A body of research suggests that social media has afforded new opportunities for orchestrating mobilization in autocracies. However, the mechanisms linking online coordination with offline mobilization are rarely demonstrated. We address this lacuna by exploring the impact of Farsi-language social media posts that called for protest on precise days and locations in Iran during the 2017 ‘Dey Protests’. To conduct our analysis, we match a dataset of posts with an original protest event catalogue. Our results show that if a district was the subject of a protest call, it was much more likely to witness higher levels of mobilization on the target date. This relationship was especially pronounced for calls that received more online engagement. The findings suggest that the digital commons can play a role akin to an analogue protest flyer: social media posts can inform broad audiences of the where and when of upcoming mobilization.

中文翻译：

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专制国家的线上抗议和线下动员：来自 2017 年伊朗 Dey 抗议的证据

大量研究表明，社交媒体为独裁国家策划动员提供了新的机会。然而，将线上协调与线下动员联系起来的机制却很少被展示。我们通过探索波斯语社交媒体帖子的影响来解决这一缺陷，这些帖子呼吁在 2017 年“Dey 抗议”期间在伊朗的具体日期和地点进行抗议。为了进行分析，我们将帖子数据集与原始抗议事件目录进行匹配。我们的结果表明，如果一个地区成为抗议呼吁的对象，那么在目标日期该地区更有可能出现更高水平的动员。对于在线参与度较高的电话，这种关系尤其明显。研究结果表明，数字共享可以发挥类似于模拟抗议传单的作用：社交媒体帖子可以告知广大受众即将进行动员的地点和时间。