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This article discusses activist perceptions of the beneficial potentialities of new media for environmental campaigning as investigated in Australia, due to its high level of environmental activism and Internet usage. Drawing upon literature on communication theory, environmental politics, digital activism, and social movement theory, this study explores new media use for activism in two large Australia-wide environmental campaigns: contestation of old-growth forest logging and unconventional gas mining (fracking) development. From March to May 2017, 34 environmental activists involved in these campaigns were interviewed for this study. They shared their opinions on what it meant for them to use new media, the difficulties they encountered, but also the beneficial potentialities they identified in using these media for their activism. The study findings show that new media built significantly on more 'traditional' forms of activism, including stalls and non-violent street demonstrations, but also enabled extended activist outreach, enhanced engagement with supporters, and boosted campaign mobilisation. As such, despite an array of quite challenging limitations they also referred to, and to which they responded strategically, Australian environmental activists found new media highly beneficial to their activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, grassroots movements have gained traction and significant numbers globally. Against longer histories of resistance and protest movements' mobilisation of documentation, mechanisation and digital technologies, this scoping literature review seeks to understand how resistance and social movements have drawn upon the participatory and easily accessible nature of social media and digital platforms to mobilise new generations of activists, create new archives, document activities and abuses, call for accountability and overwrite or challenge the narratives put forward by mainstream media outlets and state archives. We identify relevant projects, explore the activist potential and threats of the combination of digital technologies, social movements, and documentary or archival practice, before concluding by identifying open research questions in relation to digital technologies, social movements and archival practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media users, oftentimes daily, are exposed to a collection of algorithmic feeds that ultimately shape their perceptions and insights around themselves, their surroundings, and issues of the day. This study introduces the concept of lived-feed experience to describe these offline personalized insights from collective online experiences with varied algorithmic outputs. Specifically, this study questions whether Jewish and non-Jewish students have distinct lived-feed experiences when it comes to digital activism efforts on behalf of the Jewish community. This question is approached through qualitatively analyzing interview data with 27 university students in Texas in the spring and summer of 2023. Findings show that Jewish and non-Jewish students have distinct lived-feed experiences when it comes to exposure to posts bringing awareness to, education around, and fighting against antisemitism both on and offline. This article also discusses distinct obstacles faced by activism efforts on behalf of the Jewish community on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civic technologies have the potential to support participation and influence decision-making in governmental processes. Digital participatory budgeting platforms are examples of civic technologies designed to support citizens in making proposals and allocating budgets. Investigating the empirical case of urban biking activists in Madrid, we explore how the design of the digital platform Decide Madrid impacted the collaborative practices involved in digital participatory budgeting. We found that the design of the platform made the interaction competitive, where individuals sought to gain votes for their single proposals, rather than consider the relations across proposals and the larger context of the city decisions, even if the institutional process rewarded collective support. In this way, the platforms' design led to forms of individualistic, competitive, and static participation, therefore limiting the possibilities for empowering citizens in scoping and self-regulating participatory budgeting collaboratively. We argue that for digital participatory budgeting platforms to support cooperative engagements they must be revisable and reviewable while supporting accountability among participants and visibility of proposals and activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Activists have responded to the Covid-19 pandemic by organizing for mutual aid: creating collective action to meet people's material needs and build ties of solidarity. I examine the difficulties encountered by mutual aid activists during the pandemic through Alberto Melucci's notions of latency and collective identity. Through digital ethnographic observations of the Instagram accounts of mutual aid groups based in Philadelphia, USA, as well as interviews with the activists, I explore how mutual aid, conceptualized as latency work, was practiced by activists in the unprecedented conditions of the pandemic and how activists approached collective identity processes. I show that activists experienced a compression of latency and mobilization within the crisis context of the pandemic, which made it more difficult for them to pursue the construction of a collective identity. I also suggest that the effects of this compression were further exacerbated by the logic of immediacy that characterizes social network sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The provisions of United Nations' Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) provisions and the CEDAW Committee's recommendations expand on the theoretical and practical ways in which countries can combat gender-based discrimination. In Pakistan, the digitisation of women and feminist collectives and their experience of violent misogyny on the internet accentuates the weakness of the country's internet security mechanisms. This study utilises the human rights framework of CEDAW to assess the performance of Pakistan's internet security mechanisms, and highlights the state's obligations towards women's digital safety. Informed by the CEDAW's provisions and the Committee's contributions, this paper provides recommendations to combat gender-based violence and improve Pakistan's internet security mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

LGBTI groups in Turkey glided from offline media to online media. This study investigates how the LGBTI movement changed utilizing social networking sites (SNS) and what kind of a communication culture has been established in the context of social movements of this transformation caused by SNS in Turkey. Triangulation methodology is used in this paper. Semi-structured interviews were performed with the administrators of LGBTI movement communities' Facebook and Twitter pages, an online questionnaire was made with the page followers, and a non-reactive observation was made concerning SNS posts of the pages during Pride Week, which is the most important annual public sphere event of the movement. Communication practices that SNS provide to the LGBTI movement groups and use of these practices are interpreted and analyzed through collected data. This study has shown that the LGBTI movement in Turkey uses SNS as a space of action effectively with collective action, centralizes SNS with their actions and moves the new social movements' features to the Internet as a way of enhancing its exposure in the public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]