Honking 'round the world: Cross-national framing of collective identity within the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests on TikTok


William Hollingshead, Western University

The advent of social media technologies in the 21st century has had transformative consequences on political communication and civic engagement, brokering new possibilities for the dissemination of grievances, and community formation. This has culminated in various digitally mediated social movements, spanning disparate national terrains, and across the political spectrum. Theoretical accounts from sociologists and media scholars alike attempt to account for this new modality of protest as diffusive, networked, episodic, and personalized. Here, individual experience is a key form of social capital that one can share, ultimately modulating participation, as personal testimonies are collaboratively weaved vis-á-vis the associative affordances of social media, like hashtags, that index communications. Recent accounts indicate that this appears to be formulative of an alternative ontology of collective identity, rendered through avatars, filters, emojis, and the hashtag, all of which operate as signifiers of an “insider” status. Importantly, these “soft resources” – as Stefania Milan refers calls them – enable a democratization of access, given the low costs associated with their usage, as well as narrative customizability that allows anyone to become a potential participant by contributing to the plot. Furthermore, the accessibility and customizability of these “soft resources” engender pathways in which social movements can “spillover” beyond their initial social context. This was the case for the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests that initialized in Canada in response to federal legislation mandating COVID-19 vaccination for cross-border commercial truck drivers. The Freedom Convoy – as an ideological hodgepodge of far-right extremists, White nationalists, libertarians, and anti-vaccine proponents – spawned further protests across the globe, most notably New Zealand, which endured a similar multi-week occupation of parliamentary grounds, likewise organized, and intensified through the social media ether. I draw upon the Freedom Convoy to explore the discursive and aesthetic transplantation of collective identity between national boundaries, through two cases: Canada and New Zealand. This work-in-progress aims to fill several gaps within the literature. First, existing research on the digital formation of collective identity has been hampered by analyses of singular contexts, failing to grasp how collective identity – a continuously negotiated product of social interaction – can be transported to amenable situations that are foreign to their initial location. Second, and relatedly, there is theoretical fuzziness regarding how this process is actualized in practice through social media. To address these gaps, I pair collective identity and collective action frames to explore how Freedom Convoy supporters’ articulations are constitutive of a shared reality comprised of social actors – notably, the collective “We” – with ascribed attributes that impute the group’s ideological consciousness. This is observed through framing processes that elaborate upon the current situation, asserting what the “problem” is, why corrective action is necessary, and which action is suitable to undertake. I further use the concept of platform vernacular to explore how collective identity is texturized through the communicative conventions of a social media platform, TikTok. I contend that this framework will be useful to, first, revealing how a social movement’s collective identity can function as a malleable ideological template, and second, how the communicative conventions of TikTok foster replicability through what Diana and David J. Zulli term “imitation publics” that ease the degree in which collective identity can be translated in the form of pre-packaged “sounds,” “hashtags,” and narrative “styles.” This works draws upon publicly accessible digital trace data from TikTok, using a corpus of popular hashtags related to the Canadian and New Zealand-based Freedom Convoy protests. The Canadian and New Zealand dataset(s) are composed of 813 and 516 TikTok videos, respectively. Canadian data is limited to the period of the Ottawa occupation: 29 January 2022 to 21 February 2022. Comparatively, New Zealand data corresponds to the duration of the Wellington occupation: 6 February 2022 to 2 March 2022. A theory-driven thematic analysis is used to discern over-arching patterns in the deployment of collective action frames to impute how collective identity is practiced between two distinctive national contexts.

This paper will be presented at the following session: