Boycotting Russia: Expressive and instrumental motivations in political consumerism on social media

Recent global events have prompted a flurry of boycott and divestment campaigns targeting foreign governments, expressed through social media. These surrogate boycotts – targeting corporate proxies of state actors – are often dismissed as merely expressive, though this assessment is based primarily on the outcomes of the campaign rather than the motivations of participants. This article investigates the motivations conveyed by individuals posting calls for a boycott of Russia on Twitter following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Bridging literatures on political participation, political consumerism, and digital activism, we develop and implement a novel two-stage method for inferring expressive and instrumental motivations from digital trace data. Through computational analysis and applying a new typology, we show that inferred motivations for boycott calls on social media can be positioned along a spectrum – from expressive to instrumental – based on: (i) identification of a target; (ii) attempts to enable others; and (iii) expectation of an outcome.