Digital animal advocacy: a study on Facebook communication styles of italian animal rights organizations and their followers’ reactions

Despite online media having become an increasingly valuable tool for social movements to achieve their goals, the digital presence of animal advocacy organizations is still under-explored. This paper contributes to fill the gap by analyzing the social media communication of Italian animal advocates against the backdrop of a typology developed in the offline context that distinguishes political, anarchist, anti-political and mainstream animal advocacy. By using text and data mining techniques, the Facebook pages of eight Italian organizations representative of each type of advocacy were analyzed, based on over 7,000 posts and followers’ reactions. The findings complicated the offline typology by showing elements of continuity, discontinuity and hybridization between offline and online activism. They also shed light on the online communication of animal advocates and provided some initial insight into how online media can affect animal rights activism, thus providing a contribution to the emerging field of digital media and social movement studies.