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 resourcemobilization. Guided by Resource Mobilization Theory and Affordance Theory, this paperscrutinizes the impact of digital resources derived from social media platform X andcrowdfunding platform Kickstarter in the context of the “Black Lives Matter” (BLM) socialmovement. We propose two types of digital resources (instrumental resources and infrastructuralresources) that contribute to the occurrence of social movements’ protests and the number ofparticipants. Our hypotheses were empirically assessed using a combined dataset of X,Kickstarter, and BLM spanning from January 2014 to December 2021. An analysis conductedwith zero inflated negative binomial models, utilizing 140,448 city-month records, corroboratesthe substantial influence of the proposed digital resources. This research extends both theoreticaland practical understanding of social movements by revealing the digital resources that can beharnessed by participants.