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Since 2007, there has been a recrudescence in gender-based violence and feminicides in Mexico, with an average of more than 10 feminicides a day. Out of nearly 47 million Mexican women above the age of 15, almost 31 million have been victims of some form of gender-based violence, mostly perpetrated by current or former partners. The present article investigates feminist online activism against gender-based violence and feminicides in Mexico as a discursive and mobilization strategy opposing the government's populistic rhetoric in the context of a political and cultural invisibility of violence against women in the public discourse. By analyzing the deployment of private memory to remember and honor the victims of feminicides and desaparecidas, the article reflects on the relationship between institutional patriarchy, populism, memory, and gender-based violence in Mexico. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the use of AI-powered virtual influencers flourishes in the marketing world, it is unclear how effective these influencers are as advocates for social causes. Through four pre-registered experiments, this study compares the impacts of human and virtual influencers in social advocacy, delineating the mechanisms driving their effectiveness and identifying potential boundary conditions that might influence their relative impact. Specifically, it investigates the perceived authenticity of human versus virtual influencers and how it affects digital activism and altruistic motives. In addition, the study assesses whether the unique characteristics of virtual influencers, such as novelty and autonomy, can counterbalance their perceived deficits in authenticity and egoistic motives to potentially amplify their advocacy effectiveness. The findings suggest that the advantages of virtual influencers in commercial marketing do not necessarily translate to, or enhance their role in, advocacy for social causes. By considering the impact of egoistic motives, this study takes a novel perspective to expand the conceptualization of authenticity in influencer social advocacy. It thus calls for a strategic reevaluation of how virtual influencers are utilized in cause advocacy initiatives. The study makes a significant contribution to the ongoing dialogue on the role of influencers in catalyzing digital activism, offering insights for optimizing influencer engagement in social causes. • The perceived authenticity of influencers affects their ability to drive digital activism and foster altruistic motives. • Virtual influencer's social advocacy is driven less by egoistic motives than by human counterparts. • Organizations can maximize social advocacy efforts by leveraging the unique benefits of both virtual and human influencers. • The research challenges the assumption that attributes like novelty and autonomy, which are beneficial in marketing, cannot directly translate to effectiveness in social advocacy. • The paper employs a balanced approach through a series of complementary studies that incorporate both fictitious and established virtual influencers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies an intersectional feminist lens to social media engagement with European politics. Disproportionately targeted at already marginalised people, the problem of online abuse/harassment has come to increasing public awareness. At the same time, movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo have demonstrated the value of social media in facilitating global grassroots activism that challenges dominant structures of power. While the literature on social media engagement with European politics has offered important insights into the extent to which social media facilitates democratic participation, it has not to date sufficiently accounted for patterns of intersectional activism and online inequalities. Using Nancy Fraser’s feminist critique of Habermas’ public sphere theory and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, this article explores patterns of gender and racial inequalities in the digital public space. By analysing both the role of racist and misogynistic online abuse targeted at women, nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant people in public life, as well as the opportunities for marginalised groups to mobilise transnationally through subaltern counter-publics, I argue that social media engagement is inextricably linked with offline inequalities. To fully understand the impact of social media on European democracy, we need to pay attention to gendered and racialised dynamics of power within the digital public sphere that have unequal consequences for democratic participation. This will involve expanding our methodological repertoire and employing tools underpinned by a critical feminist epistemology.

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]

FISIP 21 created #WIIWY activism in response to the increase in cases of online gender-based violence (KBGO) and cyberbullying during the COVID-19 pandemic. To be able to participate in activism, the public can upload content on the social media TikTok. The #WIIWY movement is gaining traction among the general public. This study explored the motivations of #WIIWY digital activism makers, obtained information about the dissemination of #WIIWY digital activism on TikTok, and the role of TikTok in the process of making digital activism media. This study uses a virtual ethnographic method to explain the cultural behavior of digital activism that is used by users on TikTok. The results of this study indicate that there are several individual motivations involved in #WIIWY activism, namely the suitability with feelings, want to spread awareness about cyberbullying and KBGO, voice the experiences as victims of crime on social media and create a safer and more positive social media environment. The spread of this activism is quite high but its virality is limited at the beginning and is not evenly distributed throughout Indonesia. This study concludes that TikTok plays a role in the media-making process of producing and disseminating #WIIWY activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper contributes to the social media moderation research space by examining the still under-researched "shadowban", a form of light and secret censorship targeting what Instagram defines as borderline content, particularly affecting posts depicting women's bodies, nudity and sexuality. "Shadowban" is a user-generated term given to the platform's "vaguely inappropriate content" policy, which hides users' posts from its Explore page, dramatically reducing their visibility. While research has already focused on algorithmic bias and on social media moderation, there are not, at present, studies on how Instagram's shadowban works. This autoethnographic exploration of the shadowban provides insights into how it manifests from a user's perspective, applying a risk society framework to Instagram's moderation of pole dancing content to show how the platform's preventive measures are affecting user rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista Brasileira de Políticas Públicas is the property of Revista Brasileira de Politicas Publicas 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.)

Copyright of Mülkiye Dergisi is the property of Mulkiye Dergisi 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.)

Copyright of Electronic Turkish Studies is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies 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 study focuses on the experiences of disabled individuals in online activism in the context of China. Adopting the social model of disability, this study found an iceberg structure consisting of two levels and three layers. The explicit level included observed labels, attitudes and legislation. The implicit level involved both social and internalized stereotypes. These three layers of social structures interacted with each other and together brought about social exclusion into being. Adopting the social model as an organizing principle represents a starting point to alter social patterns and possibly change social isolation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governments worldwide invest heavily in digital initiatives to develop information societies with connected and actively engaged citizens, but problems like lacking sustained engagement and quality of participation still plague them. We undertook a systematised literature review on the Scopus and Web of Science (WoS) databases, covering dispersed literature surrounding Digital Citizen Empowerment (DCE) from the past two decades.Categorising the literature under four thematic categories or strategies of DCE: Digital Activism (DA), Multi-channel Service Delivery (MCSD), Participatory Budgeting (PB), and Deliberative Governance (DG) critical comparative analysis is done. A conceptual model of DCE, covering how theories from different inter-disciplinary areas of political, social, and information science influence the development of information societies and DCE is presented. Action points in our conceptual model are mapped to policy objectives targeting improved delivery of empowering policy goals by practitioners, and future research opportunities in the context of DCE are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Red flags are increasingly being raised over the contribution of short term tourism rentals (mediated by platforms such as Airbnb) to socio-spatial inequalities and residential displacement. In many cases, the most vocal reactions have come from social movements claiming the Right to the City through particular geographies of resistance that underpin protest counter-narratives in the digital and non-digital spheres. In order to evaluate this relationship, a digital content analysis based on a sample of around 16,000 tweets illustrates the depth and diversity of tourism counter-narratives within the Twitter activity of social movements in opposition to tourism saturation in the city of Barcelona. This approach is triangulated with a spatial analysis of Airbnb-mediated rentals in Barcelona, based on GIS mapping, as well as correlations with a variety of geo-referenced data sources and the application of different socio-economic variables. The relationship between these two dimensions is key for policymakers in influencing regulatory approaches to collaborative platform activity and mitigating socio-spatial inequalities generated by short term rentals and the platforms that mediate them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Literature on influence operations highlights the coordinated actions of digital activists aimed at persuading audiences. Scholars have discussed many angles of this behavior and emphasized repertoires based on specific contentious actions. However, little is discussed about how these disputes allow us to apprehend different models of political action in polarized contexts. On a whole, studies have not considered a broader understanding of digital activism performed by supporters of far-right governments. How does the far-right spread its agenda and support the government in "hashtag wars"? What kind of strategies are employed? This study seeks to compare patterns of coordinated behavior in hashtags created by supporters and detractors of the Bolsonaro government in Brazil that occupied the trending topics on Twitter. The statistical analysis is based on 6.1 million tweets taken from 20 political hashtags collected over a three-month period from May to July 2020. Data was scraped using Twitter's Search API v3.0 for academic use. We analyzed the overall volume and peaks of tweets, the users they engaged with, and their network of influence, as well as the length of each hashtag. The results show an intense use of hashtag activism by Bolsonaro supporters, with users struggling for greater prominence in social media in the face of political events in Brazil. This article sheds light on how the far-right appropriates digital platforms to promote the government's public image in times of political tension and how it promotes coordinated actions aimed at framing social media audiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a world of polarized societies and radical voices hogging the public digital sphere, this thematic issue aims at identifying the different strategies of old and new social movements in the extremes of the political debates by focusing on the interplay between polarization, uses of the internet, and social activism. In order to disentangle these interactions, this thematic issue covers a wide range of political settings across the globe. It does so by studying: (a) how opposing activists discuss politics online and its implications for democratic theory; (b) how social media uses and online discussions foster offline protests; (c) how the media and state-led-propaganda frame disruptive and anti-government offline protests and how this situation contributes to polarization in both democratic and non-democratic regimes; and finally (d) how civil society uses digital tools to organize and mobilize around sensitive issues in non-democratic regimes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The social media collective actions through the hashtags #DeixaElaTrabalhar and #LasPeriodistasParamos raised problems that women journalists were suffering in both Brazil and Spain. While the representation of feminism has long been studied, less attention has been paid to comparative studies and the more personal representation. Focusing on a combination of visual and textual qualitative content analysis, we explore 90 Instagram posts from women journalists within the two hashtags and how they portray themselves in relation to their profession. At the time of writing, Instagram is one of the most popular social networks focused on the publication of audiovisual content. This makes it suitable for the study of online self-representation. The article identifies using the Documentary Image Analysis and the Critical Discourse Analysis the recurrent demands and denunciations regarding journalism gender-related issues and finds common visual vernaculars in #DeixaElaTrabalhar and #LasPeriodistasParamos posts. This study makes a comprehensive analysis of how women journalists construct their identity on Instagram images concerning the topics they talk about and the elements they use to insert themselves in the female journalists’ collectives and connects it with the theories on feminism and social media activism. The results reported here shed new light on how female journalists take control over their situation and find empowerment, feminism, non-violent protest, and professional/private life to be common points regarding the identity construction in relation to these online groups.

This research discusses: a) The digital activism of university students in Malang amidst COVID-19 pandemic, b) The media used by the students to run the digital activism amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, and c) Political movements carried out by the students amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. This present research implemented qualitative approach using case study to describe the findings of phenomena that occur in the field. Taking concern on the discussed issue in the research, the case study method required a number of field data that are contextual and actual. Meanwhile, the results of this research found that the use of digital space as a place to carry out activism activites is one form of social change. It is observed that students’ activism in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak has changed pattern. The change was a move from conventional, mass gathering, into online using a variety of platform. This change in carrying out students’ political movement has succeeded in attracting public attention which resulted in the success of political movements and gathering and amplifying “attention” on certain social issues.

Digital activism is now considered a widespread form of activism. Studies on its impact and use have proliferated. Most research into this phenomenon has tended to analyze the impact of digital technologies on action and activism. In contrast, this study explores the role of organizations and organizational structures, focusing on internal processes and the functioning of digital campaigning. Based on ethnographic observation and interviews with staff of online campaigning organizations, this paper presents findings on how digital communication and its logic can affect the organization’s internal processes. The paper challenges two established ideas: a) the idea of de-materialization of organizational structures from digital activism; b) that digital platforms tend to support the dissemination of opinions of previously marginalized actors. My fieldwork’s findings demonstrate that the reality in both cases is far more nuanced, with significant identifiable inconsistencies. This research shows that organizations and organizational structures have not de-materialized and that the material conditions of digital activism are key to better understanding this phenomenon and new forms of inequality it might generate.

Using a qualitative research approach, this study provides an inquiry into the nature of democracy and digital political activism discourses on @Hopewell Chin’ono and @Jacob Ngarivhume prior to the 31st July demonstrations. Alternative communications spaces have revolutionised political communication in Zimbabwe. In Zimbabwe, political polarisation has created a monolithic voice in the mainstream media. In the “Second Republic”, digital activism is a growing phenomenon where subalterns question the state. This study is guided by Manuel Castells’ Power and Counter Power Theory. Data gathered using netnography was analysed using critical discourse analysis. Findings show that digital activism has turned into social media “dissidence”, calling for the resignation of the government officials including the Executive through 31st demonstrations. There is an intimate relationship between digital democracy and digital activism, enabling political advocacy and lobbying. Twitter is used to safeguard the lives of activists. Religious discourses were used by both Jacob Ngarivhume and Hopewell Chin’ono as they drummed up support for the July 31st demonstrations.

To what extent does the way in which digital platforms are organized favor citizen participation? This article looks at this question using a comparative study between two digital informative architectures: the Five Star Movement’s (originally in Italian “Movimento 5 Stelle”) Rousseau platform in Italy, and the Decidim platform, developed after the 15M movement in Spain by a collaboration of entities from different countries. From a qualitative analysis of its architectures – in accordance with an approach based mainly on communication theory – we sought to investigate and describe the ways in which information circulates and operates, and the possibilities they offer for democratic actions. This was accomplished by analyzing two aspects of the platform: 1) the conception and development of codes; 2) the functions that the platform offers and its interaction with users. In this paper, we start from the central hypothesis that the communication conditions act as a base for the quality and levels of participation. Just as more verticalized communicative structures (such as those of traditional mass media) tend to concentrate decision-making processes and power, more horizontalized structures end up favoring more collaborative and democratic actions: thus, we aimed to verify the extent to which the modes of elaboration and organization of information on these platforms, operating in digital network contexts, enable broad and effective modalities of citizen action

Literature on influence operations highlights the coordinated actions of digital activists aimed at persuading audiences. Scholars have discussed many angles of this behavior and emphasized repertoires based on specific contentious actions. However, little is discussed about how these disputes allow us to apprehend different models of political action in polarized contexts. On a whole, studies have not considered a broader understanding of digital activism performed by supporters of far-right governments. How does the far-right spread its agenda and support the government in “hashtag wars”? What kind of strategies are employed? This study seeks to compare patterns of coordinated behavior in hashtags created by supporters and detractors of the Bolsonaro government in Brazil that occupied the trending topics on Twitter. The statistical analysis is based on 6.1 million tweets taken from 20 political hashtags collected over a three-month period from May to July 2020. Data was scraped using Twitter’s Search API v3.0 for academic use. We analyzed the overall volume and peaks of tweets, the users they engaged with, and their network of influence, as well as the length of each hashtag. The results show an intense use of hashtag activism by Bolsonaro supporters, with users struggling for greater prominence in social media in the face of political events in Brazil. This article sheds light on how the far-right appropriates digital platforms to promote the government’s public image in times of political tension and how it promotes coordinated actions aimed at framing social media audiences.

In a world of polarized societies and radical voices hogging the public digital sphere, this thematic issue aims at identifying the different strategies of old and new social movements in the extremes of the political debates by focusing on the interplay between polarization, uses of the internet, and social activism. In order to disentangle these interactions, this thematic issue covers a wide range of political settings across the globe. It does so by studying: (a) how opposing activists discuss politics online and its implications for democratic theory; (b) how social media uses and online discussions foster offline protests; (c) how the media and state-led-propaganda frame disruptive and anti-government offline protests and how this situation contributes to polarization in both democratic and non-democratic regimes; and finally (d) how civil society uses digital tools to organize and mobilize around sensitive issues in non-democratic regimes.

Drawing on postcolonial critique to analyze the work and political purpose of activist groups on social media, this article asks the question: How do digital media communications simultaneously reinstate binary oppositions and invite rhizomatic relations? While the concept of counterpublics is helpful when it comes to understanding the voices of opposition in public discourse, it is also necessary to introduce postcolonial critique and geopolitical and historical distinctions in order to grasp the particularities of global digital activism (Brouwer and Paulesc 2017; Blaagaard 2018). This article does exactly that: Illustrating the postcolonial, hybrid, and cosmopolitan qualities of digital activism on social media platforms, the article presents a discursive analysis of Black Lives Matter Denmark (BLM-DK) as they operate on the social media platform Facebook. The group’s posts are dedicated to juridical and political struggles over discrimination and racial violence in Denmark and the United States, thus producing a counterpublic. The posts moreover introduce and connect two very different geopolitical and historical contexts, thus showing social media’s potential for creating rhizomatic relations.

In this study we focused our attention on the involvement of the oldest and the most active online community, Corupţia ucide, in organising or rallying protests in 2015, 2017 and 2018. We wanted to show to what extent the representatives of this community managed to increase the number of (involved) fans supporting the cause of anticorruption protests and how they used Facebook as an interactive tool for communicating with users in the case of the three analysed protests. The Corupţia ucide community has provided internet users with information about protests and anti-corruption legislation, has succeeded in connecting and engaging citizens to participate also in the street, not only in social media, and has paved the way for the digital civic activism institutionalisation in Romania. [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]

Copyright of Global Media Journal: Turkish Edition is the property of Global Media Journal, Turkish Edition 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.)

Copyright of Gumushane Universty Electronic Journal of the Faculty of Communication / Gümüshane Üniversitesi Iletisim Fakültesi Elektronik Dergisi is the property of Gumushane Universitesi Iletisim Fakultesi Elektronik Dergisi (e-GIFDER) 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.)

Digital platforms support forms of collective action with varying degrees of organizationality – that is, with organization-like attributes such as identity, actorhood, and decision-making. These forms include seemingly non-organized online groups, which can be easily dismissed as informal chatter. Building on communicative theories of organizing and Luhmann's Theory of Social Systems, we explore the communicative organizationality of a Facebook group related to urban planning. By analyzing private chat logs of the group administrators, we explore the group's organizationality and the ways in which organizational and interactional communication become intertwined to produce and curate digital political discussions. Our findings illustrate how technological affordances built for moderation also support the strategic organization of discussions to orchestrate political talk. We conceptualize such operations as discursive conditioning of organizational interaction and suggest that political action online can be propelled not only by connecting people, but also by the powerful yet concealed tactic of conditioning public online discussions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The first general women's strikes to demand gender equality in Spain took place on 8 March 2018 and 2019. Both calls were an amazing success, becoming world references for feminism. This research investigates how the strikes were dealt with through Twitter by a Collective Symbolic Coping (CSC) process. Discourses on Twitter were analysed on both years, 4,384 tweets were selected and their content was analysed by lexical analysis. The results from 2018 indicated the CSC phases of 1) awareness; 2) divergence, where feminist demands and the role of men in the strike were debated; and 3) convergence, where the success of the strike was highlighted. However, in 2019 the feminists on Twitter were forced to cope with a great deal of trolling against them. This trolling was maintained in the awareness and divergence phases, making it difficult to reach a convergent discourse regarding the success of the strike. Moreover, the results also demonstrated that there was no reference hashtag in the strikes. It is concluded that discourse on social networks has become a key factor in feminist social mobilizations and that this feminist digital activism will be critical in the continued dissemination of the claims for gender equality in Spain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the digital eco-activism on social networks and recognize when digital activism turns into civil actions. The focus of the paper will be primarily on the case study of the Facebook group "Rijeke Bosne i Hercegovine - budi promjena" (The Rivers of Bosnia and Herzegovina - Be the Change), with special reference to the limitations caused by the operation of Facebook algorithms and the Rules of use of this social network. Methodology. For the analysis of the Facebook group "Budi promjena", which has 55,800 members, a period of two years was covered i.e., from the very foundation of the group (from February 2020 to March 2022) and a statistical review of the activities of the group from 1 July 2021 to 21 March 2022. Through the case study of the Facebook group, an insight was given into the background operation of both the Facebook algorithm and the constant changes and introduction of new rules and restrictions that ultimately had a negative impact on the group activities. The paper presents a theoretical analysis, as well as the analysis of data collected relevant to this paper. Using a comparative theoretical approach, a comparison will be made with similar digital activisms that have resulted in concrete civil actions along with applying the principles from the theory of common goods, which was founded by Elinor Ostrom, on the example of the "Be the change" group. Results. From the presentation of the status (Facebook insights) of the operation of the group "Rijeke Bosne i Hercegovine - budi promjena", the limiting factors of action that indicate the restrictiveness of the FB algorithm will be analyzed. The limiting factors that lead to lower spillover from digital to civic action are listed and it is examined whether the group meets the principles of commons, which is significant because it allows the group as a commons to be seen as a counter-mechanism or counterbalance to the limiting effects of Facebook's algorithms. Social Significance. This paper presents an example of good and innovative practice of digital activism in socio-ecological boundaries, showing how the management of digital tools can empower and limit civic action. Originality. The paper presents the so far unpublished data on the management of the FB group, which resulted in concrete civil actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The FridaysForFuture movement (FFF), launched by Greta Thumberg's school strikes in 2018, has led a new wave of climate activism worldwide. Young people are at the forefront, with social media serving both as mobilizing tools and expressive spaces. Drawing upon literature on youth and digital activism with a generational, situated approach, we account for how both the climate struggle and social media are appropriated by FFF-activists as part of their own youth grassroots politics. Moreover, we explore the activities they mix and the strategies they adopt when moving across online and offline environments. From July 2020 to January 2021, we carried out 6 months of ethnographic work with(in) the FFF-Rome group by blending participant observation of assemblies and protests with digital ethnography on the homonym WhatsApp group. Results' thematic analysis shows that FFF-activists believe climate activism to be their own fight and social media their own battlefield. A generational understanding of digital climate activism emerges at the intersection of the appropriation of the dispute (climate change) and the digital environments (social media). Findings also account for broader logics and strategies adopted by FFF-activists, on and beyond social media. They move seamlessly between online and offline, spanning across and negotiating with different platforms according to political goals and target audiences. These results contribute to overcoming reductive or marginalizing approaches to youth activism, to legitimizing and situating young activists' social media usage practices within an array of grassroots political practices, and to understanding how generational belonging affects such practices in the Italian context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of new media for women is an interesting study to discuss. Internet development is unstoppable, and everyone can participate in it, including women. Women use podcast platforms to voice the digital literacy movement for women. This study examines how the women's literacy movement uses new media in its podcast practice. This qualitative research uses the case study method on the Suara Puan podcast managed by three women: Stefany, Putri, and Idha. Suara Puan is a Spotify-exclusive podcast focused on literacy. Research data is obtained through in-depth interview techniques, participatory observation, and documentation. This study's results indicate that women can demonstrate their abilities in the podcast industry, which men dominate. Suara Puan can become a literacy space for women. Without realizing it, Suara Puan has actively carried out a literacy movement for women as a form of digital activism. Suara Puan answers the doubt women lack in using technology by creating interesting content that brings financial benefits. The response from the listeners is very positive because they felt invited to love literacy by using new media that were more familiar to them and raised new awareness as women. As activism, although not explicitly recognized by the podcasters, by consistently building literacy awareness, this podcast can move its listeners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today's digital ecosystems, in which social networking sites play a leading role, foster communicative phenomena of great interest, where diverse content creators make individual and collective experiences visible. In some cases, these communities give rise to cyberactivist movements, or become a trend, generating dialogue and debate on issues of interest to society. In other cases, they are presented as challenges promoted by brands and influencers, constituting true digital cultures of great impact on networks such as Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok or Snapchat. This topic has become an object of interest in the academic sphere due to its implications for understanding the interactions that characterize citizen participation and (self)representation. The purpose of this special issue is to explore the strategies, languages, codes and skills that make it possible to connect and make content visible so that it becomes a trend, exploring the new modes of expression and communication of various groups of creators and their communicative and multimodal skills within digital social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two digital LGBT+ media in Mexico are analyzed to understand the implications of their operation and their articulation with the informational and social needs of sex-gender populations. It starts from the communicational perspective to conceptualize these projects as exercises in technological appropriation but highlighting their empirical intersections with other analytical frameworks. Through the method of systematizing the experience, the trajectories of ANODIS and Seis Franjas Mx have been recovered; through semi-structured interviews conducted with their co-founders in February 2022, the reasons, horizons and challenges that these projects have faced are analyzed. The results show that the lack of LGBT+ content and representations in the media motivate the creation of these projects, which articulate a sense of collaboration and sociality with other users belonging to sex-gender communities. In addition, the people participating in these projects are part of the LGBT+ populations, becoming them producers and consumers of information that claim the gender-identity dimension in the content. Likewise, these initiatives are specified in the youth stage of their co-founders, which refers to rethinking the role of LGBT+ youth in the new forms of activism and socialization mediated by Internet. Finally, given the progressive formation of this area of knowledge and the lack of consensus on its definition, it is proposed to name this interdisciplinary field of study as LGBT+ Communicational Studies, to show an epistemological perspective from communication and a Latin American ontological position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the discursive practice of mourning and commenting by netizens on the final social media post made by Dr Li Wenliang, regarding it as a form of political participation and competitive discursive politics enacted in cyberspace. Discourse theory is applied to conduct discourse analysis on 4000 comments. We identified two strategies that netizens used to establish an alternative space for discourse. The first involved hidden protests expressed through multi-semantic mourning, avoiding suppression by indirectly challenging official authorities. Second, through engagement with microblogs, netizens applied personalized narratives to form a collective memory and a counter-memory space that departed from the official normative narrative. Discursive activities enacted by netizens stimulated the political agenda of resilient adjustment on the part of the authorities, leading the government to accept and incorporate public demands into policies through strategic rectification. These findings help to better understand the significant power of disorganized connective action that is reliant on affective citizens and the further development of regime resilience on the part of the Chinese political system in response to digital activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In summer 2020, social media feeds were flooded with black-and-white selfies of women, shared under the hashtag #ChallengeAccepted. While the images quickly became ubiquitous, the reason for them did not. This case study analyzes #ChallengeAccepted from the perspective of feminists in Turkey, who began posting the hashtag/selfie sequence on July 26, 2020. We performed a thematic analysis on datasets of 5,510 Turkish-language tweets, 28,527 English-language tweets, and transcripts from 26 semistructured interviews with women in Turkey who participated in the hashtag campaign and sought to answer the question: How do transnational digital flows impact local and global uptake of feminist ideals? We found three stages of the hashtag, through which meaning was negotiated, defended, and re-established. Applying W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg's "logic of connective action," we saw #ChallengeAccepted as operating as a "personal action frame," which we argue provided a refractive effect that changed the trajectory of the discourse. Our findings suggest that other cases of hashtag activism would benefit from imagining the local/transnational dimensions as a collection of locals, or the translocal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This themed issue provides an international perspective on transnational processes in digital activism and protest. Against wider claims that social movements and citizen activism are shifting from the logic of spatial organization to networked flows, this themed issue foregrounds the interplay between the global and local in networked public spheres. Recent transnational movements such as #MeToo or Black Lives Matter yield the importance of interweaving digital communication, pre-existing activist collectives, and citizen activation on a seemingly global scale. In this Introduction, we ask how political causes circulate globally, what role digital technologies play, and ultimately, what "transnational" means for seemingly universal causes, global collective identity, and activist practice. After providing an overview of the different theoretical insights that an interdisciplinary approach to digital activism can provide, we outline a conceptual framework for approaching the transnational as an entanglement of flows, hierarchies, and agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay analyzes a locally networked resistance movement against the Phulbari Coal Project, an immense open-pit coal mine excavation project initiated by the multinational corporation Asia Energy (U.K.) in Bangladesh. The project was violently brought upon the rural and Indigenous peoples in 2006 but met with a formidable resistance that forced the company to halt the project and leave the country. The success of the protest was amplified by shows of solidarity from international environmental justice movements. We argue that the mobilization of movements and protests like this signify a global arcade of networked activism against transnational and geomorphic extractivism. Drawing from interviews and qualitative digital media content analysis, we identify common themes, similarities with global appeals and vocabularies, and the communicative architecture of the movements, including their digital turn. We pay attention to how local voices were picked up by national and transnational alliances. Although deeply situated in local cultures, the Phulbari movement shows that antiextractivism has become a digitally networked and globally circulated cause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Introduction. Social Work is currently facing the significant challenge of dealing with social networking sites – which have become a parallel universe of socialisation – in which ever-increasing digital activism is taking place. The #MeToo movement stands out as a global benchmark. It has established itself as a digital-global feminist movement, fighting harassment and the abuse of women. Methodology. Adopting a social work perspective, a longitudinal analysis was performed of the #MeToo movement on Twitter between 2018-2019 based on social network analysis and netnography, in conjunction with specific algorithms. Results. The results showed significant patterns of sorority, homophily and affective polarisation through the echo chambers and filter bubbles that were identified in the detected Twitter communities. Furthermore, these online communities reflected real offline characteristics (geographical location, affinities, similarities). Discussion and conclusions. The #MeToo movement’s global effect and durability has led to a new understanding of social movements in the digital era. Social workers must not be blind to the exciting digital opportunities arising from digitalisation. They must combat homophily and the polarisation of global society on social networking sites, promoting values oriented towards tolerance of diversity. Practitioners must show awareness and intervene proactively in global digital spheres to understand, reflect and promote social justice, equality of rights and the empowerment of disadvantaged, vulnerable and oppressed people.

This study investigates digital activism and democratic culture among citizens of São Paulo, Brazil. It aims to understand: 01. whether digital participation is becoming a surrogate instance of other forms of participation; and 02. whether digital activists share a specific political culture regarding democratic attitudes and behaviors. Drawing on a representative sample of 2,417 interviews, we apply multivariate analysis techniques to characterize digital activists in terms of political participation and democratic culture. Our findings show that digital participation complements – rather than replaces – other forms of participation. We also found that although the levels of democratic culture among digital-only activists were lower than among activists who participate in several arenas, digital-only activists embrace democratic culture more significantly than non-activists. This finding suggests that digital-only participation could be an important first step in developing democratic attitudes in individuals, albeit this form of participation is not sufficient to foster the highest level of democratic culture.