tradition has argued that a trans-
formative change has occurred, particularly that the
need for formal organization for successful mobili-
zation has declined.2
Two prominent proponents of transformative
change are Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg.
Their “logic of connective action” rests on the notion
that the openness and personalized characteristics of
online communications permit large-scale action
without requiring resource mobilization, boundary
crossing, and frame alignment via strong formal orga-
nizations. On the one end of their spectrum of action
networks, Bennett and Segerberg (2013, p. 47) locate
“crowd-enabled connective action” where formal
organization is virtually absent. The other end is
classic “organizationally brokered collective action.”
The hybrid networks or “organizationally enabled
connective action” represent a catch-all mixed form.
This blurring of organizational boundaries is said
to coincide with a shift in organizational communica-
tion styles. In an era of personalized political engage-
ment, so the argument, collective action frames and
their “alignment”3 with activists’ own interpretive
orientations are less necessary and perhaps less
appealing. Instead, the new mode of online-to-offline
mobilization relies on personal action frames, which
are “inclusive of different personal reasons for con-
testing a situation that has to be changed” (Bennett &
Segerberg, 2013, p. 37), do not relate to joining a
movement per se, and may not even include any
prescriptive part as to what action to take. While
collective action frames draw on shared political agen-
das, ideology, or solidarity to cross the boundaries of
communities, personal action frames are easily
adapted to a wide range of personal motivations and
goals. They may be primarily expressive in nature,
JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & POLITICS 3
containing personalization and “remixing” of existing
ideas.
But of course this narrative is far from uncon-
tested. Bimber et al. (2012) find little difference in the
way the members of the American Legion, AARP,
and MoveOn participate in these organizations –
despite the fact that MoveOn is a purely virtual and
digitally native group. To them, “technology-based
membership looks a great deal like traditional forms
of membership, and [. . .] participatory styles in this
unusual “virtual” organisation [. . .] are the same
styles one finds in ‘physical’ organisations” (Bimber
et al., 2012, p. 181). Furthermore, while short-term
mobilization goals may be realized with relative ease
given the scalability of social media and the ability to
micro-target audiences, longer-term engagement
may require organizing strategies that build commu-
nities and civic skills (Han, 2014). Both of the above
suggest that communication patterns between
groups may differ not because one has more
crowd-involvement than the other, but because
they pursue fundamentally different engagement
goals. Along the same lines, some point out that
communication and engagement patterns are highly
contingent on individual citizenship norms, and that
dutiful norms and their corresponding communica-
tion paradigms are far from extinct (Vromen, Xenos,
& Loader, 2015). And yet others doubt that the
purported new communication style can effect the
same long-term movement goals as the well-known
language of collective action frames (Tarrow, 2014).
Being cognizant of these opposing views, we set
out to explore whether differences in communica-
tion styles can be detected in real world protest
communications in hybrid movements, and
whether a certain style is associated with crowd-
involvement and another with organizational
brokerage. This leads us to our central research
question:
How do relatively more organizationally brokered
and relatively more crowd-enabled elements of hybrid
movements communicate with their online publics?
Crowd-involvement and the “self-actualizing”
protest communication paradigm
A “self-actualizing” communication style – as
opposed to a dutiful one – is said to be characteristic
4 M. GRÖMPING AND A. SINPENG
of crowd-led connective action. It is believed to be
driven by sociological and technological change alike
(Bennett, 2008; Freelon, Wells, & Bennett, 2013). On
the one hand, globalization, the atomization of indi-
viduals, and changed motivations and modes of youth
civic engagement have led to a decline in dutiful
norms of citizenship. At the same time, digital net-
work affordances match well with the new demands.
The result is the emergence of a new style of civic
information centered around the crowd, rather than
organizations.
Wells (2015, p. 50–56) points out four ideal-typi-
cal aspects of this actualizing style. The appropriate
and accepted sources of information are no longer
only experts with certified authority such as the
traditional news media, politicians, government offi-
cials, or SMO leaders. Instead, crowdsourced infor-
mation, information by activist media, social
contacts, or online news organizations may be
appropriate. A participatory approach to interacting
with information means that protest information is
no longer simply broadcast by a source and received
by an audience. Instead, there are expectations of
participating in the production of this information.
Wells sees “an increasing inclination on the part of
younger citizens to play an active, autonomous role
in defining and personalising the terms of the activ-
ities in which they take part” (Wells, 2015, p. 52).
Furthermore, the processing and interpretation of
information is peer-produced in the actualizing
ideal-type. Elite and partisan cues are less important,
whereas the online crowd, trust networks, and sim-
ply the personal relevance of a piece of information
can make the difference for whether it is acted upon.
Finally, the action repertoires of the actualizing infor-
mation style include purely communicative and
expressive actions. “Liking,” “tweeting,” “sharing,”
and other previously unavailable forms of online
expressions are accepted as legitimate actions. On
Table 1. Protest Communication Styles.
Dutiful
(1) Presentation of Social movements organizations (SMOs) broadcast information in a one-
information and way fashion to supporters and prescribe actions to them
action
(2) Repertoires of Membership and management activities dominate
action
(3) Linking behavior Links to SMO’s own website or other branded destination dominates
Note: Adapted from Wells (2015).
the other hand, the organizationally prescribed var-
iants of old – contacting the local MP, signing a
petition, attending a demonstration – may have
declined or at least transformed to online equiva-
lents. To be sure, the dutiful communication style
still coexists with the new one in this vision. But the
appeal of the new paradigm rests precisely in the
absence of a centralized mobilizing agent.
According to this, the actualizing style is expected
to be much more prevalent in crowd-based organiza-
tions, and it should be possible to use it as an indicator
of crowd-enabled connective action. Building on
Wells’ theoretical framework, we hence propose the
some observable implications of self-actualizing pro-
test communication style, juxtaposed with the expec-
tations of a dutiful communication style in Table 1.4
First, in an actualizing style, the presentation of infor-
mation and action is expected to be crowd-produced,
instead of being prescribed and broadcast.
Specifically, there are four types of presentation of
information and action: First, organization-driven
knowledge and organization-driven action, where an
organization presents information that it wants fol-
lowers to know (knowledge) or calls upon fans to
participate in prescribed activities (action). Second,
fan-driven knowledge and fan-driven action, where
an organization invites fans to contribute information
(knowledge) or suggestions for activities (action).
Wells’s framework expects the latter to be more domi-
nant in the actualizing communication style and – if
expectations hold true – to be more prevalent in
crowd-enabled action networks.
Second, regarding calls for action, the repertoire of
actions is expected to be dominated by network-
expressive activities in the actualizing communica-
tion style, compared to the dutiful one. “Network-
expressive” are those actions involving followers
directly in strengthening the network of supporters,
such as emailing friends, sharing information on
Actualizing
SMOs appeal to supporters to contribute
knowledge and action ideas
Network-expressive activities dominate
Links to destinations outside of the SMO’s
own sphere of influence dominate

Facebook walls, or spreading a video through one’s
online networks; also adding to the personalization
of the network (i.e., sharing personal stories or creat-
ing new media). In contrast to this, membership and
management activities are expected to dominate in
the dutiful communication style. Membership activ-
ities are those that are about “showing up,” partici-
pating in a group’s events, becoming active within
the group. Examples are calls for event attendance
and program participation. Management activities
are those that manage members’ actions to help the
group influence the political process. For instance,
calls to donate, writing to a member of parliament,
signing a petition, writing letters to the media.
Third, the framework expects that in an actua-
lizing communication style, groups will tend to
engage more strongly with content and actors out-
side of their own organizational sphere of influence.
In practice, this should be observable through
hyperlinks that lead from a group’s own commu-
nication platform to news sites or other organiza-
tions, rather than trying to keep users within the
media ecology of the organization itself. Inclusive
and “promiscuous” oulinking behavior is a way of
interacting with information that places less
importance on control and keeping the audience
“on message.” Instead, it represents the “stitching”
together of diverse networks and their disparate
production, curation, and integration functions via
certain technological affordances, a core mechan-
ism of crowd-enabled connective action (Bennett,
Segerberg, & Walker, 2014). On the other hand,
linking to “internal” destinations would be the
expected to be dominant in the dutiful commu-
nication paradigm.
Data and methods
We use this communication style typology as a
heuristic to explore the observable implications of
crowd-involvement in hybrid movements.
Specifically, we compare the typology’s fit with
actual empirical cases, for which we know the
degree of “crowd-enabledness.” Within a singular
instance of large-scale anti-government protest in
Thailand during November 2013 to February
2014, two Facebook pages of the hybrid opposition
movement are compared with each other: the page
of Suthep Thaugsuban,5 leader of the People’s
JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & POLITICS 5
Democratic Reform Committee (PDRC), and the
page V for Thailand6 – both of them important
mobilizing agents for the movement.7
Thailand’s recent political history has been
marred by prolonged instability evidenced by vio-
lent social upheavals and two military coups in the
past decade. The two pages under investigation
were part of the same opposition alliance that
emerged in 2013 and culminated mid-January
2014 in the “Bangkok Shutdown” mass rallies in
the capital. The primary goal of this broader mobi-
lization was to dislodge the elected government of
Yingluck Shinawatra – sister of previously deposed
prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra – and to
return Thailand to an electoral authoritarian
regime with strong unelected tutelary institutions
(Kongkirati, 2016; Kuhonta & Sinpeng, 2014). We
choose these two pages for comparison for three
key reasons: They represent archetypes of two
different forms of action networks; they allow us
to hold constant other factors that might influence
the pages’ communication styles; and they extend
the empirical horizon of studies of connective
action beyond the usual setting.
First, the Suthep page exemplifies “organiza-
tionally brokered” collective action, while V for
Thailand stands for “crowd-enabled” connective
action.8 Suthep’s page is the public page of an
individual leader, but for all intents and purposes,
it is the official page of the PDRC, a hierarchically
organized “traditional” SMO at the heart of the
opposition movement, with considerable financial
and human resources, and good access to cable TV
stations and radio outlets. Although the PDRC
runs two other Facebook pages,9 the Suthep page
was by far the most popular one with 2.8 million
followers. It links directly to the PDRC official
website,10 and both other FB pages clearly dove-
tailed it during the protest. The page is managed
by a small group of admins (likely 2–3) and Mr.
Suthep himself, with content written mostly in a
first person voice, but sometimes in third person.
The Suthep page sees very strong organizational
coordination of action through the PDRC steering
committee, providing strategies and decisions on
all key issues relating to the rallies. The backbone
of the committee came from the long established
Democrat Party, with nine former members of
parliament at the PDRC’s helm (M-Thai News,
6 M. GRÖMPING AND A. SINPENG
2015).11 Social technology (Facebook) is used by
the organization merely to manage participation in
a top-down way. While this is done very success-
fully, evidenced by a surge in volume of activity
and engagement on Suthep’s page following his
announcement to be leader of the PDRC, all off-
line activities called for by the page – rallies, fun-
draising, interviews, speeches at the stage – are
managed by the PDRC steering committee. The
organizational management of social networks is
heavily reliant on the committee’s interpersonal
networks and relationships with elites outside of
the movement (e.g., military, Democrat Party).
And finally, high-resource organizational broker-
age –for example, several million Thai Baht a day
during peak protest times, management of the
page’s media content, including professional qual-
ity photography which constituted 70% of the
page’s posts – is employed to bridge differences
between allied groups. As such, the Suthep page
represents the ideal-type of “organizationally bro-
kered” collective action (Bennett & Segerberg,
2013, p. 47).
V for Thailand, on the other hand, started as an
online-only initiative of Facebook users without
formal structure. The collective is not a subset of
the PDRC organization, but rather a grassroots
group established long before the former’s
inception.12 While it joins forces with a broad
range of anti-government groups during the pro-
test period of 2013/14, the group operates their
own activities at the same time. Before the protest
period, they follow an agenda that is clearly sepa-
rate from the PDRC’s/Suthep’s, and after the end
of the Shutdown rallies, most of the V for Thailand
posts are not related to PDRC activities at all.
Their branding, too, is separate. The “V” page
describes itself as “the Anonymous Thailand,”
thereby affiliating the group with the global anon-
ymous movement, including Guy Fawkes masks
and other iconography. There is very little formal
organizational coordination of action, and no
clearly distinguishable coordinating body govern-
ing the V page. A group of moderators is con-
nected through Facebook only, and decisions
about rallies or campaigns are taken through com-
menting or via FB messaging. These admins are
likely outsiders and depend on guesswork when
talking about Suthep/PDRC strategies and planned
activities in their posts. Posts do not refer to
Suthep as “our leader” and also use different
hashtags.13 Large-scale personal access to social
technologies (Facebook) is the precondition for
the very emergence of V for Thailand. Facebook
affords the production and curation of the various
informational and organizational resources that
allow the collective to exist in the first place. The
group’s social networks are managed exclusively
through online communications, and there is no
physical presence or interaction of core leaders (in
fact they are “faceless” due to masks). In addition,
the group commands no resources in the offline
world. It does not have offices, nor a website or
TV station. As such, V for Thailand is a clear
example of “crowd-enabled” connective action
(Bennett & Segerberg, 2013, p. 47).
Second, other factors likely to influence the pages’
communication styles, importantly their political
orientation, the cultural context, and the temporal
dynamics of contention, are held constant in this
research design. Both collectives share protest goals
and ideology, broadly believing in a “good society”
with powerful non-democratic institutions of the
monarchy and the military (Sinpeng & Arugay,
2015). Despite differences in their reform agenda,
both have contempt for elections, see the danger of
a “tyranny of the majority,” and profess to a model of
“virtuous rulership” by a leader/avant-garde who
know what is best for society. They also frequently
mobilized followers on the streets at the same time,
for the same events. Holding constant political con-
texts, timing, and motivations for mobilization in
our design is particularly important in a politically
deeply divided setting like Thailand, where opposed
movements have over time developed their own
incongruent frames of how to interpret reality, creat-
ing online “echo chambers” (Grömping, 2014).
Picking instances of mobilization on the “same
side” of the political divide controls for such other-
wise confounding factors possibly driving commu-
nication styles.
Third, in another sense the pages represent “least
likely” cases for the detection of connective action and
actualizing communications. According to the Net
Freedom reports, Thailand’s internet environment
has been ranked “not free” for five consecutive years,
beginning in 2011, with each annual report noting an
increase in information controls on political issues

(Freedom House, 2015). However, widespread access
to social technologies is seen as a precondition for
connective action. Furthermore, there is some doubt
around how well ideas of “self-actualization” even
translate into Asian contexts (Lee, 2004). The cases
at hand thus speak to the generalizability of the con-
nective action framework beyond the more open
cyberspace and new citizenship norms of North
America and Western Europe.
Our data are drawn from the Facebook pages of
Suthep and V for the dates from 1 November 2013
to 28 February 2014 via the Netvizz Facebook
application (Rieder, 2013). This was the period of
escalation of street mobilization and consequently
increased Facebook activity. This results in a total
of 3,247 page posts: 636 (Suthep) and 2,611 (V for
Thailand). Despite having far fewer posts on its
wall, Suthep’s page elicited more engagement.14
This is hardly surprising. He was after all the de
facto leader of the entire anti-government move-
ment, of which V for Thailand was temporarily
part, along with hundreds of smaller organiza-
tions. Through daily appearances at protest rallies
and TV shows he honed his self-styled populist
branding as a “kamnan” or “village headman,” and
ditched his previous politician-self by donning
simple, village chief uniform clothing. His entire
new branding identified him as a man of the
people: grassroots and down-to-earth. On the con-
trary, an ephemeral and quite literally “faceless”
organization like V for Thailand, whose very rai-
son d’être was “anonymity,” would elicit less
engagement, especially in Thai society where visi-
bility and celebrity is highly valued over anonym-
ity and invisibility.
Out of all posts with written content, 97.6% are
in Thai, 2% in English, and a negligible number
in other European languages. The whole batch is
read closely by both authors for characteristics of
dutiful and actualizing communications as per
the criteria above. In addition, a total of 195
posts – 64 (10%) of Suthep’s page’s posts and
131 (5%) of V for Thailand – are content-coded
by two Thai native speakers. Posts are selected via
simple random sampling, oversampling Suthep’s
page to compensate for the lower total number of
posts there. The code book15 draws heavily on
Wells (2015) and is applied to the posts of both
pages on their Facebook walls – both of which
JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & POLITICS 7
only allow the administrators, not anyone else, to
post. As per Table 1, three major elements are
coded for each post: (a) presentation of informa-
tion and action (four binary variables); (b) reper-
toires of action (three binary variables); and (c)
destination of hyperlinks (one ordinal and one
binary variable).16
Results
We find that, on the whole, the dutiful communica-
tion paradigm vastly dominates the communications
of both pages, while the actualizing one is rather mar-
ginal. Yet, there are nuanced and substantial differ-
ences in the way the pages speak to their audiences,
which in turn relate to the dutiful/actualizing nature of
these audiences. As we show, the quantitative coding
is only able to capture parts of these differences. We
identify three core differences in the page’s commu-
nication styles. First, V is more likely to source infor-
mation and network-expressive actions from the
crowd, thereby displaying expected tendencies of the
actualizing pattern. Second, the tone of posts –
polished, paternalistic, and vertical for Suthep, and
colloquial, collectivist, and horizontal for V – implies
certain relationships between each page and its audi-
ence, which maps onto the dutiful/actualizing distinc-
tion, but is not captured by the quantitative coding.
Third, V closely aligns its agenda to Suthep’s and
temporarily becomes its auxiliary mobilizer, specia-
lized on an actualizing audience’s communication
needs. This reveals a somewhat hierarchical relation-
ship between the two entities not expected by the
theory.
Information and network-expression
The theory outlined above expects crowd-enabled
SMOs to employ more fan-driven presentation of
information and action, and more network-expressive
repertoires of action. We find some limited evidence
for this in the quantitative coding. As Figure 2 shows,
providing organization knowledge is the most com-
mon form of communication at 88% and 76% of posts,
respectively, followed by organizational calls for action
(13% and 28%). As the latter shows, the V page was
more than twice as likely to call for participation of
followers compared to the Suthep page. At the same
time – although relatively marginal in the overall
8 M. GRÖMPING AND A. SINPENG

picture – V for Thailand asks fans more often to
contribute information to the network (5%). It occurs
about 2.5 times more often on the V than the Suthep
page (2%). An example for this fan-driven knowledge
is the call to submit suggestions for a “reform” plan for
Thailand, depicted in Figure 1. On the other hand, we
find 6% fan-driven action on the Suthep page vs 3% on
V for Thailand. This directly opposes the theoretical
expectations (Figure 2).
In regards to action repertoires, Figure 3 shows
that V for Thailand posts indeed call for more
network-expressive action than Suthep’s (45% vs
36% of all page posts). Sharing content on
Facebook and into fans’ other social media net-
works is unsurprisingly the bread and butter of a
crowd-enabled “organization.” Without such
expressive activities it would cease to exist. More
surprising is the high percentage of calls for net-
work-expression on Suthep’s page. Perhaps this is
a function of the communication platform itself,
because Facebook’s model as an online social net-
work of friends is very much based on sharing

Figure 1. An example of a fan-driven knowledge on V for Thailand Facebook page.31

Source: Facebook
Translation note: “Friends if you recall, V for Thailand has long pushed for the issue of reforming Thailand. From now on V for
Thailand will enter a new phase of drafting a plan to reform Thailand by ‘the mass.’ We’re entering the mode of the people’s sector.
Friends, if you have any ideas you want to present, let us know.”

88%

75% 76%
Percent of posts

Page
50%
Suthep

V for Thailand

25% 27%

12%

6%
5%
0% 3%
2%

Org.Knowledge Org.Action Fan.Knowledge Fan.Action

Communication type

Figure 2. Presentation of information and action.

Source: Authors.
Note: % posts containing communications of the respective categories as ratio of all posts. Categories non-exclusive. Depicted with
standard error of mean.

50%
40%
Percent of posts
30%
25%
20% 20%
10%
0%
Membership
Action repertoire
Figure 3. Repertoires of action.
Source: Authors.
Note: % posts containing communications of the respective categories as ratio of all posts. Categories non-exclusive. Depicted with
standard error of mean.
content. Nevertheless, with the research design
holding characteristics of the platform constant,
the fact remains that the V page invites more net-
work-expressive actions – in line with the
expectations.
On the other hand, we do not find the expected
pattern in terms of management activities – which are
in fact extremely low on both pages. Membership
activities are prevalent on both pages, with a slightly
higher rate for V for Thailand. This is contrary to
expectations. It may be attributed to the fact that both
pages were relatively new and became established just
as the major protests began (Suthep) or some months
before (V). The Suthep page relied primarily on the
offline management activities of the PDRC machine –
particularly food donations and fundraising activities
(M-Thai News, 2014). In Satun province, a stronghold
of Suthep supporters, local PDRC branches set up
seven fundraising booths across the province to
recruit protest participants and raise funds to pay for
their travel costs – all offline activities (M-Thai News,
2014). V on the other hand did not have much formal
membership to “manage.”
Added together, the quantitative coding is able
to detect a slightly higher amount of actualizing
presentation of information and higher degrees of
network-expressive action repertoires for the
JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & POLITICS 9
45%
36%
Page
Suthep
V for Thailand
2%
2%
Management Network-expressive
crowd-enabled entity, thereby corroborating some
of the theoretical expectations. On the other hand,
the patterns of management and membership
repertoires of actions do not fit with these expec-
tations. And when it comes to the fan-driven soli-
citation of action, the coding even diametrically
opposes expectations. How can we make sense of
these ambiguous results?
Hierarchy and tone
We argue that the quantitative coding misses some
important aspects in the pages’ communication
patterns. The first one is the degree of hierarchy
in the relationship between page and audience that
one can infer from the tone of messages and the
audience’s reaction to them.
The Suthep page relies on Suthep’s own 30-year
career as a seasoned politician when communicat-
ing with its Facebook fans. It frequently addresses
its followers as “fathers, mothers, brothers, and
sisters” before asking them to perform “civic duty”
as citizens by supporting the movement’s cause:
Tomorrow I’m asking you, brothers and sisters who
love our motherland, one last time. . .if you are near
any ministry or governmental agencies, do go there
10 M. GRÖMPING AND A. SINPENG
[to protest]. We need to eradicate the Thaksin
regime from Thai land. Civil servants, if you love
your citizens, you need to come out and join the
people.17
This appeals to notions of dutiful citizenship,
even framing civil disobedience of public servants
as performance of patriotic duty. In contrast, V for
Thailand relies on its followers’ sharing actions to
build the network and interact with information.
An example is a post asking fans to share an
internal document from the Ministry of Labour
instructing its employees not to participate in the
ongoing anti-government rallies.18 This communi-
cation effectively relies on reverse or negative
crowd endorsement of official information to dele-
gitimize the ministerial order.
In another important distinction, Suthep admins
frequently refer to Mr. Suthep as “I” whereas the V
admins would use “we” – suggestive of not only a
more collective approach, but also a less authorita-
tive style when speaking to their fans. “Let’s gather at
Sam-Sen [to protest] in a crowd of 300,000”19 is how
V for Thailand invites their fans to join the protest as
peers in a collective. The Suthep page, on the other
hand, addresses followers more as subordinates:
“Tonight, I’d like to ask my brothers and sisters
who love the land to come to the Ministry of
Finance to guard our tax money.”20 Polite, formal,
yet direct in its demand for action, the Suthep page
communicates vertically to its followers in the same
vein as a leader would speak to his masses: highly
attuned to the hierarchal structure of the Thai lan-
guage. V for Thailand admins, on the other hand, are
more informal and colloquial: they communicate to
their followers in a more horizontal manner like one
group member speaking to another.
Suthep’s paternalistic and vertical tone also eli-
cits different responses from followers than V’s
colloquial and horizontal tone, even if posts would
be coded the same according to the content analysis
scheme. Suthep’s style is authoritarian (he talks
“down” to his supporters). Even when he shares
information (coded as “org knowledge”), it reads
as if he is telling his fans what to do. For instance, in
one post, the page writes: “Amnesty for whom? It
gives me goose bumps when I watch this video:
http://youtu.be/KGuUf5HgdZY.”21 The majority
of comments offer fan action, but in a way that is
akin to accepting an order, such as “yes sir!,” or “we
will be there.” The ending of most of the comments
are in the polite particles “krub” and “ka” which
Thai people use to end their sentences when talking
to someone more senior and with authority. In
another instance, the Suthep page writes: “those
bastards threw bombs on us to scare me but I’m
not scared. Tomorrow (Jan 18th), I will rally again
at 10am at the Pathumwan junction.”22 In this post
again, Suthep shares his intention to be at the pro-
test – he does not ask his supporters to join him. As
usual, the page uses “I” in a top-down fashion. Yet
most of the reaction from fans are about joining
him at the protest the next day.
On the contrary, V for Thailand administrators
almost exclusively communicate with the pronoun
“we,” using a more consultative tone, even when
sharing organization knowledge. For example:
“Tomorrow (4/11/2013) there’s an important
event, 100 rivers will meet at Urupong/Samsaen
intersection at 10am.”23 Just as the Suthep post
above it gives information about the occurrence
of a rally. But it is written in a collegial rather than
authoritative manner (the “we” is implied by the
use of the idiom “100 rivers”). The fan responses
are therefore about “we” or “us” going to an event
along with other comments asking further details
on the meetup location and suggestions relating to
what to bring etc.
Agenda-alignment
Another aspect not captured by Wells’s coding
scheme is the temporal sequence of communica-
tions. Paying attention to this aspect reveals an
increasing alignment of V for Thailand’s agenda to
Suthep’s over time. This is contrary to the expecta-
tions of both the connective action and the actualiz-
ing citizenship paradigm, which suggest that crowds
tend to eschew formal organizations, and not accept
the latter as legitimate sources of information. But
since agenda-alignment is only temporary, and the
crowd-enabled entity maintains its otherwise actua-
lizing communication patters, this observation may
be reconciled with the theory.
Mr. Suthep himself should be seen as the de
facto leader of the overall opposition movement,
which included among others the V for Thailand
page. Hence he sets the agenda of the major direc-
tion of opposition action. In times of a major call

for action, the Suthep page would give an initial
signal such as time and place, followed by numer-
ous direct appeals on the V for Thailand page to
followers to show up. For instance, on 27
November 2013, the Suthep page calls on its sup-
porters to occupy key government ministries and
courts or to take leave from work to protest the
government.24 On the same day, the V page posts
in direct response to Suthep’s call for action by
noting that their fans already went to occupy the
administrative court in Chainat province.25
In many other examples we see the organization-
ally brokered Suthep page communicating the gen-
eral direction and the collective frames for action
(category “organizational-driven knowledge”). It
provides the narrative and a space for participation
within that frame. It then in the same breath invites
fans to contribute suggestions about how to exactly
fill out that space with action. This is why the cate-
gory “fan-driven action” is more prevalent on the
Suthep page, which appears to contradict the theo-
retical expectations, but makes much sense in the
context of agenda-alignment. The V page plays pre-
cisely the role of providing “fan suggestions” to the
Suthep page. During major rally episodes, it would
marshal its followers to the streets to join force with
the PDRC. Some emblematic V posts during PDRC-
75%
Percent of outlinks
50%
25%
0%
0%
News
Figure 4. Destinations of hyperlinks (type of linked entity).
Source: Authors.
Note: % posts containing links of the respective categories as ratio of posts containing links. Categories mutually exclusive. Depicted
with standard error of mean.
JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & POLITICS 11
led protests include: “V people of Khon Kaen, every-
body get together immediately in front of the city
shrine at 4pm”;26 or “Friends, the people of V for
Thailand, after work today let’s go protest against the
amnesty bill in front of the Arts Centre at Patumwan
junction at 5-6pm.”27 Both calls for action by the V
page aim to get their fans to immediately attend
PDRC events – not their own.
One must keep in mind that Figure 3 depicts the
activities as percentages of all page posts, meaning
that it is mostly a function of that page displaying
more calls for action overall. In that sense, it corre-
sponds to a similar difference in the category of
“organizationally driven action” in Figure 2. Both
suggest that V began to function as an auxiliary
mobilizer. Hence, membership activities are preva-
lent, signaling many calls to supporters to “show up.”
The alignment of V’s agenda to Suthep’s is also
corroborated by the pages’ linking behavior. V’s
post are almost twice as likely to contain hyper-
links (47% of all posts) as compared to Suthep’s
page (27%). This corresponds well with the net-
work-expressive character of action calls described
above. V for Thailand broadens the network by
reciprocating links and connecting different
groups with each other. As Figure 4 shows, V’s
outlinks go to a large extent to social media
82%
64%
Page
Suthep
V for Thailand
28%
18%
7%
2%
0%
CSO Govt Social media
Link destination
12 M. GRÖMPING AND A. SINPENG
platforms such as Facebook itself, Twitter,
Instagram, or YouTube. But a very significant
percentage (28% of outlinks) point to websites of
news organizations. Clearly, the admins of V for
Thailand see the page as a distributor of informa-
tion, but they also comment and re-frame these
news, ensuring that the movement’s blame-attri-
bution to the “Thaksin regime” is understood by
fans. In one post, a V admin describes this role:
Now we need to put pressure on the media to
broadcast the truth!!! Before this the state put pres-
sure on the media to present news favorable to the
government. This is why we need to pressure Thai
PBS, our public TV.28
Contrary to that, the Suthep page does not link to
nor engage with news at all. It appears that the page
acts as a news source in itself, broadcasting the agenda
in a one-way fashion, with the agenda items primarily
consisting of the actions of Mr. Suthep himself.
Instead, 18% of outlinks from Suthep’s page lead to
other civil society organizations. We see here a strong
aspect of movement-maintenance and inter-organiza-
tional brokerage that builds the movement as a whole,
but is focused on “traditional” organizations. The out-
links contain for instance calls to donate to this or that
organization, or to join its events.
100%
88%
75%
Percent of outlinks
50%
41%
25%
12%
0%
Internal
Link destination
Figure 5. Destinations of hyperlinks (internal or external).
Source: Authors.
Note: % posts containing links of the respective categories as ratio of posts containing links. Categories mutually exclusive. Depicted
with standard error of mean.
Expanding this analysis, Figure 5 shows the link
destinations according to their relation with the
pages themselves. A significantly larger percentage
of outlinks of the V page lead to “external” destina-
tions – meaning websites, social media profiles, or
other content not affiliated with V for Thailand –
than to “internal” ones (59% vs 41%). A considerable
part of this can undoubtedly be attributed to news
sharing. Others are links to online shops selling
paraphernalia, or to government websites (accom-
panied by negative commentary). However, external
linking dominates on the Suthep page to an even
larger extent (88% vs 12%). Many of these external
links lead to YouTube videos of Blue Sky TV, a cable
TV station covering Suthep and the PDRC favorably.
This all makes sense if one takes into account the
centrality of Suthep’s Facebook page in the PDRC
organizational and media ecology. There are few
other PDRC-affiliated entities that this page would
feel the need to link to. Other PDRC-friendly pages
link in, but it does not need to reciprocate.
The pattern we detect is one in which a distinct
crowd-enabled entity grows ever closer to a “tradi-
tional” SMO. It provides feet on the ground, sugges-
tions for action, reinterpretation of information, and
network expansion, all in line with the “traditional”
group’s agenda.
59% Page
Suthep
V for Thailand
External

Importantly, however, this does not necessarily
contradict the theory of connective action. We
note that agenda-alignment is only temporary,
primarily during the most intense periods of the
protests in November 2013 and February 2014. We
also note that agenda-alignment happened organi-
cally at the crowd’s own initiative, not as a co-
optation by the Suthep page. Before and after the
high-intensity period, V indeed shunned formal
organizations such as the Suthep page/PDRC,
just as the theory expects.
Two events illustrate the distinctness of the V page
as a crowd-driven entity, and its eventual alignment
to the Suthep page’s agenda. On 31 May 2013 –
several months before the establishment of the
PDRC and Suthep’s Facebook page – V issued a
call for a “Major Gathering of All Guy Fawkes
People in Thailand to Rally” to be held on 2 June.29
The page asked everyone “to bring 1) white mask; 2)
a [blank] paper sign; 3) keep Sunday free.” No pur-
pose of the gathering was indicated, nor did the call
ask for any message to be displayed on the paper
sign. Then on 1 June, the page posted a comment on
the original event saying
A lot of people sent me a (private FB) message
asking why we’re meeting and what is the purpose
of our group. After our discussion, we want to say
that our goal is to: 1) get together to get rid of the
Thaksin system; 2) get rid of the ‘colors’ and build
unity in society and 3) reveal the masks of the
authoritarian movement who conceal themselves as
democrats [the government].
The purpose of the rally and indeed of the entire
group was in effect crowdsourced among mem-
bers. Furthermore, people posted on the page if
they knew how to make masks and a high number
of people commented, crowd-sourcing info and
knowledge for mobilization. Even on the very
day of the rally, the admin posted “Has anyone
arrived to the meeting place?”, to which a number
of followers replied, clearly showing the centrality
of Facebook as the organizing agent.
Several months later, after the ascendancy of
Suthep, another V event with the title “November
15, 2013: The Day We Elevate Our Protest to a
Higher Level to Drive Away Those Who Sell Out
Our Land Out of Thailand”30 called for V members
to go to a protest that was organized by Suthep/the
PDRC. But the V admins did not come to this
JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & POLITICS 13
conclusion on their own – they rather crowd sourced
this decision among group members. In early
November they posted “Many of us have many dif-
ferent goals and purposes [for being in V], so we will
meet at noon at Ratchaprasong to discuss which
direction we would go, before we decide to join
force with the larger protest (PDRC).” There were
44 comments that gave various suggestions on direc-
tions going forward.
In sum, if read by itself, the quantitative coding
remains ambiguous, with only limited evidence of
self-actualizing communications of the crowd (see
above). When taking the implied hierarchy and
the tone of posts into account, evidence in that
direction is strengthened. And when finally paying
attention to the temporal sequencing of commu-
nications we find that a distinct crowd-enabled
entity gradually and organically aligned its agenda
with an organizationally brokered SMO, all the
while maintaining its otherwise actualizing com-
munication patterns.
There is thus a dynamic relationship between the
two, a “division of labor,” in which PDRC via
Suthep’s Facebook page provides the broad strokes
and lets the “fans” fill in the blanks with suggestions
for actions. In a way, the V for Thailand page per-
forms the role of a “fan” toward the Suthep page –
which explains the high degree of org-driven action
on the V page, corresponding very much to the high
percentage of fan-driven action on the Suthep page.
It specialized on the mobilization of audiences with
strong self-actualization norms, hence the higher
prevalence of actualizing communications. But it is
not a “fake” grassroots organization. It existed inde-
pendently with a distinct agenda before the Suthep
page, and once the intense mobilization was over,
and the high-stakes conflict decided by the military
coup of May 2014, the crowd decoupled itself again
from Suthep’s agenda.
Conclusion
Is there a discernible “crowd factor” in protest
communications styles? The short answer is
“yes.” We investigated the question with a most-
similar case comparison of one crowd-enabled (“V
for Thailand” Facebook page) and one organiza-
tionally brokered (“Suthep” FB page) action net-
work within one and the same hybrid movement
14 M. GRÖMPING AND A. SINPENG
in Thailand. Our comparative analysis suggests
that there are empirical differences between the
two entities’ communication styles in line with
theoretical expectations, but perhaps less parsimo-
nious than expected. The quantitative content ana-
lysis shows that actualizing presentation of
information and action is approximately equally
low on both pages, with V for Thailand relying
slightly more on fans to provide information, and
Suthep calling for fan suggestions for action
slightly more often. In line with expectations, V’s
action repertoire is more network-centric than
Suthep’s. However, membership activities are also
very common on the V page, contrary to expecta-
tions. Finally, V is twice as likely as Suthep to link
to other content, in particular news content, which
it frequently reframes. On the other hand it links
more often to other entities within the movement.
We make sense of these ambiguous findings by
adding context – in particular the tone and sequence
of posts – through a qualitative reading. Our findings
demonstrate that Suthep’s page performs an agenda-
setting function, with its communications creating
ripple effects radiating to individual online followers
or crowd-generated “fan” projects such as V for
Thailand. V in turn aligns its agenda to Suthep’s
during the most intense protest period and helps to
create wider resonance. In other words, V’s primary
function is to get fans to attend rallies. It does so in a
way consistent with theories of connective action
and actualizing citizenship: It focuses upon drawing
people into the movement through encouraging net-
work-expressive actions, and routing traffic to other
movement actors through its linking behavior. Its
colloquial, and interactive tone, referencing the col-
lective, is also more in tune with actualizing citizen-
ship norms than Suthep’s polished, paternalistic, and
mostly one-way communication style. This, in the
end suggests that there is a temporary “division of
labor,” where Suthep sets the agenda, and V specia-
lizes on the mobilization of an audience with stron-
ger self-actualization norms.
Relating these findings back to the research
question, raises important points about the con-
nective action framework, its relation to citizen-
ship and communication norms, and whether this
concept can indeed be generalized beyond certain
contingent conditions in which most of the exist-
ing empirical studies of it are situated.
First, our analysis speaks to the ongoing debate
over Bennett and Segerberg’s typology of action
networks. It confirms some aspects of this typol-
ogy. Within one and the same hybrid movement
there are relatively more organizationally brokered
elements, and relatively more crowd-enabled ele-
ments who have distinct communication patterns.
Bennett and Segerberg expect SMOs to be
dynamic and at times fluid in their organizational
structure. We provide explicit and empirical exam-
ples of this dynamism and of the continuum of
repertoires along which organizations operate in
hybrid social movements. Building on the typol-
ogy, we question the degree to which crowds keep
a distance from formal organizations. We do not
find a waning of traditional SMOs but rather an
intimate intertwinement of formal organizations
and crowds.
The alignment of the agendas of different ele-
ments in a hybrid social movement coalition is one
aspect of this intertwinement. Agenda-alignment
is largely uni-directional, in that more loosely
organized resource-poor elements align their
agenda with more centralized resource-rich ele-
ments. In particular, crowd-enabled collectives
organically align with organizationally brokered
elements and not the other way around.
We posit that agenda-alignment will be heigh-
tened by high-stakes contentious politics (e.g.,
regime-threatening mobilizations) and during
high-intensity periods of mobilizations. In regards
to the former, high-stakes contentious politics
foreground instrumental motivations for political
action at the expense of more actualizing motiva-
tions typically found in the actions of crowds. This
is especially true in mobilizations aimed at chan-
ging the political regime. This goal is likely to
polarize a movement and create a tendency toward
either aligning with this singular goal or opting out
of the movement altogether. Crowd-enabled col-
lectives recognize that the resources typically
necessary to win such a high-stakes conflict (e.g.,
elite allies, resources to sustain large-scale protest
over extended time) are located with traditional
movement organizations, and will likely align their
agenda accordingly in order to be part of the
potential win. Because of this, the nature of a
movement needs to be taken into account when
analyzing both, the relationship between formal

organizations and crowds, and their communica-
tion styles. Simply put, regime change movements
will likely experience more agenda-alignment than
social change movements.
In regards to the latter, high-intensity mobiliza-
tions drive a spike in media and political attention
toward a movement. During such media storms,
actors with “thematic relevance” will be the most
sought-after sources for newsmakers (Wolfsfeld &
Sheafer, 2006). Resource-rich and centrally orga-
nized movement elements in turn tend to accumu-
late the bulk of this attention. The closer aligned with
the perceived agenda of such central SMOs a given
movement element is, the more likely it is to receive
added news attention. It thus pays off for crowd-
enabled collectives to dilute their brand and align
their agenda, even to the point where they are seen as
simply an appendage of a traditional SMO. By doing
so, they can siphon off some of the attention and
resources and emerge from the episode with more
members or standing.
In concurrence with Earl (2015), we therefore
believe that traditional SMOs still perform central
functions in hybrid movements. Crucially, they set
the agenda and time line of protest as well as the
dominant frames. These are then picked up and
personalized by individual followers and crowd-
enabled networks who align their agendas accord-
ingly. SMOs may outsource to “crowds” some of the
grunt work of creating engagement in networks, of
personalizing content and making it appealing to
digital natives. Still, this does not preclude crowds
from decoupling themselves after the end of a protest
period. In that sense, our findings suggest that the
degree to which crowds move away from or conver-
sely gravitate toward formal organizations is likely
variable over time and not static.
Second, we confirm the expectation that crowd-
enabled collectives communicate qualitatively differ-
ently than organizationally brokered ones.
Nevertheless, our analysis suggests that existing
quantitative coding schemes for the detection of
actualizing communications – such as Wells’s –
could be enhanced. For instance, there is a difference
between a paternalistic and authoritative tone vs. a
colloquial and horizontal one, because it implies
different hierarchical relationships between speaker
and audience. Appeals to actions differ if they are
expressed through the pronoun “I” vs. “we.” The
JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & POLITICS 15
former is more dutiful, the latter more actualizing,
even if the quantitative coding of the message con-
tent is the same (e.g., organizational call for action).
In addition, the existing scheme disregards the audi-
ence’s reaction. Are they differential, only approve of
the organizational messages, or say they will execute
“orders” (dutiful), or are they more interactive, sug-
gest things, perhaps question the page’s posts?
(actualizing). Taken these caveats on board, we con-
cur with Wells’s analysis, that the actualizing style is
the exception, rather than the norm.
But this in turn raises the question to what
extent platform-specific affordances affect studies
of connective action? Simply put, it may be easier
to find connective action when studying Twitter
hashtags rather than Facebook pages. The reason
is that the core connective mechanism of “stitch-
ing” (Bennett et al., 2014) is dependent on affor-
dances more readily available on Twitter than on
Facebook with its compartmentalized and self-
referential communities. This is another plausible
explanation for the mixed results of the quantita-
tive coding. It is perhaps no coincidence that the
few available Facebook studies of connective
action draw the conclusion that leadership, rather
than crowds, still plays the central role in steering
popular contention, despite communicating in a
style attuned to self-actualizing citizens (Poell,
Abdulla, Rieder, Woltering, & Zack, 2016). It is
still an open question how “leaderless” crowd-
enabled networks really are, regardless of how
they communicate. But more importantly, studies
in this direction need to be cognizant of the tech-
nological determinisms of the platform(s) they
study and the coding schemes they use.
Third, the very fact that we were able to detect
some of the defining elements of crowd-enabled
connective action networks – those related to
organizational morphology and to communica-
tion styles – in a novel socio-economic, cultural,
and ideological context speaks to the generaliz-
ability of the theoretical framework. It suggests
that the framework “travels” to places where the
Internet is neither ubiquitous nor free from
heavy state repression, or where we would con-
ventionally not expect strong self-actualizing
citizenship norms. It supports the notion of a
qualitative, largely technologically driven change
in mobilizing, corroborating other findings on
16 M. GRÖMPING AND A. SINPENG
the expansion of the Internet use and unconven-
tional political participation in Southeast Asia
(Lee, 2017).
Last, but not least, the findings also demon-
strate the applicability of connective action and
the associated communication paradigms across
ideologies. Our cases are part of a reactionary
and authoritarian movement (Kongkirati, 2016;
Sopranzetti, 2016), making them “least likely”
cases for detecting connective action. The
available pool of case studies of connective
action (e.g., 15M or Occupy Wall Street)
tends to be on the progressive Left. The Left
in turn is thought of as having a more hori-
zontal and interactive participation logic to
begin with, while the Right can rely on dutiful
norms and is better at traditional, representa-
tional politics (Bennett, 2012, p. 24). Yet, the
rightist Thai opposition movement as a whole
– and one of the two pages we look at in
particular – rely heavily on crowds and actua-
lizing communications, as we have seen.
Although this does not gel with existing find-
ings, it in fact strengthens, not weakens the
connective action framework.
In conclusion, the mixed results of our
study, while somewhat disappointing from a
positivist epistemological viewpoint, bear
implications for further research into online
communication styles and connective action.
They show that crowds do contribute consider-
ably to engagement in hybrid movements, also
outside of the Global North. At the same time,
crowds do not necessarily steer away from tra-
ditional SMOs but rather align themselves
organically with them during high-intensity
episodes of mobilization. Our study derives its
analytical leverage from a “most-similar”
research design, comparing two instances of
mobilization in the same cultural context, of
the same ideology, and on the same platform.
The fact that we did recognize some distinct
ways in which each entity communicated to
their publics suggests that results are due to
the involvement of crowds in one case and
not in the other, and that these results are
robust. It strengthens the case for further
investigation of crowd-enabled connective
action as a distinct analytical category.
Notes
1. Although each organization does traverse along the con-
tinuum of organizational hybridity at some stage during
their existence, during the particular period under obser-
vation for this study, one SMO occupied a traditional
SMO position, while the other one was crowd-enabled.
2. See for instance Benkler (2006), Bennett and Segerberg
(2013), Earl and Kimport (2011), Karpf (2012), or
Shirky (2008).
3. See Snow, Worden, Rochford, and Benford (1986).
4. See also the online appendix for a complete codebook and
concrete examples for each of the categories of Table 1.
5. https://www.facebook.com/suthep.fb.
6. https://www.facebook.com/V.For.Thailand.
7. We focus on Facebook, as it was (and is) the primary
online platform for the coordination and mobiliza-
tion of political action in Thailand. YouTube, Twitter,
or other open platforms were neither widely used in
2013 nor promoted by SMOs in the anti-government
movement. Secure platforms such as Telegram,
FireChat or LINE – now commonly used by protes-
ters in authoritarian settings – did either not exist or
were negligible in reach during the time under
observation.
8. See also the online appendix for further details on
case selection.
9. O n e i n T h a i ( h t t p s : / / w w w . f a c e b o o k . c o m /
PDRCFoundation), and one in English (www.facebook.
com/PDRCThailand).
10. http://www.pdrcfoundation.org/.
11. Suthep discussed the reasons for the establishment of
the PDRC and its structure in a speech televised on
the PDRC-affiliated BlueSky TV channel https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuSjJEximhU. The
PDRC Committee made official demands and state-
ments largely on stage at the protest sites but they
were also televised on BlueSky and the texts got
reposted on Facebook through PDRC networks.
12. V for Thailand’s first Facebook “event” took place on
June 2, 2013, more than half a year before PDRC was
established. The group was reported on as early as
May 27, 2013 (http://www.komchadluek.net/news/
politic/159534).
13. For example, #vforthailand #anonymous #Anony
mousThailand and #Thaiuprising. But not #pdrc.
14. The Suthep page had an average of 82,357 cumulative
likes, shares, comments, and comment-likes per post,
while its V for Thailand ally had an average of 2,935.
Normalized by the number of page followers, this
translates into an average post engagement rate of
3.2% for Suthep, and 1.4% V for Thailand.
15. Further data description, code book, coding exam-
ples, and description of inter-coder reliability tests are
available in the online appendix.
16. Indicators of inter-coder reliability are satisfactory for
seven of the nine variables (Krippendorf’s α between
 JOURNAL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY & POLITICS 17

.71 and .86). Two variables (presence of fan-driven ORCID

action, Y/N; and presence of management activity, Y/
N) fall below that threshold, likely because of exceed- Max Grömping http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1488-4436
ingly low number of observations in these variables,
and because of linguistic ambiguities. Due to the
exploratory character of our study, we nevertheless
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