This paper assesses the role of social media to enable collective action, that is, parties’ attempts to change behaviour in such a manner that a common goal is achieved. It studies collective action in the light of the sharing economy and some parties’ attempts to reverse the commercialisation of the sharing economy and (partially) recreate it as a collaborative economy. This paper draws social media data for almost 36 months, from 14 March 2016 to 11 February 2019, generating a dataset of 11,553 social media posts for the sharing economy, from which a subsequent dataset consisting of 533 social media posts with reference to the collaborative economy was derived. Findings point at how the collective actors were caught between conflicting interests and chose to prioritise the marketing of their own services, rather than supporting the collective action movement. Increased transactional behaviours and difficulties to reach through counteracted the collective action idea. Based on these findings, we contribute to previous research by discussing ways in which digital technology facilitates or hinders collective action in the context of digitalisation.