On Friday 5th January, media researcher and sociologist Joan Donovan wrote a piece for The Conversation about ‘networked incitement’. The concept, taken from a working paper by Donovan, Kaylee Fagan, and Frances Lee, is described as:

a socio-technical infrastructure where insurgents use multi-platform communication to command and control mobilized social movements in the moment of action

Donovan, J., Fagan, K., & Lee, F. (2022). ‘President Trump is Calling Us to Fight’: What the Court Documents Reveal about the Motivations Behind January 6 and Networked Incitement. Media Manipulation Casebook. (link)

Networked incitement is a way of describing the role social media plays in orchestrating actions such as abuse, harassment, and violence. In this blog post I’m going to share some thoughts I have on the concept of networked incitement.

In my view, networked incitement is:

• diffuse
• componential
• collaborative
• scalable.

Networked incitement is diffuse because it comprises a dynamic set of individuals, groups, and organisations. While there are inevitably thought leaders (individuals recognised by the mass as an authority), networked incitement is enacted by the propagation and promulgation of ideas by large, changing sets of individuals (here individual refers to an individual social media account, which can represent a group, organisation, etc.).

This diffused premeditation is also what makes acts such as the January 6th insurrection difficult to track before they happen. With hindsight, it is easy to see how the plans for the riots evolved and came to fruition, but in real-time when thousands of individuals are contributing to varying discourses it is very difficult to track.

Networked incitement often happens over a wide area between multiple actors.

This leads into the next property: networked incitement is componential. It is made up of posts, comments, groups, threads, images, GIFs, and many other facets of computer-mediated communication (CMC). These many parts compound the difficulty of tracking and predicting networked incitement. It can be done in public, or in private forms of communication.

I view networked incitement as componential because while often top-down, it is of course networked. As Donovan, Fagan and Lee note, it is characterised by multi-platform communication, and it is the incitement’s spread through social media networks that contributes to outcomes such as January 6th. It is participatory and reliant on many individuals becoming involved using varying means of communication.

The many components of networked incitement means the messages spread to wider audiences and avoid moderation easier. As a result, the outcome of networked incitement is often greater than the sum of its parts. The parts are individual comments, groups, threads, and posts, and the outcome can be bloodshed and death.

Additionally, networked incitement is collaborative. It involves individuals working together towards a shared goal or ideal. To be networked involves the clicking, sharing, forwarding and production of content. Networked incitement does not happen if no one promotes the core message (the incitement). This collaboration can be informal where individuals simply converse and engage with each other through means such as likes, retweets, etc., or formal where individuals actively plan and enact negative behaviours together.

Finally, networked incitement is inherently scalable. I’ve used the authors’ example of January 6th throughout but networked incitement is not always this monumental. It can be grassroots and carried out by a small collective.

While organisations such as ‘Libs of TikTok’ can orchestrate wide-reaching, impactful social movements that cause harm and rely on large numbers, equally networked incitement can be small scale, even down to single numbers, where individuals seek to incite others.

Concluding Thoughts

Networked incitement is a negatively marked online behaviour (NMOB) (Hardaker, 2010) that brings about real-world harms. While these harms can be carried out online or in-person (or as a hybrid of the both), they are characterised by being social media enabled and social media dependent.

Networked incitement is a useful way of understanding how messages spread through social media and how these messages can contribute to violence and criminality. It helps explain the role social media plays in coordinated harassment and abuse, and how social media exacerbates existing social problems.