Viral Nature: Exploring non-profit social media use during the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires

Abstract

What could make virality relevant to the non-profit sector? Technological advancements can now produce large amounts of information, and gaining attention in digital spaces is becoming increasingly difficult. Furthermore, as attention is becoming the most valuable resource in today’s over-informed society, virality appears to be the most lucrative payoff. The attention generated by virality has the potential to make non-profit sector organizations (NPSOs) and their actions visible through social media, thus furthering their causes. In this thesis I will explore the impacts of virality on the non-profit sector’s use of social media. To that end, I will explore how non-profit sector organization (NPSO) personnel perceived and addressed such impacts. The Amazon rainforest fires, which attracted attention on social media in 2019, will be studied. The main research question is the following: What was the impact of the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires’ virality on NPSO’s social media use? By impact, I refer to the challenges that NPSOs may have faced while using social media and the outcomes they may have accomplished that are identifiable outside social media platforms. Data from 11 interviews with key NPSO personnel and a sample of social media posts from the organizations’ Twitter and Facebook accounts were collected and analysed to answer these questions. The analysis found that the virality caused by the 2019 Amazon rainforest fires posed challenges ranging from lack of team capacity to engaging with misinformed audiences. Although respondents identified fundraising and advocacy outcomes as a result of the attention produced by the 2019 fires, they were divided over the extent to which their social media efforts contributed to these outcomes.