Do Protests Need To Make Sense To Make Money?

Animal rights and climate change are important causes that many activists care a lot about. However, despite their best efforts, activists frequently feel like they’re ignored by the public and governments. This has led some activists to protest in ways that are shocking, disruptive, and attention-grabbing, hoping that these actions will help people notice them and their cause. These protests sometimes lack a direct connection to the issue being protested, and because of that, they can seem nonsensical or radical to an outside observer. Other times, they disrupt public life so that people are forced to notice, potentially resulting in arrests. So, is any attention good attention, and does it help for protests to be disruptive and radical?

Focusing on two U.K.-based activist groups, Just Stop Oil and Animal Rising, this study looks at the relationship between protests, media attention, and donations, with donations specifically serving to show active support of protests by these groups.

Researchers classified protests by their action logic: in other words, how directly the protests relate to the issues they’re protesting. A protest with low action logic would have no connection to the issue at all and serve only to draw attention to the protester or protesting group, such as throwing soup on the Mona Lisa to protest climate change. On the other hand, a protest with high action logic would be directly related to the issue, such as camping in an old-growth forest to prevent a pipeline from being constructed.

The researchers also classified protests by disruptiveness, with disruptive protests causing significant disturbance to organizations or public life (e.g., blocking roads). They made these classifications by training GPT-4, a large language model, to rate the protests by action logic and disruptiveness. They also used GPT-4 to extract key details about protests, such as date and location, from an online database that tracks violent and non-violent conflicts, as well as to sort the protests by type (e.g., sit-in, vandalism, rally, picketing).

This study considered protests to influence donations for one week, based on the assumption that most people hear about the event through media coverage in the following days rather than by being physically present to see it. In this way, media hits are usually a mediator between the protests and donations rather than protests leading directly to donations. To measure media hits, the researchers used data from an open-source platform for media analysis, which notably included only traditional media, not social media. Finally, donation data were supplied by the two activist groups, covering the years 2021 to 2023 for Animal Rising and 2022 to 2023 for Just Stop Oil.

The analysis revealed that weeks where the groups ran protests generally resulted in more donations — an average of 58 more. When the groups held more than one protest in a single week, each additional protest brought in an additional 20 donations.

Further, the researchers also found that less logical and more disruptive protests were more effective at increasing media hits and donations, after controlling for general increases of donations over time, multiple protests in a single week, and unrelated events that brought attention to the group’s issues (e.g., a nearby climate disaster). Additionally, they found that disruptiveness has a stronger effect on donations than on media hits, suggesting that disruptive protests are less dependent on traditional media coverage for getting noticed — possibly because they reach people through other means (e.g., social media). In contrast, action logic has a stronger effect on media hits than on donations, indicating that less logical protests rely on media attention in order for them to impact donations.

Further research is needed to determine the relative effects these tactics have on public opinion. Other studies have shown that disruptive tactics can reduce public support for the protesters and the cause they’re protesting. This study acknowledges that these tactics may represent a trade-off between increased media attention and public support in the form of donations and decreased public opinion. However, the findings push back against the narrative that illogical or disruptive protests are inherently counterproductive for a cause, suggesting that they do still have their use and place in a social movement.