Change Unmasked
About
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen two main protests groups arise and capture the public consciousness: Black Lives Matter and the various anti-lockdown groups. I argue in this project that the governmental decisions in combating the pandemic had a direct causal effect.
Research Enquiries
The key research enquiries were as follows:
- Can COVID-19 era protests be best explained by the Compensatory Control Theory?
- Do different protest groups of the COVID-19 era have more in common than they differ?
- How reflective of the wider population are these protest groups, or has COVID-19 allowed for a disproportionate amplification of minority views?
Many of the foundational assertions of BLM and the anti-lockdown groups are grounded in mistruths that have been adopted wholesale as to be utilised as unifying grievances. This, therefore, fits the definition of a conspiracy theory and the compensatory control theory is an effective tool to understand why many people are drawn to either movement despite provable evidence to the contrary being widely available.
This has been an area of personal interest extending out of my journalistic career which has seen me researching many of the groups associated with public demonstrations, both in the UK and the US. I have come to realise that many of these groups share many of the same characteristics just as the far-right neo-Nazi adherents and the far-left Anarcho-Communists, ANTIFA do within the US.
Within the UK and in the context of COVID-19, BLM and anti-lockdown groups share many of the same interesting defining features yet differ at key points. We know about the silent majority, but how many of these groups are the rowdy minority? Polling of these groups can give us a glimpse into the public acceptance of these movements as well as the numbers that make up their online communities.
Copyright Notice
All images and content © KWMEDIA 2021
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Key Research Papers
