The dynamic of social media: A case of usage in Saudi Arabia

Posted: January 4th, 2023

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The dynamic of social media: A case of usage in Saudi Arabia

2.2 Conceptual framework

2.2.1 Weak Tie Theory

The Weak Tie Theory advanced by Mark Granovetter in 1973 can be used to explain how the social network ties facilitate the flow of information and how these networks have been influenced by social media. Following extensive studies in the aspects of human relationships in social sciences, Granovetter proposed the “strength of weak ties” as a theoretical framework to explain how weak ties are likely to be more influential than strong ties (De Meo, Ferrara, Fiumara, and Provetti 2014, p. 78). Specifically, Granovetter distinguished between strong and weak interpersonal ties by reckoning that strong ties existed between known and trusted individuals, such as family, relatives and close friends. Contrastingly, weak ties existed between unfamiliar individuals vastly dispersed or relating to earth other as just acquaintances. In his 1973 article, “the strength of weak ties” in which the theory was first articulated, Granovetter noted that in weak ties, information was transmitted across wider segments of the population and a larger social distance compared to that across strong ties. He justified this by observing that unrelated individuals transmitted new information and perspectives easily because they were less concerned by being judged by others, especially if the information evoked strong emotions and transgressed the norms of the closely-related circle. In addition, weak ties facilitate the sharing of information by individuals facing stressful situations because they could access diverse perspectives, which was often constrained in a homogenous group (Wright and Miller, 2010). However, Larson (2017) cautions against accepting wholesomely the facilitative utility of information diffusion through weak ties in social networks. In her argument, Larson (2017) notes that weak ties, especially in small groups, had a low capacity of facilitating the movement and sharing of new information. These limitations emanated from the skepticism between interacting individuals due to low trust levels, the limited understanding of the novel information, and the reluctance to distribute the benefits accruing from such novel knowledge

Although this theory was formulated to explain information diffusion in the physical space, it has been expanded to the digital environment in which interactions occur over social networking sites. In this regard, weak ties on social media enhanced cohesion between many individuals of diverse characteristics and optimized the coverage of information spread (De Meo, et al. 2014). This theory is relevant to this study because it explains the ability of social media to foster the spread of information between strangers that are greatly dispersed geographically, thus influencing each other’s opinions and worldviews.

2.2.2 Ritual theory (theory of media events)

Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz conjured a theory of ritual to explain how media events play a transformative role of shifting public perceptions and shaping political discourses. This theory was advanced to explain the pervasiveness of mass media influencing people’s perceptions and discourses from the events transmitted over the television. Dayan and Katz observed that the television was being used to transmit live events that were carefully produced and highly coordinated to divert people from every day realities and direct their attention to weak-chosen symbolic issues (Couldry, Hepp, and Krotz 2009). Usually, the media events were choreographed to portray an idealised version, while subjugating opinions that went against the norms and ideals of society.

It is part of the ritual theories that proclaim the centrality of focused interaction in social dynamics, in which rituals invoke group emotions that form a foundation for thinking, morality, beliefs and culture, which in turn, form patterns of social interactions over time (Stets and Turner 2014). Notably, it is drawn from a theory of ritual and emotions advanced by Durkheim used the term, collective effervescence, to describe the emotional arousal generated by rituals, increasing group membership awareness and the sacred significance of external powerful forces (Stets and Turner 2014, p. 135). Seeck and Rantanen (2015) notes that although the concepts of media rituals or mediatized rituals resulting from a convergence of rituals and media events in a predetermined and recurring manner, they are increasingly being used in unexpected events such as mass killings, school shooting, major accidents, and natural disasters.

Although this theory was formulated during the heydays of television as the only influential traditional media, it can also apply in the contemporary environment of the new media. Specifically, information and news originating and trending on social networking sites, often makes news in the traditional media, thus reaching and influencing many more people. With social media changing the concept of news, the increasing linkage between social media and traditional media channels was helping transmit new ideas and perceptions across greater geographical distances that are unprecedented by the traditional media alone (Seeck and Rantanen 2015). This theory has relevance in this study because of the powerful effect of social media in integrating societies by deemphasizing and dissolving social divisions, thus creating a shared sense of identity among communities that were previously overlooked by choreographed and prearranged media presentations, particularly by authoritarian regimes, such as that in Saudi Arabia.

2.2.3 Situational Theory of Problem Solving

The situational theory of problem solving (STOPS) was advanced in 2011 by Jeong-Nam Kim and James E. Grunig to explain the processes of individual communications during challenging circumstances. It is derived from the situational theory of publics (STP), which is used to explain how and why public communicate as part of public relations. The situational theory of problem solving introduced concepts, such as i) problem recognition, ii) constraint recognition, iii) involvement recognition, and iv) referent criterion (Kim and Grunig 2011). In effect, it expands the focus of the situational theory of publics beyond decisions to include life problems and challenges. According to Kim and Grunig (2011) people adopt three domains of communication actions as they try to resolve a problem, though which they behave actively or passively. These dimensions include information acquisition, information selection, and information transmission. In this regard, an individual can pursue information acquisition actively through information seeking behavior or passively through information attending behavior by being exposed to messages in an unplanned manner. Similarly an individual can select information actively through information forefending, in which the individual ignore certain information based on its value and relevance to the problem, or passively through information permitting behavior of accepting any information related to the problem. Moreover, can choose to actively transmit information through information forwarding even in the absence of information requests, or choose information sharing only upon request for an opinion.

This theory is relevant in this study because it can explain how different people engage in different communicative behaviors on social media when confronted by problems. The situation of their problem motivates them to adopt different behaviors when seeking information and ways of resolving it. This will help explain the different communicative behaviors that Saudi women, government officials and other publics communicate about women issues, especially those that are problematic to the Saudi women.

2.2.4 Social exchange theory

The social exchange theory is a wide psychological and sociology theory that explains the social behavior of interacting individuals and groups based on the analysis of costs, risks and benefits accrued from the interaction. This theory has been developed by renowned scholars, such as George Homans, John Thibaut, Claude Levi-Strauss, Peter Blau, Harold Kelly, and Richard Emerson, with their injections of varied concepts, like distributive justice, expectancy, equilibration, correspondence-non-correspondence dyad, deprivation-satiation dyad, reciprocity, interdependence, and self-interests as the foundations of social behavior as essentially, an exchange process (DeLamater 2006). Notably, according to Homans, social exchange is an exchange of tangible and intangible activity between two persons or more, that may be gratifying or pricey. In this regard, continued social behaviors was sustained the mutual reinforcement of each other’s behaviors during social interactions, which in turn, can be used to explain solidarity, power, authority and distributive justice in society. Therefore, people engage in social relationships by weighing the potential benefits against the risks, in a bid to maximize the benefits and minimize the risks. Similarly, Blau perceived social exchange social exchange and being integral to social life and the relationships between individuals and groups in society (DeLamater 2006). Therefore, social exchange, unlike economic exchange, was motivated by the unspecified reciprocity that drove the voluntary actions of individuals in the exchange process.

Although the theory has been widely proven in offline setting, it is also applicable in online social interactions, which is the focus of this study. Notably, social exchange is facilitated by social networking sites because of their low transactional costs. Similarly, social media expands the opportunities of creating and maintaining social relations, which are not afforded by offline environments (Surma 2016). Therefore, the theory would help to explain how social media facilitates social exchanges of narratives, ideas and information related to women empowerment issues, articulating their problems, and inviting interactions in the generated discourses.

2.2.5 Collective Behavior Theory

The collective behavior theory is a classical model that explains social movements using several models. The theory posits that collective behavior is exhibited during social disruptions when people feel aggrieved deeply by issues rather than being as standard occurrence during the political process (Staggenborg, 2016). In this regard, this theory can be used to explain revolutions, religious cults, riots, social movements, fads and crazes that are witnessed in society. The theory assumes that i) collective behavior exists outside institutionalized structures, ii) collective behavior, and in turn, social movements, arise as a consequence of dramatic events, rapid social change, and natural disasters, which present cultural and structural strain and breakdown, and iii) collective behavior emerged amidst the shared belief of participants (Staggenborg, 2016).

Symbolic interactionism is central to the collective behavior theory because ot explains the creation and maintenance of society through repeated and continuous and interactions between individuals. This concept provides a bottom-up perspective on the relation between individuals and society and the mediating role played by social structures and institutions, which deviates from the top-down approach adopted by positivists (Carter and Fuller 2015). In this regard, symbolic interactionism views individuals as autonomous, agentic and pertinent creators of their social world, whose actions can be explained using the Chicago, Iowa and Indiana Schools of Thought as advanced by Herbart Blumer, Manford Kuhn and Sheldon Stryker, respectively. although the three schools of thought concur that i) people react towards things based on the meaning held about them, ii) social interactions create the meaning of things, and iii) the interpretation of things encountered by people directs the handing and modification of their meaning, they differed in the their methodologies (Carter and Fuller 2015). Notably, the conceptualization of symbolic interactionism by Blumer of the Chicago school of Thought is the most commonly used to explain collective behavior and social movements. In this regard, the Chicago School of thought uses symbolic interactionism that explains the construction of meanings through social interaction by social actors, to explain how collective behavior develops when there is a breakdown of sources of information and established systems of meaning, in turn, forcing people to adopt new behaviors from the new meanings they have constructed (Staggenborg, 2016). A notably symbolic interactionist perspective of collective behavior is the application of social identity to explain how the perceptions of self in group membership can influence behavior in social movements (Carter and Fuller 2015).

The collective behavior theory is relevant to this study because it can explain why people across the world, and particularly in Saudi Arabia participant or do not participate in social movements. It also introduces identity issues in helping understand how Saudi women, government officials, and public construct the oppressor/oppressed categories when engaging in women empowerment discourses. It also helps explain the emotions and behaviors of the actors during the activism on women issues in Saudi Arabia, and how such emotions help or hinder women empowerment discourses in the country.

2.4 Role of social media in protests

Social media has great potential in coalescing individuals, communities, and nations around issues and problems afflicting their societies and are not receiving sufficient attention from authorities. Although social movements have a longstanding history across the world, social media has facilitated their expansion, reach and urgency in the issues they articulate.

Staggenborg (2016) traces the history of social movements by noting that they originated as collection actions among communities in France and England to articulate, defend and advance their local interests. Similarly, Rudbeck (2012) explains that social movements originated in the 1760s in the Britain as a form of political action in the struggles to promote civil liberties. In this respect, the Wilkites is credited as one of the first politically-motivated mass social movement.

Flam and King (2007), in their book “emotions and social movements” revitalize the debate about the role of emotions in social movements by noting that although the importance of emotions had been ignored as a part of classical social movement approaches and feminist research, it has re-emerged in social movement research because of its mobilizing utility. They note that the personal loyalty and affective bonds displayed in social networks were critical in maintaining active social movement organization membership and they generated collective emotions that were instrumental in identifying with social movements and sustaining movement identities. Although collective emotions can be reciprocal or shared, reciprocal emotions that involved the feelings of people towards each other are responsible for many social movements, such as the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) that sought to end the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the Coalition of Labor Union Women, which is a movement that connects labor and feminist movement in the united states (Flam and King 2007). However, the protests associated with these movements were often in form of strikes that were held locally by the aggrieved members, and rarely enjoyed massive participation from the public.

Arafa and Armstrong (2015) observes that most protests in the Arab world that became known as the Arab spring, started from a single event that was widely transmitted and shared over social media and went viral. In this case, Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old street vendor in Tunisia doused himself with gasoline and set himself on fire in an act of self-immolation as protestation against repeated harassment by authorities. In Egypt, the 2011 protest is traced back to the brutal killing of Khaled Saeed, a 28-year-old blogger by police after he captured a video of law enforcement officers in Alexandria sharing drugs they had confiscated, and posted it online. Wael Ghoneim from dubai, acting as an anonymous activist, created the “We are all Khaled Saeed” page on Facebook, in which he posted pictures of Saeed’s mutilated face along his videos on YouTube, which went viral and fomented intense emotions and resentment. .

In explaining the influence and centrality of social media in contemporary protests, Poell (2019) argued that the intensity of social media use had changed the temporality and speed of protest communication, with potential impacts on the mobilization, sustenance, discussion, representation and remembrance of protests. In his investigation of how the regimes of temporality in protest communication facilitated or hindered the efforts of protestors towards gaining public legitimacy, Poell (2019, p. 1) noted that social media had not eased the generation of persistent attention for structural issues related to protests, despite the participatory affordances it provided. Notably, although social media communication complemented and amplified the news items presented in mainstream media, it did so in an episodic manner unlike the sustained 24-hour cycle of coverage used by traditional media (Poell 2019). In this case, Poell (2019) uses three protests between 2010 and 2012, which received both traditional and social media attention to illustrate the intermittent nature of social media news coverage. These included the Toronto protests during the G20 Summit, the Egyptian uprising, and the India protests following the gang rape incident in New Delhi. Notably, crowdsourcing of news about the protest through the continuous generation of user content and its posting and transmission over Flickr, Twitter, and YouTube accelerated the mass media cycle by broadcasting ‘breaking news’ incessantly, while ignoring the anti-capitalism and poverty issues that instigated the Toronto protests in the first place. Also, in the Indian case, Twitter was the arena for the connection between feminist activists and journalists, over which new incidences of gender violence were reported, discussed, and shared. This drew attention away from the central issues that featured prominently in the protests, including the male-dominated social system in India and the systemic gender violence it facilitated. In the same vein, months before the Egyptian uprising against President Mubarak and his regime in 2011, Kullena Khalid Said, a young Egyptian that was subjected to police brutality that turned fatal, generated much attention on his Facebook page, albeit episodically (Poell 2019). Although social media in these occasions reduced the dependence on mainstream media houses, its administrators had temporal control that made the messaging episodic and focused towards daily incidents rather than sustaining the overarching issues affecting the society. Similar sentiments are echoed by Veronica Barassi in the book edited by Dencik and Leistert (2015) called “Critical perspectives on social media and protest: Between control and emancipation”in which she notes that the temporality provided by the immediacy of social media had contradictory outcomes. On one hand, social media accelerated the sharing of information and mobilization for political support and participations on one hand, and hindered elaboration and reflection on the other hand (Dencik and Leistert 2015). However, a study by Lee (2018) revealed some contradictions to the effectiveness of social media in fomenting protest participation. While the study examined the role played by social media and its mechanisms in mobilizing citizens’ participation in protests revealed that the frequency of use of Facebook was significantly associated with protest activity, the path analysis conducted thereafter indicated that Facebook did not have a direct effect on protest participation. Rather its use facilitated such participation indirectly by facilitating purposeful consumption of news and expression of political opinions. Besides, incidental exposure to news, which was prevalent on Facebook, did not facilitate further expression of political opinions as a political action. Nonetheless, protests that are facilitated by social media often foment within activism that occurs in social media networks.

2.4.1 Cyberactivism

Milan and Hintz (2013) defined cyberactivism as the pursuance of social or political change through collective actions that exploit the ontological and technical features of online network infrastructure or target the infrastructure itself. In this regard, cyberactivism comprises of activities, such as, hacking, network disturbances, autonomous infrastructure creation, and online civil disobedience. Radical technology groups, also known as “grassroots” are examples of cyberactivists that endeavor to counteract state and commercial efforts to censure and limit media access and information content, breach individual privacy of users, and institute mass surveillance of people without their knowledge (Milan and Hintz 2013). They note that tech and online activism combined collectivism and individualism infused by their informality. In the same vein, Sierra-Caballero (2018) presents a materialistic approach to cyberactivism in which collective action can be viewed as an autonomous process of social transformation. In this regard, the internet presents a platform upon which virtual communities engage in an informal space to advance collective projects that foster common awareness and recognition. In this regard, Sierra-Caballero (2018) introduces the concept of oppositional public space (OPS) in describing digital activism from a Marxist perspective by noting that these new spaces create a cyberculture that is self-organizing and mediatory in a distinctive fight against capitalism. In the same vein, activists leverage the temporality of immediacy afforded by social networking sites because they spread information and images rapidly, thus enabling the establishment of affinity and solidarity networks and facilitating the formation of mass social movements (Dencik and Leistert 2015). Similar sentiments are echoed by Câmara (2016) who argued that cyberspace interactions promoted change in social relations and cyberactivism facilitate the construction of the feminist by promoting the identification of, relationships with, and discussions among members in their online publications. In the same context, Kemekenidou (2016) noted that cyberspace was the new battleground through which feminist activists fought patriarchy using the internet because it provided hyperconnectivity that was limited in the physical sphere. She argued that the hyperconnectivity availed by online tools facilitated combating inequality because it was linked to empathy rather than aggression. In this regard, Kemekenidou (2016) revealed that empathetic hyperconnectivity was critical for cyberfeminism as demonstrated by the Hollaback! campaign that used a website and social media to publicize women harassment incidents and protest against patriarchy on the cyberspace.

Cyberactivism has been demonstrated to initiate many protests and political reforms across the world, and particularly in the Arab world. These sentiments were echoed by Radsch (2012) who noted that many women that initiated and participated in the Arab Spring uprisings were cyberactivists prior to the protests. She made these observations when investigating the role of women cyberactivists on fueling revolutions in their countries and how they had facilitate the shift of power from the older generation of male-dominated political elites towards the youth, who constitute the majority of their countries’ population. Radsch (2012) noted that the young female cyberactivists had helped organize virtual protests alongside physical ones, thus rearing down the social and physical barriers between men and women and positioning the empowerment of women in the focus of political change struggle while challenging the religious and cultural taboos and norms. She also observed that these cyberactivists stood out for their application of social media and other new media technologies to transcend national frontiers and create linkages with activists groups and transnational mainstream media.

Khamis and Vaughn (2011) narrate how activism on social media sparked a revolution in Egypt that deposed president Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Wael Ghonim, an Egyptian activist noted that internet access helped to free a society because it promoted civic engagement through its tools and presented a platform for political networking opportunities and free speech. In turn, the virtual spaces of assembly afforded by social networking sites like, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and text messaging services enabled protesters to plan and execute peaceful protests following an initial onslaught of cyberactivism. Similarly, Arafa and Armstrong (2015) notes that young Arabs were come of the initial activists to incorporate new media technologies in their democratization movements and protest networks and identifies several cyberactivists that contributed to the unfolding of the Arab Spring on cyberspace. More significantly, new media, which includes social media among other digital and online technologies, enabled Arab women to advance their activism and participate in the ensuing uprisings without being perceived to contravene any social codes of their societies. Examples include Esraa Abdel Fatel, the “Facebook girl” from Egypt, Lina Ben Mhanni, the blogger from Tunisia. Thorsen and Sreedharan (2019) contribute to the women cyberactivism by interrogating its application in Saudi Arabia. They note that #IamMyOwnGuardian, #EndMaleGuardianship and #Women2Drive were successful online campaigns initiated by women cyberactivists in Saudi Arabia and caused the Saudi government to change its mahram policy of the male guardianship system and the denial of women’s right to drive.

However, cyberactivism is often associated with echo chambers, which can amplify or extinguish the political or social agenda at hand. Nguyen (2018) clarified what echo chambers are and distinguished them from filter bubbles, which were terms used to explain certain social media outcomes. Specifically, echo chambers were structured to consciously and purposefully exclude alternative opinions or discredit divergent opinions to advance a single viewpoint. In turn, when used in social media, echo chambers are formed when users are persuaded to agree with a certain perspective or consider a given ideology as the correct one while filtering out any contrary or divergent opinion. Contrastingly, in filter bubbles, information is omitted accidentally and without ill intent to narrow or direct the perception of an individual towards a chosen truth or reality. Nguyen (2018) points out that both are structures of exclusion, with echo chambers using credence and trust manipulation against alternative voices while epistemic bubbles use omission in their exclusion mechanisms.

In support of the mobilizing capability of echo chambers and filter bubbles facilitated by social media, Khosravinik (2017) revealed that political lobbyist, especially those supporting nationalistic or nativist politics capitalized on the structure and mechanisms of social media to advance their right-wing populist political views and gaining massive followership. In this regard, social media platforms encouraged echo chambers and filter bubble when forming groups and seeking popular support among like-minded people while keeping them away from any meaningful discourses and interactions with other and among themselves. Features such as “like”, “share”, and “tag” in Facebook and “retweet” in Twitter were features that advanced echo chambers and filter bubbles even around pertinent political issues such as Brexit and President Trump’s election (Khosravinik 2017, p.62). Likewise, Frick (2016) investigated utilization of cyberactivism in opposing regional planning as a component of activism by citizens, and found that new media facilitated the directing of intense, deep-rooted emotions into the propagation of counter-narratives that subverted the planning process. The success of such planning lobbyists emanated from the echo chambers afforded by social media, in which online users aligned their worldview with other of like minds. Unfortunately, such users receded into information cocoons that protected them from divergent views and comprehensive debate because they became polarized against views contrary to their own. Boutyline and Willer (2017) explains why filter bubble and echo chambers were beneficial to cyberactivism by noting they facilitated political and social homophily in which people tended to interact with those holding similar ideologies. In this respect, political homophily created social networks with dense and stronger ties between members of a homogenous ideology. This helped the activism participants to fortify their views and enhance their obligation to their ideological group by discarding divergent opinions that would divert them from their course (Boutyline and Willer 2017). In turn, such outcomes promoted participation in collective social action, despite polarizing public opinion. In these scenarios, the echo chambers and filter bubbles created by social media campaigns has succeeded in delivering their intended outcomes in Brexit, United States presidential elections, and sabotaging regional planning.

However, echo chambers and filter bubbles undermined cyberactivism by their nature. For instance, Klang and Madison (2016) noted that despite the wide utilization of the new technologies of communication and their growing application in cyberactivism, the may create artificial participations, which is termed as a lazy form of activism, also known as “slacktivism” instead of promoting real activism. The weak ties developed in online networks may not deliver actual change despite creating enormous online activity. Moreover, social media networks had algorithms that were heavily biased politically and directed by the social norms, culture, economics, and laws if the social network service providers, which created filter bubbles and echo chambers, and limited the freedom of users by forcing cyberactivism to occur with the limits set by the service providers. In the same vein, in as study analysis the structural evolution of virtual communities on Facebook that influenced the emotions and engagement of users, Del Vicario et al. (2016) the echo chambers formed therein influenced the emotional behavior of community members. In turn, the confirmation bias propagated by the echo chambers also circulated false claims that were deliberately advanced to the members. In turn debate, concepts and information were oversimplified, flattened, and trivialized, allowing large amounts of distorted information to influence important decisions, especially because the more active users shifted faster towards the echo chamber and filter bubble.

2.4.2 Social Media Censorship

Organizations and government have attempted to censor the use of social media to prevent the free expression of dissent and avoid upsetting the status quo. Breuer, Landman, and Farquhar (2015) give an account of the tactics that the Tunisian government used to censor cyberactivism, which included the interception of email messages though the Tunisian Internat Agency (ATI) in the pretext to preventing public morality and order violations, generating fake “file not found” error alerts (error 404) to disguise blocked websites, and by requiring that the owners of internet cafes hold users responsible for their online activities while obliging them to register their identification numbers. In the scaling up of online censorship following the demonstrations and strikes against the Phosphate Mining Company corruption allegations in2008 included the blocking of Facebook and its covert surveillance after the blocking was reversed amid enormous online protests. However, while Munger, Bonneau, Nagler, and Tucker (2019) acknowledge that authoritarian regimes restricted the use of social media to prevent dissent and protests by either blocking the internet or censoring online content, they introduce a third dimension in which the regimes engaged in strategic and massive online conversations that diverted attention from the discourses about problematic issues. They note that this tactic was employed by China and Russia and now by Venezuela, and term it a third generation strategy. Munger et al. (2019) called this form of online propaganda campaign regime activism to differentiate blockage and content censorship as the first and second generation strategies of censoring cyberactivism and protests. However, Pan (2017) notes that the censoring social media by authoritarian regimes was effective only if the social media firms were domestic rather than foreign. This explains why China is able to censor social media so effectively because the social networking sites used in the country, such as Weibo and WeChat were owned by domestic firms, which was unlike other authoritarian countries where social media was dominated by firms based in the United States, like Facebook and Twitter.

2.9.1 Social movements in Saudi Arabia

Social movements are “the manifestations of feeling of deprivation expressed by individuals in relation to other social subjects and feeling of aggression resulting from a wide range of frustrated social subjects” (Della Porta and Diani 2020, p. 7). Flam and King (2007) view social movements as large groups of people that organize their efforts around a particularly issues and pursue a particular social or political goal. The Webster dictionary defines social movement as “a group of people with a common ideology who try together to achieve certain general goals”. In these definitions, the overarching characteristics of social movement include a group of people, the sharing of a common ideology or intentions, and the pursuit of a common course. David Aberle proposed four types of social movements based on who was affected by the social change and how much change their elicited, to include i) revolutionary social movements that produced radical changes that transformed every one, ii) redemptive social movements that produced radical changes that affected specific individuals, iii) reformative social movements that changed everyone but elicited limited changes, and iv) alternative social movements that produced limited changes that affected a few specific individuals (Sinaga 2015). Social movements had and were evident across the world, including the civil rights movements, labor movements and women’s movements, more recent gay liberation movements, Egyptian revolution and the Occupy Wall street movement that had online and physical activism and activities (Goodwin and Jasper 2014).

Emotions are a critical component of social movements. Jasper (2011) noted that emotions were instrumental in every phase of a political movement because of their unique attributes, including being generated in crowds, shaping stated and unstated goals of the movement, articulated as rhetorical expressions, and their ability to motivate individuals towards a predetermined course. These emotions are exhibited in the collective crowd behavior often displayed in protests and other civil activities that characterize social movements (Flam and King 2007).

4.5 Summary of key findings and insights

Altogether the Saudi women held different and contradictory perspectives regarding the change agenda that was being spearheaded by the Saudi government. The voices that praised the government for its efforts in redefining the role of the Saudi women in a conservative society took a conservative approach in airing their sentiments, which was typical with the traditional perceptions that were always associated with women in the Arab and Islamic cultures. Contrastingly, the women advocates that continued to criticize the government can be considered to hold liberal view, which perceived women from a global perspective and consistent with the practices across the liberal and globalized world. These participants felt that the Saudi regime was still very conservative and left behind in the community of modern nations.

510 Summary of key findings and insights

Digital activism was vibrant in Saudi Arabia as it was the only alternative available to Saudi women to engage in discourses that are otherwise difficult to conduct in physical spaces due to the high punitive restrictions and the immense social and religious barriers presented by the Saudi administration and society, respectively. The cyberactivism space in Saudi Arabia appeared to be dominated by young well-educated and well-travelled Saudi women, who were the majority and most active participants in online women empowerment discourses. Moreover, this cohort of women was braver than their older and rural counterparts, who may be considered to be conformists in the Saudi society. Nonetheless, while the cyberactivists were few, the network was large because it comprised of Saudi and other women from foreign countries, who were sympathetic to the empowerment course of the average Saudi woman. In turn, although significant change was slow and mainly along economic empowerment, many Saudi women were still hopeful of the progression toward more political and social empowerment, although they were skeptical that such reforms would reach the standards of western countries.

6.6 Summary of key findings and insights

Social media usage in cyberactivism was increasing in Saudi Arabia as the Saudi women had discovered its unlimited power to facilitate discourses in public issues without going into public spaces. Moreover, the geopolitical events in the region and Arab world in general had encouraged women to pay attention and participate in discourses addressing social and political issues. The government officials presented the perception that the government encourages such discourses provided they did not contravene the social and religious norms of the country. Notably, calls to regulate the social media space from wayward users seen to misuse the privilege was common across come women activists and government officials. Nonetheless, the participation of the government in online discourses was viewed positively and skeptically by the advocates of women empowerment in the country. Again, the level of bravery and conformity was evident, with few advocates choosing their negative sentiments carefully, and indication that conservative reservations prevailed across Saudi women.

7.3.4 Effectiveness of social media in changing the government’s responsiveness to citizens and civil society

The study revealed that the Saudi society had made significant progress in dialoguing between the government and the Saudi public. The government’s control of the public discourse was shrinking in the backdrop of increased public participation in discourses about the political and social issues afflicted them over social media. More significantly, social media had increased the Saudi government’s responsiveness to the civil society and citizenry in varied ways, ranging from unstructured and informal conversations over cyberspace, to using social media as an additional tool of communicating government policies that target the welfare of Saudis alongside addressing the concerns of the citizenry.

In this regard, social media was a tool for regime activism because it was used to communicate with the Saudis and present a semblance of interactive engagement about pertinent issues. The regime activism approach taken by the Saudi government was precautionary and aimed towards forestalling the spiraling of social and political issues into outright protests against the authoritarian regime. This stance taken by the government can be explained through the third generation strategy mentioned by Munger, et al. (2019) as the alternative of closing down the internet and censoring online content. The evidence provided by the government officials in the study indicated that the Saudi government and its agents engaged in continuous conversation with the public on social media and responded to the activists and citizens’ concerns. However, the government used the third strategy to drown the anti-regime sentiments and direct the narrative towards other issues that were besides those being articulated, in what is called regime activism (Munger, et al. 2019). By avoiding the use of the first and second generation strategies for censuring cyberactivism, it would seem that the Saudi government had learned its lessons during the Arab Spring Uprisings of 2011 when authoritative regimes, like those in Egypt and Tunisia attempted to shut down the internet (first generation stragtegy) amid protests, which only managed to fuel the revolts instead (Munger, et al. 2019). In the same vein, the Saudi government may have learned from China, which can block and censure content (Second generation strategy) during the use social media use across the country to avoid political and social upheavals because the social networking sites in the country are locally owned and run, unlike those in Saudi Arabia, which are American owned (Munger, et al. 2019). In this regard, Saudi Arabia has no control of the social media platforms in the country in the same manner that China has, and as such, cannot censure activism over social media to the same effectiveness of China.

The Saudi government’s responsiveness towards its citizenry can be explained using the concepts of filter bubbles and echo chambers afforded by social media platforms. In addressing the issue of women’s driving rights, the government initiated conversations over social media about the unconfirmed form of reforms and structure that driving rights would adopt, such as limiting the driving eligibility to 35 years. This was in response to the sustained cyberactivism on the issue since 2011, with the government acting positively in 2018. Posting a proposed nature of driving rights anonymously, which was taken as rumors by the Saudi public, enabled the Saudi government to influence the discourse by raising the hopes of the women’s rights activists and Saudi women generally. This hopeful discourse overshadowed the negative sentiments against the removal driving restrictions by Saudi men and clerics, and the Saudi regime’s restriction of driving rights by altering the emotions of the public and avoiding domestic mass protests and a crisis, as explained by Del Vicario et al. (2016). Notably, authoritarian regimes that are technologically savvy use social media to contain their populations by capitalizing on social homophily while at the same time, monitoring the level of resentment and cyber activism by actively engaging over social media, officially and anonymously (Boutyline and Willer 2017). The homophily sustained by the official and unofficial engagements on social media had helped fragment cyberactivism in the country and promoted docility by inducing the fear of instability that was witnessed in other Arab countries during the Arab Spring revolutions.

However, as mentioned earlier, the Saudi government responds in a half-hearted and delayed manner, which means that manages to persuade the Saudi public towards impeding political and social reforms without providing deadlines and timelines within which such reforms would be implemented. In this regard, many Saudis avoid engaging in in-depth and critical debate about the impeding reforms for fear of upsetting the authoritarian regime. The success of the Saudi government in transmitting hope on social media can be explained using the weak tie theory, which posits that information diffusions across social networks is facilitated by weak and not strong network ties. Although the cyberactivism for women empowerment issues are driven by female activists mainly, the Government initiated discourses are captured by a wide section of unrelated individuals in the Saudi society, who help propagate the narrative, often drowning that of the female activists (Wright and Miller, 2010). In this regard, the strong networks are unable to amass the critical numbers of homophilic members needed to initiate a mass countrywide revolt. In turn, the Saudi government focuses its discourses towards other issues, usually related to the economy, which often overshadow the feminist cyberactivism. In this respect, the government responds to economic issues by promising huge aid programs and redistribution of oil wealth to trivialize the women empowerment issues (Jones 2011).

Altogether, despite the strategic use of social media by the Saudi government to prevent the formation of mass movements that can engage in mass protests, it has instituted significant reforms following concerted and sustained cyberactivism. Notably, the government has allowed women to drive and maintained hope that the male guardianship requirements would be eased, thus managing to contain the uprising that may have been centered on these issues.

8.1 Summary of Findings

This study sought to investigate the utilization of social media in addressing women’s rights and empowerment issues in Saudi Arabia. More specifically, it set out to the women empowerment discourse of social media and what motivated these virtual engagements. It also sought to assess the level of adoption of social media by the Saudi government officials and the extent to which this initiated and advanced social and political reforms. Further, the study sought to determine the interaction modes and levels, response practices, and interaction approaches used on social media when engaging in women empowerment discourses. The questions posed were:

How has social media been used to advance women’s rights in Saudi Arabia?
How has the Saudi government engaged with social media activity relating to women’s rights?
What features of social media facilitated the women’s empowerment discourse in Saudi Arabia?

8.1.1 Use of social media in advancing women’s rights in Saudi Arabia

The study revealed that the women’s rights movement in Saudi Arabia had benefited immensely from social media, considering that it was operating in an authoritarian country ruled by a totalitarian absolute monarchy along Islamist principles. Although many authoritarian regimes limit the use of social media in their countries, the advocated of women empowerment in Saudi Arabia had enjoyed considerable freedom despite their political and social circumstances. In this respect, social networking sites were often used to cyberactivism to advance the course of women’s rights in Saudi Arabia. In a country where physical protests attracted high punitive repercussions, social media provides an alternative platform upon which the Saudi women’s rights issues are articulated. In Saudi Arabia, the women’s empowerment discourses conducted over social media included, mainly, the expansion of the social rights of the Saudi women, which are repressed by the highly patriarchal Arabic and Islamic culture in the country. Consequently, the Saudi women had accrued several wins from their cyberactivism, with the allowing of women to drive, which was effected in 2018 being a significant accomplishment. Likewise, there was hope that the restrictive male guardianship laws that had oppressed the Saudi women for a long time could be repealed soon, going by the Saudi government’s declarations.

8.1.2 Saudi government engagement with social media activity relating to women’s rights

From the study, it can be concluded that the Saudi government engaged substantially with the Saudi public in women’s rights issues. Government leaders and officials often took to social media to engage in women empowerment discourses and address the concern affecting the Saudi women, having been championed by the youthful Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman. Notably, social media has allowed the Saudi government to articulate its programs for expanding the women’s economic and social rights related to education, work, business, and property ownership. Moreover, it had used social media to communicate the impeding social and economic reforms that would empower the Saudi women further to make them active participants in the country’s economy, while improving their welfare. However, the study revealed the presence of significant concerns from women’s rights advocates in Saudi Arabia, who felt that the Saudi government was not responsive enough or diverted attention from the pertinent political and social issues towards the economic issues of empowerment, in which it had already made significant progress. Similarly, the advocates did not trust their government wholly when they accused it of insincerity and propaganda. In this respect, the Saudi government used social media to prevent full-blown mass protests across the country by delivering hopeful messages along with the scary consequences of political and social instability to not only the wellbeing of women but also that of the entire country.

8.1.3 Features of social media that have facilitated the women’s empowerment discourse in Saudi Arabia

The study also revealed that social media technologies had several features that were especially facilitative to the women’s empowerment discourse in Saudi Arabia. The features that afforded facilitation to the empowerment discourses include the social mobilization capabilities that enabled cyberactivists to raise awareness about the political and social rights challenges experienced by the Saudi women for a long time. Social media enabled advocates of women’s rights to raise awareness within and beyond Saudi Arabian borders, thus persuading a larger audience that would have been otherwise untenable using other mobilization approaches. The weak ties developed across the social networking sites inside and outside Saudi Arabia called the attention of Saudi women that were intimately afflicted by the denial of social and political rights in the country and foreign audiences who were enjoying these rights in their own countries. Using the filter bubbles and echo chambers afforded by social media platforms across social networks, women’s rights advocates could appeal to audiences with similar ideologies.

Moreover, specific social media platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube could be interconnected to publish individual women’s content on their experiences using text, images, and videos, thus presenting their appeals graphically. These multimedia features of social media elicited intense emotions across network members, persuading them to amplify the plight of the Saudi women and call for action from the Saudi authorities. Indeed, several individual women had become influential cyberactivists through their interactive blogs, tweets, and followership over different social media platforms. Such emotions were instrumental in bolstering social movements that drowned alternative perspectives that could divert the attention of the cyberactivists in Saudi Arabia. Besides, the anonymity and interactivity of social media platforms facilitated the participation and engagement of individuals who wished to remain anonymous whole discussing sensitive and controversial women empowerment issues to avoid being victimized by the authoritarian authority.

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The dynamic of social media: A case of usage in Saudi Arabia

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The dynamic of social media: A case of usage in Saudi Arabia

2.2 Conceptual framework

2.2.1 Weak Tie Theory

2.2.2 Ritual theory (theory of media events)

2.2.3 Situational Theory of Problem Solving

2.2.4 Social exchange theory

2.2.5 Collective Behavior Theory

2.4 Role of social media in protests

2.4.1 Cyberactivism

2.4.2 Social Media Censorship

2.9.1 Social movements in Saudi Arabia

4.5 Summary of key findings and insights

510 Summary of key findings and insights

6.6 Summary of key findings and insights

7.3.4 Effectiveness of social media in changing the government’s responsiveness to citizens and civil society

8.1 Summary of Findings

How has social media been used to advance women’s rights in Saudi Arabia?
How has the Saudi government engaged with social media activity relating to women’s rights?
What features of social media facilitated the women’s empowerment discourse in Saudi Arabia?