Abstract

Research on digital protest often treats visibility and engagement as temporally uniform by aggregating social media activity across extended periods. This approach obscures how political moments shape which messages become widely amplified. Addressing this event-contingent visibility problem, this study examines how event context structures patterns of visibility in protest communication on Twitter within a semi-authoritarian media environment. Using a high-visibility corpus of the most-retweeted tweets from 21 major political protest events in Thailand during 2021, the study combines thematic content analysis with a four-way ANOVA to analyze how event context, content themes, media formats, and posting time interact to shape retweet visibility. Visibility is conceptualized not as a stable behavioral tendency but as a contingent outcome shaped by political salience, affective alignment, and platform affordances. The findings show that event context accounts for the largest share of variance in retweet visibility, while the effects of content themes and media formats are conditional and event-dependent. These results indicate that visible connective action is episodic and that affective amplification operates in context-sensitive ways. The study refines theories of digital protest by conceptualizing visibility as an event-contingent process and highlights the analytical value and limits of high-visibility sampling.