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The nature of collective "bads" may induce group members to contribute voluntarily to the production of collective "goods." For a large family of collective bads, marginal cost or offensiveness decreases as the bad becomes more plentiful. Additional street trash, eg, is less noticeable on a street that is already dirty than on one that is clean. By cleaning the street singlehandedly, an activist with an interest in public sanitation therefore strengthens other residents' incentives to keep the street clean. Similar strategems for triggering voluntary collective action can be identified in a variety of fields ranging from crime prevention to political protest & the maintenance of group norms & groups themselves. Government is probably the most prominent user of this strategy for eliciting voluntary collective action. 30 References. AA

The role of social media in fostering collective action in China is under constant debate, and the mechanism underlying the effects of social media use on collective action has not garnered sufficient scholarly attention. This study aims to investigate the (in)direct effects of attention to social media—administered by the governmental (gov) and nongovernmental sectors (nongov), respectively—for information about COVID-19 mitigation in China on intention to participate in online collective action (IPOCA). Findings from a survey suggest that attention to both social media (gov) and social media (nongov) directly predicted IPOCA. The indirect effect of attention to social media (gov) on IPOCA was significantly mediated by social identification. This study evidences the impact of social media on collective action in China and theoretically underpins its mechanisms through the social identity model of collective action.