Online and Mobilized Students: The Use of Facebook in the Chilean Student Protests

Abstract

Considering the relationship between new social media and youth political actions, the purpose of this article is to describe the use of Facebook during the 2011 Chilean student movement, through a content and textual analysis of Facebook’s page of the Student Federation of the University of Chile (FECH). In 2011, Chile experienced massive mobilizations for seven months. These were perhaps the most important social protests in Chile’s recent history, where young people played a leading role in the discussion over education. During these events, Facebook was one of the digital social networks most widely used by the mobilized organizations. In FECH’s case, it utilized Facebook mainly to call for protest actions, to highlight the achievements of the movement, and to indicate their opponents. However, most of the content published on this Facebook page was produced by traditional media, showing that conventional communication strategies of social movements are interrelated with new innovative practices. Therefore, this article rejects technological determinism, because it does not recognize the complex characteristics of student and youth movements.