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This article analyzes the digital activism that has been developing in Cuba in recent years and seeks to discover what its impacts are, as well as the obstacles and challenges it faces. Taking a tour of different types of activism, the analysis shows that the Digital Activism has led to an increase in the expression and activity of citizens in the public space and facilitated contentious action and protest, opening new channels of participation and incidence to citizens, but also increased surveillance and state control. From this perspective, the Digital Activism is constituted as a antecedent of the social explosion of 11J, so its analysis can contribute elements for its understanding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does exile affect online dissent? By internationalizing activists' networks and removing them from day-to-day life under the regime, we argue that exile fundamentally alters activists' political opportunities and strategic behavior. We test the effect of exile on activists' public discourse in the case of Venezuela, through an analysis of over 5 million tweets by 357 activists spanning seven years. Our results suggest that after going into exile activists increasingly emphasize foreign-led interventions to shape their home country politics, focus less on local grievances, and become more harshly critical of the regime. This is partly due to the changes in exiles' networks: after leaving, activists increase their interactions with foreign actors and tweet more in English. This work contributes to our understanding of the relationship between exile—one of the most ubiquitous yet understudied forms of repression—and dissent in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexual violence harms millions of individuals each year in the United States. Survivors of sexual violence endure long-term hardships such as significant financial setbacks, physical and mental health consequences, academic challenges, and stunted career achievement. Digital feminist activism (DFA) has created space online where women can disclose experiences of sexual violence. Research thus far has been limited to documenting the existence and value of DFA for those who participate and has not addressed whether DFA can influence a key demographic for prevention, young men. We conducted an experiment to examine the impact of DFA on college-aged men's reactance to messaging, rape myth acceptance, knowledge about severity, and susceptibility to perpetrate sexual violence. University men (n=230, 18–29 years old) were randomized to one of three conditions: (1) tweets from women challenging rape myths, (2) tweets from women providing information about sexual violence harms, or (3) no exposure control. Tweets challenging rape myths or providing information did not impact rape myth perceptions, knowledge, or susceptibility. Participants had greater reactance (unintended outcome) to tweets challenging rape myths, and subsequently higher rape myth acceptance and lower knowledge about the severity of sexual violence. Rape myth acceptance was associated with susceptibility to perpetrate sexual violence overall. Our finding that some forms of DFA have a negative, indirect influence among college-aged males highlights important unintended consequences and the need for more efficacious communication to prevent sexual violence perpetration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Democracies around the world are struggling with the decline of civic and political engagement. At the same time, new forms of engagement such as lifestyle politics, Internet activism, and political consumerism are on the rise. In this introduction to the Special Section, we argue that citizens are increasingly engaging through informal, creative, and digitally networked activities, thereby moving political engagement into the domain of entertainment and personalized communication on the Internet and in social media. Moreover, we advocate a cross-cultural approach to explore how media use contributes to political participation in a globalized, mediatized world. The studies assembled in this Special Section show that political engagement through using media hinges on cultural parameters such as political structures, political leaders, press freedom, neo-tribes, degrees of tightness, postmaterialist values, norms, and localized versus centralized patterns of information disorder, to mention a few. Implications of the studies and suggestions for future research direction are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 raised an enormous wave of Internet activism and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks launched with the help of common users across the world. In this article, we describe the events of the first days after the invasion from the perspective of the cybersecurity incident response team of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic. We observed hundreds of users intentionally participating in DDoS attacks against Russia from the university's network. The campus network faced only minor issues in terms of service unavailability, but alerts flooded the cybersecurity team. Two dimensions of the events are highlighted. First, the large-scale attacks in an unexpected direction were highly unusual and brought technical challenges in network monitoring and intrusion detection. Second, hacktivism still violates the campus network's terms of use and requires the cybersecurity team to communicate the issues very carefully with the community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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It aims to carry out a systematic review of the scientific production that deals with the performance of feminist movements in social media, understanding how the studies carried out have perceived the use of these media by collectives and organized feminist groups as a resource for political mobilization and proposition of claim agendas. The research was carried out in the SciELO, CAPES, SCOPUS and Web of Science databases. After establishing the inclusion and exclusion criteria, at the end 25 studies were selected, which after categorized and analyzed were organized in their argumentative and problematizing lines about the theme in question from the following analytical axes: a) Relationship between feminisms and social media; b) Social media as a tool to fight against violence; and c) Social media, feminisms and culture. The exposed results indicate that social media is an important strategy for political mobilization, but as long as it considers challenges such as the expansion of internet access for these feminist collectives. Furthermore, it is important the continuous articulation with different contexts and the performance in the construction of possible alliances between the various movements, having in mind that the feminist struggle is broad and for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reviews and analyzes from the perspective of political communication, the scope and effects achieved by the performance “Un violador en tu camino”, created by the feminist collective LASTESIS. The rhetoric of signs, languages and movements, released a few weeks after the social outbreak in Chile, is reviewed and understood from the literature based on the definition and dynamics of political communication, the media system and its effects, the citizen response and the impact on social networks, including digital activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The digital creation is son the defining base of current breaking-off processes which new urban movements star in. In the present protests cycle that began in 2011 -from arab spring at Yo soy 132- it is remarkable how negative processes, rebel imagination and resistence are demanding a new conceptual framework in order to understand the nature of transformations of new social movements. A critical reading of cyberactivism goes through collective imaginaries and contemporary ways of representation of social individual recognizing the radical historicity and the possible vanishing points. On the following pages, we will execute a materialistic review of cyberactivism from some fundamental contributions to develop a socio-critical interpretation of protests and collective action on the Internet Galaxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a study of US high school students from predominantly working-class, immigrant backgrounds, this article illustrates how young people used social media to share personal opinions, experiences and news about environmental problems affecting their neighborhood, ultimately helping to change public policy. It reveals how the interpersonal connectivity facilitated by social media can create opportunities for youth voice and collective identity that inspire connective action. Youthful online practices of sharing personal stories, links, photos, memes, videos and other online artifacts of engagement exemplify 'connective journalism' through which young people create and share narratives about their personal experiences and concerns that, in turn, allow them to see themselves as members of a larger community or counterpublic of people facing similar experiences and grievances. These connective journalism practices have implications for the ways we think about journalism, political activism and youth citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This empirically and analytically oriented study seeks to review the intersection between women, literature, feminism, and the Internet to explore the organizations that are already contributing to it in Latin America, and analyze the practices developed and the use of cybernetic tools, especially in communication, to challenge and dismantle the dominant masculine discourse in literature. In Latin America, we see that digital activism is still in the process of setting up a significant scenario to build networks and transform cultural structures that ignore the literary experiences of women in both writing and reading. Likewise, we conclude that these types of initiatives have enormous potential to question and destroy the structures of inequality, although they need to hone their strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notwithstanding the growing interest in cyberactivism in Brazil since the 2013 protests, not much is known about the previous unfolding of this kind of activism before it became a major actor in challenging the political system. Thus, this paper aimed to offer a first outline of cyberactivism's history in Brazil, taking into account which actors and practices were present in each moment, stressing their continuities and discontinuities. To this end, we used existing empirical literature – predominantly focused on particular actors, practices or moments – to gather data, facts and processes. Our investigation found out three moments of cyberactivism in the country, disrupted by an entaglement of socipolitical and technological factors and classified on the basis of existent actors, practices and platforms. First, the emergence, whereby web portals served as a source of information and a space for self expression and political articulation. Second, the consolidation, in which blogs provided networks for debates known as blogospheres. And, finally, the routinisation, when the emergence of social networks – stimulating debates, individual political manifestations, exchange of strategic information and calls for demonstrations – enabled cyberactivism to become part of everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I analyze the role of the Israeli online arena in attempts to challenge attitudes toward sex work and the sex industry. By exploring the short history of the "feminist sex wars" that are being conducted on public feminist Facebook pages, I ask whether online activism can really avoid being drawn into the realm of conventional offline politics. The article argues that while the various Facebook pages aimed to alter the landscape of political and public discourse around sex work and the sex industry, they were in fact sucked into the vortex of the existing public discourse surrounding sex work in Israel, forcing them to choose sides in the dialectic sex wars. I conclude that they nonetheless succeeded in establishing a "narrative of influence" which should be analyzed beyond the disappointment of specific policy outcomes. Online activism thus becomes a key platform for both the construction and contestation between different narratives within the sex industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article engages the global controversies of digital feminism within the recent scholarship and offers a situated and critical analysis of Chinese young women's digital feminism. Based on the ethnographic online observation of young women's activism in social media from 2012 to 2018 and in-depth interviews with feminist activists, my analysis takes the two landmark online campaigns in Weibo as case studies: Naked Chest against Domestic Violence and #MituInChina, and elaborates on how such digital activism converged in and diverged from the development of Chinese feminism from the 1950s to 2000s and rewrote the politics of "the personal is political" in these three aspects: (1) establishing gendered and political subjectivity via different ways of consciousness raising; (2) further politicizing women's private matters for provoking public discussions and pressuring the government for policy changes; (3) forming new coalitions for public activism. The article further exposes the drawbacks of such digital activism: (1) the precarity of digital platforms; (2) the problems of politicizing personal issues in social media. This paper aims to delineate a comprehensive and complex picture of Chinese young women's online activism and thus contributes to a fuller understanding of digital feminism in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how the group Las Periodistas Paramos (We the Women Journalists Stop) arose and developed within the context of the feminist strike that took place in Spain on 8 March 2018 ('8M'). The purpose of this research is to understand how this community began and its typology, to analyse the selection of digital tools in the process and to outline the strengths and weaknesses of the group on the basis of participants' experiences. Using three qualitative methods, specifically an interview, non-participant observation and focus groups, the group's collective work dynamics and its evolution are defined. The results obtained show that this is a community of interest that has collaboratively broadened its initial objectives, surmounted ideological differences, contributed to the feminist movement and grown exponentially by expanding its activities to embrace other Spanish cities and foreign correspondents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As sports reemerge as a site for social protest, league- and team-controlled media are a new forum for the spread and consideration of political messages. In-house sites challenge established boundaries between journalism and promotional content, but they seek to engage readers by establishing themselves as credible sources, although judgments about credibility are ultimately up to the audience. This content and textual analysis uses social protest by athletes following comments by President Donald Trump about National Football League (NFL) players in September 2017 as a means of exploring the terms of engagement in team media between site producers and audience. In content produced about the protest, writers for NFL team sites stressed the ideas of unity and collaboration expressed by players and executives. Fan response on Facebook was harshly critical toward the protesting athletes, teams, and NFL. These findings suggest in-house media may amplify messages of social protest, but fans use their power in this space to contest those messages. At the same time, the use of in-house spaces as equivalent to newspaper comment sections further casts team media content as less overtly promotional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Virtual surveillance is the modern extension of established policing models that tie dissident Muslim advocacy to terror suspicion and Black activism to political subversion. Countering Violent Extremism ("CVE") and Black Identity Extremism ("BIE") programs that specifically target Muslim and Black populations are shifting from on the ground to online. Law enforcement exploits social media platforms--where activism and advocacy is robust--to monitor and crack down on activists. In short, the new policing is the old policing, but it is stealthily morphing and moving onto virtual platforms where activism is fluidly unfolding in real time. This Article examines how the law's failure to keep up with technological advancements in social media poses serious risks to the ability of minority communities to mobilize against racial and religious injustice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how the video-sharing platform YouTube was utilized by networks of anti-immigration activists that began emerging in Finland during the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. By combining network analysis with qualitative analysis, we identified three central strategies of video activism: movement building through documentation, discursive controversy generation, and personal branding practices. These strategies are firmly supported by the affordances of YouTube and by the way in which the platform enables the building of varying scales of media presence. Consequently, our findings highlight the increasingly common practice of microcelebrity branding in online political communication. This notion demonstrates the affinities between fragmented and contingently mobilized anti-immigration movements and the personalizing and performance-oriented logics of social media presence, in particular when explored from a post-movement perspective. In the algorithmic environment of YouTube, microcelebrity is a political and a platform-specific genre that occupies the post-movement political space by generating sustainable algorithmic visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internet and social media have revolutionized activism. However, governments seeking to curb opposition have recently learned to target the very same technologies that empowered activists in the first place. This article challenges the accepted framework for discussing such efforts by governments, centered on surveillance and privacy. It argues, first, that governments' actions should be conceptualized as measures of digital domination. Applying the republican concept of freedom as non-domination, the article suggests that the core harm resulting from such domination is to activists' freedom, not only to their privacy. Since activism is a check on the government, measures undermining the ability to engage in activism also have devastating consequences for the freedom of the citizenry as a whole. Second, the article argues that governments' reliance on digital militias allows them to sidestep the limits of their legitimate authority, therefore posing a grave threat to the rule of law. Finally, the article underscores that governments deploy measures of control beyond surveillance. Rather, they (1) gather information on activists, (2) disrupt communication channels, (3) flood online conversation to drown out the opposition, (4) deploy the state's coercive power based on information gathered, and (5) mobilize digital militias to bully activists online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Identity is crucial to social movement participation. Existing research examines why active people "avoid" activist identities but has less to say about how active people adopt such identities as if they automatically follow participation. We draw on interviews with high school and college students from a midsize southwestern city to examine how young people make sense of what it means to be an activist, who identifies as such, and why youth are willing--or unwilling--to adopt this label. We find that respondents' conceptualizations of "activists" are critical to (non)identification. Those who see activism as a broad category are more likely to identify, holding constant their level of activity. Those who see activism as a greedy institution, requiring significant substantive fluency, making the issue their primary focus, and willingness to sacrifice, do not, despite their level of engagement. Our findings have implications for identity formation and movement participation more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores episodes of provocative online articulations and the accompanying angry public reactions as part of the cultural politics of juvenile online resistance in contemporary Singapore. Rather than viewing such delinquency as 'youth deficits', this paper seeks a literary-culturalist standpoint in exploring the uninhibited audacity of these public online displays. We perceive such performances as reflecting the critical and socially unrestrained emotional subjectivities of 'youth mirroring deficits' of the 'Emperor's new clothes'. The authors propose to appropriate the colloquial Singaporean Chinese Hokkien term of Si Geena (brat), a label commonly used to describe these offending personalities, to frame the dynamics of youth resistance, and new media in Singapore. Si Geena are often un-social digital juvenile provocateurs baiting moral outrage and public indignation. In turn, societal responses to the Si Geena 's episodic resistance reveal the contradictions, insecurities, and volatility of Singapore's reactive public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper demonstrates how protest tactics, such as the use of hashtags, can be co-opted by counter-protesters, as evidenced by how the cybertroopers operated against the Bersih 4 protest in 2015. This is achieved via focusing the analysis on how geographic places were communicated on Twitter around the time of the protest. The Bersih movement in Malaysia is an example of how a digital-savvy social movement organisation (SMO) operates in a hybrid regime. In this paper, I explore a form of reaction that, on the surface, appeared to be a bottom-up initiative against the Bersih movement. Based on the fieldwork conducted around the Bersih 4 protest in 2015, I focus on place mentions on Twitter to detect the cybertroopers who attempted to disrupt the discussion and narrative through the use of hashtags. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reconsiders contemporary digital activism in an increasingly pious Indonesia and responds to Eva F. Nisa's 2018 paper on young Muslim women as daʾwa (proselytization) activists published in this journal. This paper asks: How have today's socially mediated publics in Indonesia influenced the figure of the daʾwa activist? How are these daʾwa activists different from those in the past? I argue that the daʾwa activists are the products of a Muslimah intimate public, part of a networked public within which young women discuss, engage with, and express how they 'feel' about issues that interest them, and celebrate self-improvement and self-enterprise, combined with religious self-cultivation. Within this public daʾwa activists have two key characteristics. First, market logics and commercial interests are fundamental to their daʾwa. Second, the daʾwa accounts frame controversial and political issues through specific visual ethics that engender a sense of intimacy with their followers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces the special issue on 'Digital Activism' by exploring some of the trends in social media activism and scholarship thereof. The authors ask to what extent this literature helps us understand Asian forms of online activism, which forms of activism have relatively done well, and whether Asian activism requires its own theorizing. Most of all, it is a plea for a careful and ethnographically informed approach to digital activism. Although outwardly they look similar and use the same templates, manuals, or even similar media strategies, not all forms of online activism promote democratic values. Furthermore, we argue that much of what happens under the banner of digital activism is not necessarily politics with a capital P but, rather, consists of everyday forms of engagement, with sometimes seemingly vulgar contents and often familiar routines and natural forms, yet in their impact such 'banal activism' may have political implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) was passed by the parliament of India on December 11, 2019. Muslim women and many other people in India are contesting this act on the grounds that it provides citizenship status on a religious basis. Key enactments of dissent in relation to anti-CAA protests have become visible globally through the media. One is the very visible presence of a local community of Muslim and other women in the physical space of protests in Shaheen Bagh, Delhi. We draw from on-site interviews with Muslim women protestors at Shaheen Bagh to examine how Muslim women are using their physical bodies in protest sites to show dissent and to challenge the hypermasculine Hindu body politic of India. Based in our grounded analysis, we explore four main themes in this study: visibility of Muslim women in protest sites, using social media for international visibility, pushing against fear, and using care as a protest strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do digitally mediated weak-tie appeals to engage in connective action have the same effect everywhere? This study argues that the effect of weak-tie action appeals is contingent on citizenship norms and corresponding social network dynamics such that citizens in countries with higher levels of engaged norms are more likely to be motivated to endorse protest posts than those in countries with lower levels of engaged norms. To demonstrate this, I draw on an original cross-national survey experiment, the results of which show that digitally mediated weak-tie appeals to engage in protest have a more strongly positive effect on motivation to endorse the appeal among Koreans than Japanese respondents. Furthermore, the impact of weak-tie appeals exhibits considerable sensitivity to social network heterogeneity among Japanese respondents. The results of this study suggest that, although technology may in principle empower horizontal networks of citizens, its effect is contingent on norms of political behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the deployment of Internet memes in a 2018 boycott campaign that targeted three major corporate brands tightly associated with the dominant sphere of power in Morocco. Using multimodal critical discourse analysis, the study analyzes discursive choices made in the production of memes circulated during the boycott, and the intersections between satirical humor and online participatory culture. We argue that these memes are "tactics" resorted to by the subaltern in their struggle for social justice. Although these tactics lack a "proper" locus where they can keep their "wins," they allow the weak to carve out a space from where to effectively challenge the dominant power structures. The article contributes to the still limited body of research exploring Internet memes as multimodal political discourse and to the study of humor as a fundamental discursive aspect of Internet memes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This contribution examines a case of collective action in Turkey against a sexist advertisement. Protests unfolded exclusively through social media and resulted in more than 20,000 protestors signing a petition against the ad. In this study, we examine protest motivations behind the case and study the degree with which these motivations are explained by (1) online/offline action practices, and (2) three social-psychological variables (social identity, perceived efficacy, and just-world beliefs). Survey data from 353 participants were analyzed by means of hierarchical linear regression. Results indicated that protestors were mobilized by their identification with women's rights defenders, their perceptions of collective efficacy and both offline and online action practices. In addition, just-world beliefs were negatively associated with collective action. Our findings confirm and expand recent findings of the relevance of socialpsychological predictors for collective action in the online sphere. At the same time, the case points to the facilitating power of social media toward change in Turkey's current authoritarian climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Women's rights" and "gender equality" are not straightforward or neutral terms. Competing political projects define them in different ways. The articles in this Special Section show how the struggle to define gender equality and women's rights has played out in different moments and in different types of media during the past hundred years in Turkey. The articles cover a range of historical and contemporary issues about women's rights and gender equality. This Special Section contributes to our understanding of institutional structures, actors and relationships, and media texts that shape the landscape of women's rights and gender equality in Turkey. In this introduction, I present the contributions and provide a summary of debates on gender and media in Turkey today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My study brings a practice perspective to the study of video activism, specifically seeking to bridge a focus on activist agency with attention to structure. Hence, it provides a critical lens on new economies of image developing in relation to the post-2011 Syrian conflict, to theorize both the agency--the practices, aspirations, and need--of local Syrian videographers and how it is challenged and restricted by structure: that is, the dynamics of ruling perpetrated both by commercial platforms (particularly YouTube), that are now stepping up censorship of video, and by the international justice movement, that is now rushing to harness the probative power of online eyewitness video for grave crimes investigations and prosecutions. Based on semi-structured interviews with four key actors in the international justice movement and 15 Syrian videographers, the study advances our conception of the potentials and challenges of digital camera-practices for civic agency and activism within a contested global media space of ever-increasing exploitation, commodification, and censorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues for the exploration of and experimentation with the potentials of civic technoscience as a way of materializing counterdominant practices in human-rights activism that may challenge conventional uses of technology and rooted understandings of expertise. It examines the Ground Truth project, which addresses the Palestinian- Bedouin struggle for indigenous rights in the Naqab desert, in the southern region of Israel/Palestine. It focuses on the use of do-it-yourself (DIY) aerial photography with balloons and kites, alongside other collaborative practices, for mapping and visualizing Bedouin political and spatial claims. Against a backdrop of increasingly technologically savvy legal-professional cultures in human-rights organizations, this article proposes that a community-based DIY approach to truth making may challenge entrenched thresholds of participation and open opportunities for creating hybrid forums in the human-rights field. Finally, it suggests that civic technoscience can offer an experimental ground for training oneself in critical ways of thinking and engaging with technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A decade after the outbreak of the Arab revolutions, what remains of the political promise of "cameras everywhere" to permit activists and protesters in the region revived forms of agency, self-expression, and connectivity? This Special Section aims to provide a better understanding of what the opportunities and constraints are for practices of grassroots digital image activism within today's political struggles in the Arab world. Together, the articles track the current conditions of possibility for Arab digital image activism to actualize counterdominant practices of capturing, mobilizing, and archiving visual documentation of people's struggles for justice in the region. Where traditional media studies tend to focus on insurgent image making as content rather than as embodied and embedded practices, the contributions here feature a range of concrete, contextual, and innovative repertoires of activist video and photography practices. They specifically detail the struggle between resistance and control, between efforts to maintain the radical potential of grassroots forms and practices image-making in the region, and the renewed hegemonic threats and pressures of co-optation, commodification, and censorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research in the past decade has illustrated the role of social media in protest mobilization and coordination, but few have examined whether and how social media facilitated movement continuity after the end of a protest cycle. This study contributes to knowledge about this research gap by examining levels of social media use and how social media use relates to protest attitudes--persistence, pessimism, and radicalism--among young people during movement abeyance. Analyzing a survey of university students in Hong Kong in March 2019, several months before the onset of the antiextradition bill protests, the findings show that political use of social media related to how young people evaluate the Umbrella Movement, the previous peak of mobilization in the city. Both social media use and evaluation of the Umbrella Movement shaped people's protest attitudes. Overall, the findings suggest that social media help maintain protest potential even at a time when social mobilization is generally weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research studied the dynamics of online and offline activism among networks of organizations and social activists across India involved in the globally recognized Right to Information movement. Our overarching research question examined how a network of organizations and activists grew global, national, and local collective action strength, outreach capacity, and recognition for their grassroots innovations online and offline in a landscape of digital inequality. This qualitative study, which used a purposive sample of activists and organization representatives (N = 72) and supplementary data, found that online activism increased in recent years; yet, the movement conducted most of its campaigns offline, with social media used to exercise geographic reach, amplify messaging, and pressure government and corporate interests. The movement built collective strength online and offline through unifying cross-cutting campaigns, innovations, and cross-network alliances with diverse constituents. It also sustained initiatives that built broad-based inclusive relationships across Indian society that became known around the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to surface youth perspectives on their own activism, their experiences of age-based power dynamics in activist spaces, and their understandings of adult allyship. Using semistructured interviews and innovative participatory visual methods that invite youth to create and discuss original memes, we investigate these questions from the perspective of 10 youth activists involved in counterhegemonic organizing movements in the United States. Our analysis reveals that youth activists feel fundamentally misunderstood along multiple dimensions, including the practice of activism in online and offline spaces, the meaning of young people's participation in activism, and their desires or expectations in terms of intergenerational allyship. By highlighting the key frustrations experienced by youth organizers and the solidarity practices that they desire from adult allies, this research contributes to a bottom-up understanding of youth activist praxis in relation to larger cultural discourses and adultist systems, while identifying practical implications for intergenerational support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hannah Arendt is unusual among contemporary political theorists for many reasons, not least of which is her apparent praise for the pursuit of glory. Yet, far from arguing for its enduring relevance, Arendt seems to suggest the pursuit is obsolete, as the individual heroic actor has been supplanted by anonymous process in modernity. Here, the hacktivist collective Anonymous is used to illustrate the enduring significance of glory in politics, as it pursues, seemingly paradoxically, an Arendtian-style glory with its hacktivism. Through their use of pseudonymity, Anonymous's actions afford a kind of revelation and, in this way, offer a chance at glory and immortality, while respecting the collective's opposition to individual celebrity, and also protecting the offline identities of actors. With its combination of identification and obfuscation, Anonymous's pseudonymous pursuit of glory offers a model for political action today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on survey data on the members of six British parties gathered in the immediate aftermath of the general election of 2015, this article addresses the question of what members do for their parties during campaigns. It identifies a key distinction between traditional forms of activity and more recent forms of online campaign participation. While the well-established general incentives theory of participation continues to offer a useful basis for explaining both types of campaign activism, we find that our understanding is significantly enhanced by considering the impact of national and local political contexts. Whereas the former chiefly adds explanatory value to the model of online participation by party members, the latter considerably improves the model of offline participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do images affect online political mobilization? If so, how? These questions are of fundamental importance to scholars of social movements, contentious politics, and political behavior generally. However, little prior work has systematically addressed the role of images in mobilizing online participation in social movements. We first confirm that images have a positive mobilizing effect in the context of online protest activity. We then argue that images are mobilizing because they trigger stronger emotional reactions than text. Building on existing political psychology models, we theorize that images evoking enthusiasm, anger, and fear should be particularly mobilizing, while sadness should be demobilizing. We test the argument through a study of Twitter activity related to a Black Lives Matter protest. We find that both images in general and some of the proposed emotional attributes (enthusiasm and fear) contribute to online participation. The results hold when controlling for alternative theoretical mechanisms for why images should be mobilizing, and for the presence of frequent image features. Our paper provides evidence supporting the broad argument that images increase the likelihood of a protest to spread online while teasing out the mechanisms at play in a new media environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars argue that contemporary movements in the age of social media are leaderless and self-organised. However, the concept of connective leadership has been put forward to highlight the need for movements to have figures who connect entities together. This study conducts a qualitative research of 30 interviews of human rights groups in the 2011 Egyptian revolution to address the question of how leadership is performed in information and communication technology–enabled activism. The article reconceptualises connective leadership as decentred, emergent and collectively performed, and provides a broader and richer account of leaders' roles, characteristics and challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although a growing number of studies are examining the relationship between Internet use and political participation, varying study characteristics make the overall effect size difficult to estimate. Using a meta-analysis, we estimated the mean effect size and tested whether the effect size was influenced by study characteristics. Data for this meta-analysis were derived from 56 papers reporting 63 independent studies. Results revealed that Internet use had a weak relationship with political participation (rc = .22). Moderator analyses demonstrated that type of Internet use, Internet use measure, Internet use for news, type of political participation, sample origin, and survey year significantly moderated the relationship between Internet use and political participation. For instance, Internet use including news (rc = .27) had a significantly stronger relationship with political participation than did Internet use excluding news (rc = .19). European samples (rc = .27) had the largest mean correlation followed by North American samples (rc = .23) and Asian samples (rc = .18) in decreasing order of strength of relationship. The theoretical and methodological implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The intersections between learning, technology, and media are often the scene of tumult and change. The forces of learning, technology, and politics are pervasive in the lives of young people. These contexts of learning are fueled by the current political moment, but also informed by historical contexts that impact our youth, regardless of socioeconomics, culture, race, or gender. Educators are struggling with how to discuss these trends, and their impact on the learning and engagement of youth. This study focuses on how local Charleston activists formed groups, and utilized technology and media in order to resist socio-political discourses post Trump. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes a critical view of online activism as its point of departure and explores how the activities of Cambodian youth on Facebook have spilled over into formal politics. Contrary to concerns that Facebook and other social media tools distract activists from more effective means of political participation, this article suggests that facebooking has contributed positively to offline political participation. More importantly, the petty acts of discussing and sharing information on Facebook have, on occasion, succeeded in triggering changes in government decisions and behaviours. In developing these arguments, we draw upon everyday politics perspectives which provide the theoretical ground to qualify facebooking as political and make sense of its importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]