Communities of Protest: A 3R Framework of Social Media Rhetoric, Reach, and Reinforcement in India's #Anti-NRC Movement

Abstract

Social-media–based protests often unfold across multiple, semi-autonomous communities that cooperate, compete, and overlap, yet most research still treats “the movement” as a single unit. I introduce the 3R framework—Rhetoric, Reach, Reinforcement—to trace how collective-identity messages are produced, circulated, and amplified among these communities. The study analyzed a multilingual corpus of 800,000 Facebook posts (200,000 textual posts) spanning three months, using unsupervised topic modeling, multiple linear regression, and social-network analysis. Results show systematic heterogeneity: communal organizations react most intensely to posts criticizing the government, signaling identity-affirming outrage. Journalistic pages function as “bridge nodes,” injecting new topics into the network and diffusing them widely, thereby disrupting potential echo chambers. High-reach, high-rhetoric messages are disproportionately reinforced through repeated sharing and cross-posting, magnifying their visibility well beyond the originating community. This study maps how rhetoric, reach, and reinforcement interact across organizational boundaries, offering a unified theoretical and empirical approach to understanding how online protest movements construct, contest, and sustain collective identities.