University students across the US have been protesting since 7 October 2023 with vigils, rallies and marches asking for a ceasefire in Gaza and for their universities to divest from Israel. While some of these protests led to heated fights about foreign policy, the most prominent events have involved university presidents’ abysmal congressional testimony. This week’s arrests of more than 100 Columbia students reinvigorated the student movement and now it’s kicking off everywhere.

As a sociologist of social movements, I study how movements select and shift tactics to elicit a response from their opponents. Over the next few weeks, we will see dozens of other university encampments spring up because activists have found a tactic that gets the administration’s attention at a critical time: during finals and commencement.

In 2011, I was an organizer at Occupy LA and ended up writing my dissertation about distributed networked social movements. The Occupy movement’s growth was aided by social media, then an emerging technology popular with young people, and the invention of the smartphone, capable of using apps and streaming video.

With the global wave of Occupy protests, the mobile phone was converted into a political tool imbued with the powers of narrative and broadcast. Occupy protesters were not able to control the narrative about the movement, but they certainly could share their own reality and invite other social media users to do so too.

Every person with a smartphone who entered these Occupy encampments behaved like a journalist, documenting........

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