Digital Resources for Social Movements : How X and Kickstarter Influence the “Black Lives Matter” Movement

In this paper, we analyze digital platforms’ impact on social movements via digital resource mobilization. Guided by Resource Mobilization Theory and Affordance Theory, this paper scrutinizes the impact of digital resources derived from social media platform X and crowdfunding platform Kickstarter in the context of the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) social movement. We propose two types of digital resources (instrumental resources and infrastructural resources) that contribute to the occurrence of social movements’ protests and the number of participants. Our hypotheses were empirically assessed using a combined dataset of X, Kickstarter, and BLM spanning from January 2014 to December 2021. An analysis conducted with zero inflated negative binomial models, utilizing 140,448 city-month records, corroborates the substantial influence of the proposed digital resources. This research extends both theoretical and practical understanding of social movements by revealing the digital resources that can be harnessed by participants.