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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]

Various scholars have studied the relationship between music and politics. Most, however, focus on how governments and political parties on the one hand and movements and activists on the other use music for political outcomes and in doing so they often ignore the more latent forms of political participation music can lead to. This article, therefore, focuses on how people give meaning to political music in informal conversational settings by exploring the reception of Pussy Riot on YouTube. New media platforms like YouTube are ubiquitous in the West and as 'third spaces' they allow audiences to publicly reflect on everyday newsworthy events and activism. We combine the computerized methods of topic modelling and semantic network analysis to study both quantitatively and qualitatively how Pussy Riot's punk protests afford political participation by (Western) YouTube users. Results show that the comments mostly address (1) the geopolitical boundaries of activism, (2) the legitimacy and commitment of the activists, (3) the political content of the protests and (4) the relationship between the protests and religion. For the YouTube users in our study, the political music of Pussy Riot thereby serves as a vehicle to discuss politics beyond the protests themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]