{"id":34374,"date":"2026-08-13T17:14:48","date_gmt":"2026-08-13T21:14:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=34374"},"modified":"2026-08-12T14:21:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-12T18:21:13","slug":"online-conflict-may-strengthen-not-weaken-social-movements-mcgill-researchers-find","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2026\/08\/online-conflict-may-strengthen-not-weaken-social-movements-mcgill-researchers-find\/","title":{"rendered":"Online conflict may strengthen, not weaken, social movements, McGill researchers find"},"content":{"rendered":"

Online conflict tends to advance social movements rather than undermine them, according to new research from McGill’s\u00a0Desautels Faculty of Management.<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cAnyone who has watched an online debate turn heated assumes arguing kills collective action,\u201d said\u00a0Emmanuelle Vaast<\/a>, Professor of\u00a0Information Systems<\/a>\u00a0and the study’s senior author. \u201cOur study shows the opposite: the same social media dynamics that produce conflict also enable millions of strangers to discover they are telling the same story and act together. It explains how a teenager\u2019s solo school strike could become a worldwide mobilization in a matter of months<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study was carried out in collaboration with colleagues at Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts.<\/p>\n

The researchers examined social media activity related to the 2019 global climate strikes sparked by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg \u2013 the largest climate mobilization in history \u2013 to understand how distinct causes, from pipeline opposition to the protection of monarch butterflies and wolves, fused into a single global \u201cmovement of movements.\u201d They found that this process happens in three phases: exposure (movements discover each other\u2019s issues), entanglement (conversations become tangled and contentious) and coalescence (participants converge on shared goals and joint action).<\/p>\n

\u201cConflict did not weaken the movement,\u201d Vaast said. \u201cCo-operation and disagreement evolved together, like the two strands of a double helix. Arguing was part of how a shared agenda took shape.\u201d<\/p>\n

Previous research has mostly examined single movements and treated online conflict as a threat to collective action,<\/strong> the researchers said.<\/p>\n

Nearly two million Twitter posts studied<\/h2>\n

The team used computational text-analysis<\/strong> methods to analyze about 1.9 million Twitter messages posted between April and September 2019. Vaast noted that by combining semantic network analysis and natural language processing at this scale, the team could observe movement dynamics and identify patterns that may have been obscured by other methodologies, such as interviews or case studies.<\/p>\n

Although social media platforms have shifted since 2019 from largely chronological feeds to recommendation-driven ones optimized to hold users’ attention<\/strong>, the researchers said this does not necessarily impede movement building.<\/p>\n

\u201cRecommendation algorithms can actually accelerate discovery. For instance, TikTok surfaces [social] causes to people who never sought them out. So, coming together on social media is still possible today. It just runs through more opaque mechanisms,\u201d Vaast said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat’s exactly why the 2019 moment is worth studying: it’s a benchmark for what today’s algorithms are enabling.\u201d<\/p>\n

About this study<\/h2>\n

\u201cEntangling and Coalescing on Social Media: A Study of Issue Boundary Spanning in Movement of Movements<\/a>,\u201d by Carol Lee (Northeastern University), Pratyush Bharati (University of Massachusetts) and Emmanuelle Vaast (McGill), was published in\u00a0Information Systems Journal.<\/em><\/p>\n

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JOURNAL<\/h4>\n

Information Systems Journal<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Online conflict tends to advance social movements rather than undermine them, according to new research from McGill’s\u00a0Desautels Faculty of Management. \u201cAnyone who has watched an online debate turn heated assumes arguing kills collective action,\u201d said\u00a0Emmanuelle Vaast, Professor of\u00a0Information Systems\u00a0and the study’s senior author. \u201cOur study shows the opposite: the same social media dynamics that produce… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":34375,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"no","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"off","neve_meta_content_width":70,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[526,368,335,7],"tags":[805,804,807,803,193,806],"class_list":["post-34374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-behaviour","category-communication","category-politics-2","category-relationships","tag-agreeing","tag-arguing","tag-dynamics","tag-fighting","tag-media","tag-twitter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34376,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34374\/revisions\/34376"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/34375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}