The Power of Virtual Communities

Executive Summary

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During 2020, the Governance Lab interviewed leaders of 50 Facebook groups and 26 global academic and industry experts for this study of the governance and leadership of Facebook groups. This work was funded by a grant from Facebook and conducted in partnership with Facebook's Community Partnerships team.

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Executive Summary

The report finds:

  1. People can experience a strong sense of community from membership in such groups despite the lack of physical proximity.
  2. Online groups are a still fluid form of human organization that in many cases attract members and leaders who are marginalized in the physical societies they inhabit, and who use the platform to build new kinds of community they could not form in real space.
  3. Many of these groups have counter-cultural norms and are what political scientists might call “cross-cleavage” communities. These groups cut across traditional social groupings, and bring together people normally divided by geography around a shared trait or interest.
  4. The flexible affordances of online platforms have enabled new kinds of leaders to emerge in these groups with unique skills in moderating often divisive dialogues, sometimes among millions of members.
  5. The leaders of many of these groups run them as a labor of love; they are neither trained nor paid, the rules that govern their internal operations are often uncodified, and the hosting platform - in this case Facebook - holds significant power over their operations and future. 
  6. These groups, some of which have huge memberships, remain emergent and largely unrecognized: they are outside traditional power structures, institutions and forms of governance. 
  7. More research is needed to understand whether and how these groups will operate as genuine communities over the long term, especially given the tensions that derive from conducting public life on a private platform such as Facebook, and how such groups and their leaders can be supported to ensure they provide maximum voice, participation and benefit to their members.

View a panel discussion about the report’s implications and the future of digital community building here. 

For more coverage of these findings from around the world, see:

United States

Argentina 

Brazil

Indonesia

Pakistan

United Kingdom

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