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Just Stop Oil: do radical protests turn the public away from a cause? Here’s the evidence (theconversation.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

But that’s not what we found. In fact, experimental manipulations that reduced support for the protesters had no impact on support for the demands of those protesters.

We’ve replicated this finding across a range of different types of nonviolent protest, including protests about racial justice, abortion rights and climate change, and across British, American and Polish participants (this work is being prepared for publication). When members of the public say, “I agree with your cause, I just don’t like your methods,” we should take them at their word.

Wow, that is both new (at least for me) and interesting - thanks for sharing this article. :)

I note a potential weakness in the method of analysis: if negative framing (e.g. by the media) reduces support for the protesters as persons (but not their cause), it may still somewhat harm their ability to bring about change, since it probably reduces people's willingness to team up with them - but not another group which has the same cause but different methods.

So, if the goal is mass action (which has a component of mobilizing like-minded people to join) I would strongly recommend a protester to choose non-controversial methods (so that even grannies can join). :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I would be shocked if negative framing did not have an effect, but unfortunately a tasty negative angle is exactly the kind of bait an antagonistic press is likely to go for in order to give the action greater coverage.

I've lost count of how many people have come here confident that JustStopOil has 'destroyed' art or 'damaged' stonehenge, and a couple that think the private jet action was a failure because they didn't paint Taylor Swift's plane specifically. All of them angles that hacks in the press have taken with these stories. Luckily, bastions of media literacy like the Fediverse exist, and while many of these people are difficult to disabuse of their false narrative, the actual story has definitely gotten better vote scores. Lemmy has been an even better platform in this regard than Reddit, which is a massive win for what we're trying to do here.