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There are currently no concerted attempts to understand the role of whistleblowers in the new social and political environment created by digital ICTs. Digital ICTs drive an accelerating visibility where elites and citizens constantly acquire new tools to track, surveil, and scrutinize each other. Moreover, these technologies make possible a new kind of invisibility. Increasingly complex modes of digital data production and usage generate grey areas that seem to escape legal jurisdiction and democratic oversight. With their privileged access inside these grey areas, conscientious employees-turned-whistleblowers are likely to become key sources for the disclosure of serious wrongdoing in the coming years. The argument is empirically illustrated through three cases that represent different types of grey areas in advanced democracies: big data surveillance (Edward Snowden), tax havens (Antoine Deltour and the Panama and Paradise Papers), and digital political profiling (Christopher Wylie).

This conceptual paper wishes to contribute to the debate on digitally mediated movements by developing the perspective of ‘contentious branding’. The empirical research has followed the #Occupy and #Anonymous hashtags around popular social media, reconstructing their highly heterogeneous adoption. A branding perspective on contentious politics is aimed at highlighting the diverse and sometimes contradictory appropriations of the ‘semiotic repertoires’ of protest movements, particularly apparent within digital networks of communication. A contentious branding perspective on social movements not only tries to fit these specific cases better: it intends to provide an epistemological and methodological device to sustain a non-essentialist understanding of social movements in general, and to face the challenges and opportunities of digital social movement research in particular. The first section of the paper briefly discusses the concepts ‘social movement’ and ‘branding’, characterizing the proposed idea of ‘contentious branding’. Some insights derived from a broader digital exploration on the uses of the hashtags #Occupy and #Anonymous then serve to emphasize their variable, incoherent and at times contradictory utilization: few of the several reiterations of the brand Occupy, deviating from its original use, are presented, and a heuristic categorization of Anonymous’ diverse issues of involvement is proposed. Based on this, the discussion further develops the concept of contentious branding, clarifying its analytical boundaries vis a vis neighboring approaches in social movement theory. The conclusion discusses some of the epistemological and methodological implications that contentious branding bears for the study of social movements in the digital age.

This special issue is indeed special. When the idea to guest edit this issue was mooted, none of us had heard of COVID-19. After organizing what turned out to be a successful pre-conference, buoyed by excellent paper presentations at the IAMCR meet in Madrid in 2019, we preselected papers for this themed issue expecting nothing but a normal submission process followed by strenuous let alone painstaking peer-reviewing of manuscripts as traditionally expected from a journal of this caliber. We were wrong. In what became a fathomable but cumbersome experience, scholar after scholar wrote to request deadline-day extensions just as getting reviewers to commit to assessing papers became conscientiously convoluted. While the global pandemic undoubtedly slowed the process, we were able to prepare this issue on time thanks largely to the support we got from the journal’s editorial team along with thoughtful, thorough, constructive comments and suggestions from the reviewers to whom we remain incessantly grateful. Twenty-three years have passed since the first issue of Information Communication and Society was published. Over the years, this journal has become one of the leading, top-ranked media and communication journals around. It is for this reason that we feel honored to have been selected to edit the journal’s first special issue exclusively dedicated to the African continent. The timing would not have been better. Long considered economically and socially underdeveloped compared with the rest of the world, Africa has in recent years emerged as an important global player in many respects, helped in part by a set of factors including rapid population growth that is expected to reach 1.7 billion inhabitants by 2030 and 2.5 billion by 2050 (Dietz, 2017), an expanding urbanization and a growing, tech-savvy youth that is adopting ubiquitous technologies to demand transparency from its political leaders in a bid to improve their lives and communities (Mutsvairo & Ragnedda, 2019a). In spite of the seemingly endless prospects, ranging from abundant natural resources to fresh democratic transitions, albeit frequently fragile, a series of challenges remain firmly in place and this special issue not only highlights so-called opportunities associated with digital communications but also assesses the implications of expeditious technological changes that have dominated Africa’s online space over the last few years.

Within Putin's conservative nation-building agenda, the Russian mediascape excludes or marginalises non-heteronormative sexualities’ voices from the official discourse. However, certain manifestations of non-heteronormative sexualities infiltrate public space through convergent traditional and new media (Jenkins, 2006, Convergence Culture. Where Old and New Media Collide. New York University Press) and the performativity of non-heteronormative sexualities in popular culture. This paper claims that these convergent media-enabled representations of NS can challenge, inform, mediate or authenticate the establishment discourse. It focuses on a particular case of a sexually provocative video with homoerotic undertones (mimicking a popular music hit ‘Satisfaction’) produced by male cadets from the Ulyanovsk Institute of Civil Aviation and uploaded onto YouTube in January 2018 (allegedly without the cadets’ permission). The paper examines its mediation from the grassroots to semi-official peripheries, to mainstream media (TV) and back again (focus group data), highlighting a dramatic change in the official coverage as well as a lack of hegemonic consensus regarding representations of non-heteronormative sexualities.

In the emerging field of critical data studies, there is increasing acknowledgement that the negative effects of datafication are not experienced equally by all. Research on data and discrimination in particular has highlighted how already socially unequal populations are discriminated against in data-driven systems. Elsewhere, there is growing interest in public perceptions of datafication, amongst academic researchers interested in producing ‘bottom up’ understandings of the new roles of data in society and non-academic stakeholders keen to\ud establish positive perceptions of data-driven systems. However, research into public perceptions rarely engages with the issue of inequality which is so central in data and discrimination\ud scholarship. Bringing these two issues together, this paper explores public perceptions of datafication through the lens of inequality, focusing on the relationship between understandings\ud and feelings within these perceptions. The paper draws on empirical focus group research into how audiences perceive the data practices that signing in to access BBC digital services enable. The paper shows how inequalities relating to age, dis/ability, poverty and their intersections played a role in shaping perceptions and that these social inequalities informed understandings of and feelings about data practices in complex and diverse ways. It concludes with reflections on the significance of these findings for future research and for data-related policy.

This paper makes the case for considering the role of cross-cultural encounters in shaping developers’ notions of information privacy. Recent studies on privacy by design shed light on developer practices yet tend to regard these workers as a generic category. The paper draws on two interviews with workers in a late-stage Israeli startup as a step toward localizing developers and the global products they design. The analysis identifies four narratives that juxtapose the local, the global and the commodification of users’ personal information: (1) the origin myth of the company; (2) workers’ personal and professional biographies; (3) reports on external regulations; and (4) accounts of work practices, rituals and communication formats. The analysis suggests how the globalization of the startup was implicated in changing ideas and practices relating to users’ information. The paper concludes by discussing some of the challenges facing a culturally-sensitive study of developers as mediators of privacy.

This paper aimed to study the Internet’s impacts on moral intolerance and social intolerance. Taking the perspective of media ecology, this paper viewed the Internet as a context and explored how i...

this paper reflects on the ethics of internet research on community controversies. Specifically, it focuses on controversies concerning gendered, social interaction in hacking communities. It addresses the question how internet researchers should treat and represent content that individuals controversially discussed online. While many internet sources are likewise technically public, they may yet suggest distinct privacy expectations on the part of involved individuals. In internet research, ethical decision-making regarding which online primary sources may be, e.g., referenced and quoted or require anonymisation is still ambiguous and contested. Instead of generalisable rules, the context dependence of internet research ethics has been frequently stressed. Given this ambiguity, the paper elaborates on ethical decisions and their implications by exploring the case of a controversial hackerspaces.org mailing list debate. In tracing data across different platforms, it analyses the emerging ethico-methodological challenges.

In this paper, we investigate memes about student issues. We consider the memes as expressions of a new networked student public that contain discourses that may fall outside the mainstream discourse on higher education. The paper is based on content analysis of 179 posts in the public Facebook Group ‘Student Problem Memes’, combined with a nine-month media watch and a discussion workshop with 15 students. Through self-deprecating humour, students create an inverse attention economy of competitive one-downmanship, where the goal is to display humorous failure instead of perfect appearance. Our analysis shows that students use humour to express, share, and commiserate over daily struggles, but also that the problems related to work/study balance and mental health, are experienced as a persistent feature of student living. We also analyse limitations of meme-based publics, emphasizing processes of inclusion and exclusion through specific vernaculars of visual and discursive humour where issues related to gender, race, orientation, class, and ability are sidelined in favour of relatable humour. Locked until 19 August 2019 due to copyright restrictions. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Information, Communication & Society on 19 February 2018, available at https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1437204

This paper examines the implications for European music culture of the European Union’s (EU) Digital Single Market strategy. It focuses on the regulatory framework being created for the management of copyright policy, and in particular the role played by collective management organisations (CMOs or collecting societies). One of the many new opportunities created by digitalisation has been the music streaming services. These depend on consumers being able to access music wherever they are, but such a system runs counter to the management of rights on a national basis and through collecting organisations which act as monopolies within their own territories. The result has been ‘geo-blocking’. The EU has attempted to resolve this problem in a variety of ways, most recently in a Directive designed to reform the CMOs. In this paper, we document these various efforts, showing them to be motivated by a deep-seated and persisting belief in the capacity of ‘competition’ to resolve problems that, we argue, actually lie elsewhere – in copyright policy itself. The result is that the EU’s intervention fails to address its core concern and threatens the diversity of European music culture by rewarding those who are already commercially successful.

While analyses of Twitter have shown that it holds democratic potential, it can also provide a venue for hate speech against minorities. The articulation of opinion-based identities, the tendency to homophily, and the use of emotional discourses can indeed help spread verbal violence on Twitter. This paper discusses group polarization on Twitter through Mouffe's distinction of agonistic and antagonistic politics, as elaborated in the 2013 book “Agonistic: Thinking the World Politically”. The theory is supported by a practical example: a qualitative analysis of Islamophobic tweets sent in the aftermath of the 2016 British referendum on European Union membership, which is commonly referred to as ‘Brexit’. Following the UK’s decision to leave the EU, there was a surge of Islamophobic attacks on Twitter. My analysis reveals that anti-Islamic sentiments were articulated in terms of complex identities referring not only to religion but also to ethnicity, politics, and gender. The paper shows that these ...

Social media technologies like Twitter are credited with enabling a new form of connective action, in which political movements coalesce and mobilise around hashtags, memes and personalised action frames. After the UK riots in 2011, citizen ‘broom armies’ took to the streets to clear up and repair damage. Different hashtags, including #RiotCleanUp and #OperationCupOfTea, were implicated in these movements.This paper questions connective action theory in this context. It seeks to respond to two criticisms of the connective approach, namely that connective action underplays differences between technologies and does not account sufficiently for cultural and ideological drivers of action.The paper combines an analysis of software systems, issue publics and discourse to giver a fuller account of connective politics during the riot clean-up movements. In doing so, it develops several metrics to advance understanding of digital communication systems, drawing attention to the roles that time and account s...

As a contribution to the ongoing tradition of critically assessing documents for research, this paper aims to highlight materiality as a key factor in the co-shaping of knowledge derived from digital documents. The paper first builds upon prior debates in document studies with work from the fields of Science and Technology Studies, and Communication Studies, to establish the role of document materiality in the interpretative process. By first establishing digital documents’ material reality as electrical signal, the paper then discusses the interpretative role of software, in both the representation of that signal for human interpretation and the production of the document through software tools. Finally, the paper considers the implications for persistence and access to digital documents posed by their material reality and the private archival contexts in which they often reside.

This paper examines how marginalized youth in Morocco use YouTube to contest hegemonic discourses of state power and institutional practices of social exclusion. The paper analyses a user-generated, YouTube web-series, Tales of Bouzebal, as a performance of marginality and a social critique of state bureaucracies and institutions in the context of post-Arab Spring Morocco. Using a combined method of textual and discourse analyses, the paper argues that the new media practices of producing and consuming user-generated video are best understood as practices of cultural citizenship that contribute to social change through the production of counter-discursive political subjectivities among youth in MENA. The paper posits that the concept of citizenship needs to be expanded to account for citizen participatory media practices that contest the conditions of marginality and inequality sustained by normative definitions of citizenship.

This paper begins from the basic premise that in considering digital media and its multifarious relations with forms of protest and political mobilization, we are interested in social change. Yet, too often, the key ingredient of protest and political mobilization – the radical politics itself – is left out of our analyses. How can we begin to tackle the challenges posed to democratic politics if we do not talk about actual politics as part of our research? This problem is both conceptual and practical. A politics requires a practice. We cannot understand the nature of the practice without understanding its politics; we cannot understand the politics without appreciating its processes and organization. Yet, so many studies do just this. This paper argues that a fugitive politics limits our abilities to take progressive thought and action forward. By ignoring the actual politics, we end up depoliticizing counter politics because we offer precious few suggestions as to how we can do democratic polit...

This paper details research on online designs to overcome the collective action problem in the political, economic, and cultural spheres. This problem is created by pluralistic ignorance (Chwe, M. S. (1999). Structure and strategy in collective action. American Journal of Sociology, 105(1), 128–156) – people do not know what each other thinks. They are unaware how many other people would want to do what they want to do, and not knowing this, they are unwilling to act alone. However, if this information was known, they could all pre-agree to act together to make their collective aim a reality. The internet's capacity to enable cheap and rapid communication overcomes the structural barrier to this problem. It allows latent groups (Olson, M. (1965). The logic of collective action. Public goods and the theory of groups. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) to be made visible and act collectively and so to ‘no longer suffer in silence’ (p. 165). The paper analyses the spectacular growth of Groupon ...

This paper explores how online actions such as the practice of digital self-writing shape our offline identity. We start with an examination of the concept of hupomnemata – a practice of self-writing in which notes are kept as a ‘material record of things read, heard, or thought’ in the intent of shaping the self [Foucault (1997). Self writing. In P. Rabinow (Ed.), Ethics, subjectivity and truth. The essential works of Foucault, 1954–1984. Volume 1 (pp. 207–222). New York, NY: The New Press p. 209] – before arguing that the practice of digital content curation can be understood as a modern-day variant of the Greco-Roman hupomnemata. Although the work of the digital curator is conducted online, this paper positions contemporary curatorial practices as acts of self-exploration, self-cultivation, and self-care, which nourish offline identity and which ultimately work to shape the offline, corporeal self.

This paper explores the impact of communication protocols on the development of collective identity in networked movements. It focuses primarily on how communication protocols change patterns of interactions and power relationships among the constituents of social movements. The paper suggests that the communication protocols of commercial social networking media lead to organizational centralization and fragmentation in social movements by eroding one of the preconditions of collective identity, namely solidarity. The empirical material presented is part of a PhD dissertation on a political protest movement and their use of Facebook as a core communication and organizational platform. The data gathering is multi-methodological and relies on both qualitative and quantitative data collection techniques in the form of a historical analysis of interaction patterns, and a content analysis of online conversations among activists.

Sharing has been subjected to continuous re-imagination and positioning throughout networked culture's history. Recently, there has been specific emphasis on user-generated content and social media platforms. Particular social actors, such as social media platforms, attempt to cultivate an imaginary of sharing in networked culture. They do this by appropriating positive social values associated with common understandings of sharing, such as community, generosity, shared values of cooperation, and participation. While there has been a recent surge of interest in sharing, conceptual gaps remain. Though sharing is a central concept of networked culture, in this paper I show how its boundaries with other social theories of exchange have not been sufficiently established nor has the concept itself been adequately critiqued. Most significantly, this paper problematizes how sharing is implicated and positioned in studies of networked culture. I argue that a framework for a theory of sharing is needed and identif...

This paper examines research about Wikipedia that has been undertaken using big data approaches. The aim is to gauge the coherence as against the disparateness of studies from different disciplines, how these studies relate to each other, and to research about Wikipedia and new social media in general. The paper is partly based on interviews with big data researchers, and discusses a number of themes and implications of Wikipedia research, including about the workings of online collaboration, the way that contributions mirror (or not) aspects of real-world geographies, and how contributions can be used to predict offline social and economic trends. Among the findings is that in some areas of research, studies build on and extend each other's results. However, most of the studies stay within disciplinary silos and could be better integrated with other research on Wikipedia and with research about new media. Wikipedia is among few sources in big data research where the data are openly available, unlike many studies where data are proprietary. Thus, it has lent itself to a burgeoning and promising body of research. The paper concludes that in order to fulfil this promise, this research must pay more attention to theories and research from other disciplines, and also go beyond questions based narrowly on the availability of data and towards a more powerful analytical grasp of the phenomenon being investigated.

This paper considers food as a site of public engagement with science and technology. Specifically, we focus on how public engagement with food is envisioned and operationalised by one non-profit organisation, foodwatch. Founded in Germany in 2002, foodwatch extensively uses new information and communication technologies to inform consumers about problematic food industry practices. In this paper, we present our analysis of 50 foodwatch e-newsletters published over a period of one year (2013). We define foodwatch’s approach as ‘governance by campaign’ – an approach marked by simultaneously constituting: (a) key food governance issues, (b) affective publics that address these topics of governance through ICT-enabled media and (c) independent food and food-related expertise. We conclude our paper with a discussion of foodwatch’s mode of ‘governance by campaign’ and the democratic limits and potentials of a governance mode that is based on invited participation.

This paper reports on an action research project with public sector organizations in the UK which experimented with a range of digital methods (social media data mining, social network and issue network mapping and data visualization), in order to explore their potential usefulness for the public engagement activities of these organizations. We argue that there is a need for small-scale, qualitative studies of cultures of large-scale, quantitative data like ours, to open up spaces in which to reflect critically on the methods with which such data are produced. However, in this paper we highlight the difficulties we had enacting through action research a commitment to both the potential (which might be seen as the action part of action research) and the problems (which might be seen as the research part of action research) of digital methods. Following Hammersley [(2002). Action research: A contradiction in terms? Exeter: British Educational Research Association], we suggest that an equal balance between a...

This paper presents the first systematic analysis of memes created by Palestinians in Israel. An analysis of 150 memes reveals how memes are used to reflect on and intervene in Palestinian youths’ ...

Aside from #MeToo and similar campaigns, sexual assault survivors use social media to disclose personal experiences. This paper uses a mixed-methods approach and draws on network ethnography (Howar...

The aim of this paper is to understand the role of parody characters on Twitter as drivers of digital narratives connected to ongoing crises Using a paradigmatic case study methodology, we will focus on the hugely popular Spanish parody account @Coronavid19, where the virus, presented as a fictional character, has been offering a humorous chronicle of an unprecedented social and health crisis, from the early beginning and in almost real time This case has been chosen considering its popular impact in terms of media repercussion and growth (almost half a million followers in less than a week), but also its peculiarities as a fictional character and a privileged chronicler in the first person Our goal is to understand how this kind of fictional parody character is built, how narrative and character traits evolve along time, and to observe to which extent they serve as a tool to cope with hard times, fostering collective empowerment, empathy and stressing official recommendations by mocking irrational behavior We conducted a systematic extraction of tweets over nineteen weeks (n = 954 tweets) for analysis and conducted a semi-structured interview with the author behind the account Results point to a character-driven narrative with a transformation arc in an otherwise unpredictable plot, where: (1) the threat is made tangible and vulnerable through humanization;(2) the bleakest implications of the pandemic are side-lined in the process;(3) there lies a tension between character coherence, relevance and the authorial ethical dilemmas faced in front of an unpredictable, far-reaching crisis [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Information, Communication & Society is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use This abstract may be abridged No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract (Copyright applies to all Abstracts )

This paper presents a study of focus groups on three vulnerable population categories (ethnic minorities, older people and people with disabilities) and explores the patterns of intersectionality i...

This paper argues that the social power of algorithms comes to the fore through the narratives they generate about individuals. Proposing the notion of ‘algorithmic emplotment’, the article showcas...

The present paper contributes to the research on the activities of far-right actors on social media by examining the interconnections between far-right actors and groups on Telegram platform using ...

In recent years, political discourse in digital spheres has seen a rise in the use of infographics. The paper addresses an unexplored question about this phenomenon: which characteristics are assoc...