Against Authoritarian Continuity: Exploring Filipino Students' Participation in Social Media Activism and Offline Activism For #NoToMarcosDuterte2022

Abstract

What informs the link between social media activism and offline activism through offline protest participation? This study represents an attempt to address this gap in the literature by focusing on students’ subjective experiences and narratives about the #NoToMarcosDuterte2022 movement, a digitally-mediated social movement that was enabled by the use of social media platforms during the campaign period for the 2022 national elections. Concerned Filipino college students and representatives of numerous civil society groups organized the aforementioned movement through online discourse and offline mobilizations. Data on students’ experiences of involvement in both online and offline modes of participation for the movement were collected and analyzed thematically. The results suggest that offline activism complements social media activism by serving as a forum for physical dissent that helps social movement supporters to overcome the perceived insufficiency of online collective action on social media platforms. Such complementarity is described by the experiential interplays between social media engagement and motives for offline protest participation.