Testing the bidirectional causation among media attention and the protest scale: the case of Hong Kong

Media attention is crucial for the success of social movements. In contemporary hybrid media ecology, news media, social media, and on-site protests interact with each other during social movements. The present study investigated the relationships among the scale of street protests, attention from news media, and social media in the Anti-ELAB movement in Hong Kong. The results show that attention from pro-democracy and nonlocal media significantly influences fluctuations in the protest scale. Moreover, they closely correlate with changes in protest size, highlighting the importance of political parallelism in media coverage during contentious movements. We also found a two-way relationship between the degree of social media attention in the LIHKG forum and the scale of on-site protests. This suggests that social media not only serves as a platform for public discourse on protest events but that it also acts as a mobilizing force for participants. Additionally, our results indicate that news media has a significant influence on shaping attention trends on social media, thus confirming the effectiveness of traditional media in driving social movements in Hong Kong, even amid the rise of social media platforms.