Digital Strike: Monetizing Online Engagement and Content for Myanmar’s Spring Revolution

Abstract

Digital networks and social media are increasingly becoming spaces with high political stakes as well as great economic gains. This paper contributes to the ongoing debate concerning the relationship between economic and political motivations, particularly the observation that economic factors often drive the creation of politically charged content (Grohmann & Ong, 2024). We present a case in which the roles of economic and political incentives are turned on their head, the creation of seemingly nonpolitical content with the purpose of generating money for a political cause. The mechanism through which this inversion is possible is the second finding of this paper: A network of politically motivated internet users coordinate themselves to create, interact with, and watch content for the purpose of income generation through advertisement revenue, which is not for the content creators or users but for a commonly shared political goal. This phenomenon is analyzed in the highly contentious and violent political context of the coup, the Spring Revolution, and the ongoing civil war in Myanmar. In our analysis, we draw from theories of economic incentives in online content creation, click farms, and financial resource mobilization for collective action as well as algorithmic resistance.