Digital protest crowds behave like swarms that cannot be organized durably

Evidence

Rather than a mobile “mass,” today’s QAnon troops and antilockdown protests look more like the infamous swarms: a group responding to short and powerful stimuli, driven by charismatic influencers and digital demagogues—the power to irritate, maybe a few stings here and there, but little more. Anyone can join a Facebook group with QAnon sympathies; as with all online media, the price of membership is very low, the cost of exit even lower. Leaders can, of course, try to choreograph these swarms—with tweets, television appearances, or supposed Russian bots. But that choreography still does not summon up a durable organization. — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment, 343

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Gerbaudo’s bodies-without-organs and the earlier chapter’s disintermediation and low-exit-cost online communities themes. — connects to: Social media grew in a civic void and then accelerated that void — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 277; Digital party organization cannot replace vanished civil-society substructures — Arthur Borriello and Anton Jäger, The Populist Moment: The Left After the…, 300; Expanded protest crowds can blunt original organizers’ political messaging. — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 409 (+10 more)
• recurring: this claim recurs 2 times within its source

Broader Connections

• Expanded protest crowds can blunt original organizers’ political messaging. #expands (0.80) — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 409
• Local protest movements can aggregate into a national politics without top-down coordination #qualifies (0.80) — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 620
• Crowds arouse sub-individual instincts while organized groups transcend individuals #corroborates (0.78) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 345
• Unpoliced protests leave crowds free to act out and discredit their organizers #expands (0.72)