Ablation Studies in Protest Networks: The Role of Influential Agents in Shaping Protests

This study investigates how different content modalities, like images and text, contribute to mobilizing support and driving engagement in collective action campaigns that thrive on multimedia representation propelled by social media. Focusing on the 2022 Brazilian insurrection, it examines how escalating outrage and shifting sentiments manifested online during societal flashpoints. Grounding the analysis in Resource Mobilization Theory and Moral Foundations Theory, it explores how texts and images contributed to collective identity formation, understanding emotion and morality’s role in mobilizing audiences. A socio-technical approach analyzed emotion and moral dimensions in Instagram posts by analyzing protest networks to identify influential agents. Findings demonstrated text and image captions playing crucial roles in collective identity formation and mobilization, with morally charged responses of rage and victimization driven by influential agents circulating reinforcing multimedia.