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Burgess and Bruns (2015) have linked the computational turn in social media research to an increase in the number of studies focussing exclusively on 'easy data', such as the 'low hanging fruit' provided by Twitter hashtags. This paper explores whether there is a preponderance of such easy data in digital activism research through a systematic review of relevant journal articles published between 2011 and 2018 (N = 315). Specifically, it examines whether computational digital methods have become increasingly prominent in digital activism research during this period. A key focus of the paper is the extent to which digital activism research focused on easily accessible Twitter data, and whether these were obtained via standard API services. Results indicate that (1) traditional research methodologies were more commonly deployed in these articles than digital methods, but (2) Twitter was the most researched platform in the corpus, and (3) single-platform hashtag studies were an archetype of digital activism research alongside single-platform Facebook studies and holistic approaches (hybrid, multi-method & multi-sited, e.g., ethnography). The paper concludes by advocating for greater diversity in terms of the methodological approaches adopted in digital activism research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Central to the growth and visibility of conspiracy theory QAnon is the #SaveTheChildren movement – a digital social movement aimed to bring awareness to and end child trafficking. This paper analyzes the #SaveTheChildren movement on image-sharing platform Instagram, where the hashtag (and related others) had to be shielded by the platform because of its association with QAnon. A thematic analysis of #SaveTheChildren posts examines the motivations, tactics, and desired outcomes of the movement. Emergent themes highlight the pervasive spread of misinformation regarding human trafficking and the ideological, political, and social motivations of posters. Drawing on shared reality theory and social identity theory, we argue that the movement represents a 'networked moral panic' and explore the structural limitations of digital social movements in an era of information disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers some insights into Twitter as a political field, based on Bourdieu's field theory. Networked publics, as agents of this field, are competing overpower by performing networked practices. To investigate this field, we focused on two networked practices: networked framing and narrating. Persian Twitter in 2017 presidential election provides a good context to analyze how such a field is constituted. Combining a social-network analytic approach with discursive and textual interpretations, we analyzed a corpus of 2,596,284 tweets. We identified three main networked publics in the retweet network: reformists, conservatives, and diaspora users. Having identified the most influential users in each community based on PageRank metric, we thoroughly investigated all of their tweets. The results show that ordinary users constituted the major population of conservative and diaspora publics. The reformist community included mostly journalists and to a lesser extent media. Findings also confirm that all networked publics used the same strategies to gain more power in the field. They produced quite the same frames and narratives to compete with each other. Moreover, the battle was more about the routine and electoral debates, not the legitimacy or entity of regime. Hence, none of the networked publics challenged the hegemonic discourse in Iran significantly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a growing body of literature around the concept of artivism, which refers to artists who use social engagement and activism in their artistic practices. Artists, however, are not necessarily perceived as political actors and are heard for their political activism only through a legitimacy cross-over from artistic field to political field. In this paper, therefore, we theorize that audience attention has become an important resource for political legitimacy and study how a set of artivists are received on social media. To this end we have analyzed over two million tweets and argue that content on social media platforms such as Twitter provides insight into how people talk about social issues, such as politics and activism. We employ the methods of topic modeling and semantic network analysis to study how Twitter users engage with artivists and find that very few Twitter users are interested in the societal issues that artivists raise. Instead, the majority of tweets in our data involves attention to state prosecution, media-centric artistic recognition and consumerism. These findings indicate that even though some artivists succeed in bringing their activist art to Twitter audiences, political activism that originates from artists is rarely a topic of discussion among Twitter users in terms of its activist content. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media provides marginalized activists multiple options for constructing alternative narratives that challenge mainstream discourse. However, despite these platforms' increasing accessibility, disabled activists may struggle in creating their counter-narrative. Their inability to conform to able-bodied notions of activism leaves their individual experiences out of the discussion of social media activism. This paper addresses this gap by presenting the individual decision-making process of disabled social media users regarding activists' performances in social media as gleaned from the qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews. This process includes three phases that demonstrate the experiences of social media users with communicative concealable disabilities – autistics, hard-of-hearing (HoH), and people who stutter. First, these interviewees present a spectrum of perceptions of disability activism in social media. Second, these perceptions lead to a spectrum of motivations, which mirror the interviewees' various risk-benefit calculations regarding public self-disclosure as disabled. Third, these perceptions and motivations are manifested through interviewees' strategic design of their activist performances in private and public spheres. By rethinking key concepts in social media activism – risk-benefit calculation, slacktivism, and digital storytelling – this process illustrates taken-for-granted assumptions of personalization, visibility and representation, that challenge current discussions on social media activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media use enables information consumption and exchange as well as group ties that can facilitate participation in boycott and buycott campaigns. Social media also provide low-threshold activities that serve as a stepping stone towards more intense forms of cause-oriented participation. This paper uses original survey data (n = 1,539) collected in 2019. Reading political information, posting political information on social media, and following social and leisure groups increase the likelihood of boycotting and buycotting. Changing profile pictures doubles the odds of participating in political consumerism. Overall, citizens use symbolic low-effort activities on social media to mobilize their peers to participate in political consumerism but, in the end, they also mobilize themselves toward more intense forms of participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the topic of social media users' polyvocal political activism facilitated by participatory culture and expressed through multimodal digital humour (including humorous memes) in the context of a threat of a regime. The focus of attention is political humour on the r/HongKong subreddit, specifically the posts pertinent to the ongoing boycott movement of multiple companies consequent upon their actions in response to the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Apart from presenting the multimodal characteristics of the creative digital data through the lens of Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis, the central aim is to discuss the functions of users' political humour online, offering various socio-pragmatic conclusions about the polyvocal participatory practice at hand. It is argued that this digital humour resides solely in the attention-grabbing form, with the otherwise serious posts performing informative and persuasive functions as they convey community members' socio-political critique. While disparaging the 'butts', online users do bonding through collectively expressing their political dissent (which also gives them psychological relief) and sharing subversive ideologies. The humorous items inform and warn potential punters and tacitly call for a boycott of the companies that bow to the regime, all in an act of solidarity with Hong Kong protesters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gender-based online violence (GBOV) involves digitally-mediated and -enabled forms of harassment and abuse targeting women, and thus represents a major challenge to feminist movements globally. In this paper, we argue that civil society-based feminist organizations from various parts of the world have responded to this challenge by centring evidence of GBOV in order to develop key though hitherto under-examined epistemic, cultural, and socio-political practices, which we term evidentiary activism. Using a qualitative content analysis of 82 documents produced by feminist organizations, our analysis finds that this activism has two fundamental components. First, feminist organizations engage with existing formal evidentiary cultures by advancing and critiquing legislative and regulatory reforms to address GBOV, platform-based technological 'solutions,' and conventional notions of user privacy and anonymity. Second, they embrace and contribute to informal evidentiary cultures, which treat evidence as a tool of cultural and political mobilization against GBOV through strategies of publicization, moral pollution, and the cultivation of feminist digital citizenship. We contend that, akin to evidence-based advocacy that is influential in the fields of biomedicine and health, feminist organizations participate in and invent modes of digitally-oriented evidentiary activism designed to combat GBOV. Feminists' recasting of the how, why, and what of evidence represents a noteworthy development in struggles against online violence and misogyny, and within digital culture more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines how social media platforms can facilitate greater visibility of Tunisian women in political communication activism to survive male politicians' domination and the conventional media's boycott. The authors chose to focus on the case of Tunisian activist Abir Moussi to investigate how she uses Facebook for political mobilization and self-branding purposes. A monographic approach to the content of the Facebook page was carried out, along with a semiotic analysis of the speech given by Moussi on the decisions announced by President Kais Said on 25 July 2021. The results revealed a Facebook-Live-based communication strategy to address audiences as well as a large number of photos and videos. Besides, The Tunisian political activist used several linguistic elements in her discourse to make her political discourse effective, such as contrast, intertextuality, metaphor, etc. Unlike President Said, who uses Standard Arabic, the Tunisian political activist speaks the Tunisian dialect; Abir's tone ranges from humorous, enthusiastic, provocative, menacing and promising; she provides her propaganda speech with legal texts and arguments to convince her audience, claiming to enlighten minds by simplifying ordinances and complex political terms. Moreover, she revealed several political and economic 'hot issues' that led to the Tunisian crisis. The authors conclude that social media does not create new ways of activism but rather amplifies traditional ones; they suggest enhancing the political efficacy of social media to boost political activism and emphasizing the concept of 'online political efficacy' in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a mixed-methods approach consisting of a directed content analysis of five established LGBT+ organizations' use of Twitter and Facebook during a month in 2022, and semi-structured qualitative interviews with social media content producers, the study attempts to understand the role of self-controlled social media spaces in challenging the Uganda society's logics of oppression. The results indicate that self-controlled spaces are not used for disrupting the basis for repression – the local logic of oppression – or its cocoon of collective post-colonial amnesia. Nor were spaces used for re-constructive engaging with transnational and development partners' unwitting impact on global south actors' agency and legitimacy. Instead, with a few exceptions, spaces displayed a conspicuous uniform human rights advocacy rhetoric, and Western identity labels summarized in the LGBT+ acronym. The interviews with social media content producers suggest that the LGBT+ community's dependency on international support may sway actors into what we call performative visibility, in self-controlled spaces. The study concludes that future analysis of Global South based activist's use of social media spaces' affordances including its potential for supporting de-colonialization efforts, must approach use as relational to actors' dependency on key resources such as funding and protection through affiliation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Libraries and archives have long been rich sites of exploration for LGBTQ+ people in search of self-understanding, identification, shared experience, and community. Yet the information infrastructures that guide every quest for queer and trans information remain silently powerful mediators of our research processes. Through an extended discussion of the Homosaurus, an international LGBTQ linked data vocabulary that the authors helped to develop, this article explores how queer information activism can confront the impoverished tools available for describing queer and trans resources. By focusing on both "corrective" and "analytic" strategies, the authors argue that the Homosaurus must work to expand the queer and trans terminology available for subject description while still challenging the structure and process of classificatory systems as always in tension with our queer aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While it is increasingly recognised that commercial social media platforms are not neutral tools for online activism, our knowledge of how such platforms concretely intervene in user activities and shape the dynamics of online activism remains limited. This article focuses on analysing the strategies and mechanisms that have been used by Sina Weibo to manage online contention. Based on interviews with Weibo operators and opinion leaders, and analysis of relevant cases and documents, this article finds that in its early days Weibo actively facilitated the production and spread of online contention to establish itself as a key avenue for users to discuss and follow the development of unfolding incidents. Meanwhile, subtle strategies were applied to mitigate the tension between engaging users and conducting censorship. By showing how Weibo managed online contention in order to advance its own commercial interests, this article contributes to a deeper understanding of the role social media platforms play in online activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sudan experienced a nationwide nonviolent revolution between December 2018 and July 2019, which has remained underrepresented in communication studies literature. This study employs empirical data from personal interviews with Sudanese activists as well as a theoretical framework of social movements based on media ecologies. The study's theoretical framework considers social movements in terms of their historical contexts and as a whole consisting of communication networks and interaction between various forms of communication and actors, particularly the entanglement of online and offline elements of activism. The research contributes to the body of knowledge on social movements and communication, particularly in Sudan. The findings of the study show that the media ecology approach provides a more comprehensive understanding of the interplay and intertwinement of human actors in social revolution, collective agency, and technologies than the one-medium biased approach used in previous studies on social movements, particularly in the Arab world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media platforms provide major opportunities for online activism and the emergence of digital counterpublics. Research on counterpublics has focused on actors and their narrative strategies aiming at deconstructing dominant discourses. Less attention has been paid to how the interplay between actors and platform-specific functions affects the configurations and therewith also the success of digital counterpublics. Existing studies mainly rely on determining up front which topics, actor characteristics, or arguments constitute hashtag activism and digital counterpublics. In contrast, our approach allows for an empirical identification based on how actors position themselves in an online debate toward other actors and their shared hashtags. We argue that online activism is co-constituted by actors and their usage of hashtags, actor mentions, and retweets. Applying a communicative network perspective allows for the integration of semantic and relational research traditions. We combine a recently developed automated network analysis method and content analysis to analyze two Twitter debates about animal welfare issues. Our results show that among Twitter users, citizens and environmental organizations formed a common cluster whereas media actors formed their own sub-clusters in both debates. The findings emphasize the central role of citizens for the configuration of digital counterpublics. The proposed approach can be further adapted and applied more widely for the analysis of online activism and debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]