Active vs. Passive Social Media Engagement with Critical Information: Protest Behavior in Two Asian Countries

Passive online media use refers to the act of merely reading and observing political information on a users’ feed. Alternatively, active use refers to the conscious decision to share information, comment, challenge, fact check, or engage in related activity. We argue that these types of social media use have fundamentally different relationships to offline political participation. We use original survey data from Malaysia and the Philippines to test two propositions: (1) active political use, such as online protest or resistance, substitutes for offline protest and (2) passive users who encounter critical information and do not engage in active use will participate in offline protest. Our results confirm these expectations.