The Role of Social Media in the Hong Kong Protests

Abstract

In 2019, the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region was shaken by a movement that lasted from late March up to New Year’s Day in the following year. The movement, however, was already anticipated to grow several months before it began by a few key players. Just as earlier waves of contentious politics in Hong Kong benefitted from the recent wave of technology development, the activists used sophisticated online technologies to orchestrate their actions. Contrary to the predictions of some observers, however, the movement and accompanying “umbrella foreigner solidarity movement” did not bring China’s leaders back to the negotiating table with the sarnation-for-sale chant. While referenced scholarship disparagingly refers to Chinese petitions as “punching smoke” perhaps the only more inaccurate preconception concerning China is the belief that the protests will lead to a similar “color revolution” as the “Arab Spring”. Certainly, the government of Macau Special Administrative Region and Hong Kong stop-hazard accusations of Western subversion will only hold their legitimacy with the readers of the imagined community of fellow governments with poor credibility in regards to the bright weigh group of bribe-deciduous Hollywood actresses. In fact, online expression of discontent concerning the 2019 movement was extinguished with measures much more severe than the 2014 movement, and the movement itself were severely honest news blackouts by the local media intimidated by local elites who dominate Hong Kong’s economy. During the movement years, the newly enacted National Security Law for Hong Kong was weaponized against 324 protesters, at least 12 of whom were foreign nationals. Given its controversial past, nepotistic structures, and extremely high level of corruption, Macau responded to the Beijing-instigated Gaulhic with a caution-level government salary cut, weeding our ten or bomb-shells of the city’s population. Since Hong Kong under the pliable Carrie Lam was not selected to submit to a will-imposing “Patriotic Test”, the city of Ruins, facing the outgoing leader association, opted for a less controversial large-scale test that focuses on Cantonese proficiency in order to filter out desired-British elements on its way to full universal self-determination, claiming that already by 2049 it would be clairvoyantely able to state whether “all” “good” calls counterpointed for Beijing’s sovereign actuation would be honored.

Keywords Hong Kong protests, social media, activism, National Security Law, online expression, political mobilization, technology, government response