Search

This article approaches digital activism as an object of discourse and asks: how is the political prowess of digital technologies discursively articulated in news magazine coverage of digital activism? We take an exploratory approach that maps the representations of digital activism in two world-renowned news magazines – Wired and Time, between 2010 and 2021. We find five dominant narratives through which digital technologies gain political significance, namely: as a last resort; as a witness; as a double-edged sword; as sites of creativity; and as enablers of horizontalism. We argue that these narratives contribute to a persistent discourse casting digital technologies as powerful political tools of grassroots empowerment, which enable unprecedented levels of citizen mobilization. This discourse rehearses techno-utopian imaginaries casting digital technologies as democratizing forces while underplaying the difficulties of sustaining mobilization and of working towards political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.)

By longitudinally tracing India's top political Twitter trends for 2019, our study shows that discursive framing of political leaders is another approach to digital politics. We show that political discourse on digital platforms in India (a) revolved around personalities and (b) hashtags projected political personalities using discursive frames that allow personal subjective interpretations to emerge in resonance with an individual user's worldview. This is interpreted as a form of political distortion enabled by digital platforms, shaping the perception of political leaders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research analyzes Ganjar Pranowo’s strategic focus in the 2024 Presidential election on three sub-themes of the Human Development Index, namely Health, Education, and Economy via Twitter. This research aims to understand how Ganjar Pranowo uses the Twitter platform to highlight Health, Education, and Economic issues in the context of the 2024 Presidential election. The study has academic relevance because it provides insight into how a political candidate uses social media to convey political message. Meanwhile, this research can practically offer political candidates’ and campaign teams’ preferences in designing communication strategies via social media. The methodology used in this research is qualitative with the Qualitative Data Analysis (QDA) Miner approach. Content, network, and cloud analysis was performed using the Nvivo 12 Plus software. The findings were that Health was the main topic, with a discussion percentage of 47.11%, followed by Education with 34.71%, and Economics with 18.18%. This reflects Ganjar Pranowo’s emphasis on access to quality health services and commitment to education issues. This finding means that it provides insight into the focus of his political strategy. The research concludes that Ganjar Pranowo’s strategy in using Twitter in the context of the 2024 presidential election focuses on Health and Education issues as an attraction for voters. However, economic discussions and articulation of economic policies must be improved to ensure voters understand Ganjar’s plans for facing future economic challenges. The practical implication of this research is that political candidates can consider the importance of emphasizing Health and Education issues in their communication strategies via social media. In addition, this research also underscores the need for improvements in economic policy communication to increase voters’ understanding of candidates’ financial plans. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. The article concerns the problem of digital technologies influence on political processes. The main goal of the paper is clarification of trends and perspectives of digital technologies in their application to political practice.Methodology and sources. Paper’s main approach is analysis of contemporary trends in artificial intelligence in context of political practices. Modern applications of AI-technologies in political practices examined on works of S. Russel and P. Norvig.Results and discussion. Analysis of trends in digital technologies application in political process shows that it could be distinguished three stages in transformation of politicalpractices. On the first stage analogous technologies are dominated despite those digital technologies exist and apply widely in human lives. On the second stage digital technologies are widely applied by politicians but citizens couldn’t actively influence in political process. The third stage make internet users true actors of political practices. On the same stage artificial intelligence systems concerned to big data is vigorously introduced in politics. Contemporary political systems in many ways based on success in AI-technologies however there is no full confidence in such a success in near future. Mass introduction of AItechnologies in politics has also negative influence on labor relations in society.Conclusion. Review of digital technologies application in political practice shows positive trends as well as negative ones. The answer on question how minimize negative effect of degradation of labor relations is still to be found.

This paper conceptualises platformed solidarity, describing how platforms change their affordances to support particular social justice causes, sometimes temporarily, and often in response to current events. Such actions allow platforms to perform their support of different interests in response to issues such as racial and gender equality or pro-democratic aims, among other examples. In each case, a specific feature of the platform is modified to visibly promote support, altering how their users experience these spaces. In doing so, these interventions highlight how major platforms demonstrate their politics, raising questions about the differences between the politics that they publicly portray and policies they enact. This paper explores platformed solidarity through an extended examination of Twitter hashflags, typically temporary visuals attached to hashtags of particular commercial, social, and political interests and offering affective emphasis to selected content. While the bulk of hashflags are commercial products, created in partnership with brands to encourage engagement and promotion of a campaign or product, there have been a number of hashflags for major events and causes, from elections to selected social justice campaigns. We suggest that examples of platformed solidarity can elucidate what global platforms see as their role and influence in public communication. However, this raises important questions about what causes, events, and groups are deemed worthy of platformed solidarity? What values do they represent and how – if at all – are these supported by platforms' policy decisions regarding the same issues? We suggest that, whether cynical or well-intentioned, these surface-level interventions do not always necessarily align with higher-order corporate priorities and decision-making. As such, we suggest that platformed solidarity is a corporate tactic that can have overlap with considerations of 'woke capitalism', where visible gestures towards causes and issues are made but underpinned by platforms' missions to maintain high user numbers, grow engagement, and profit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Etkileşim: Academic Journal of Uskudar University Faculty of Communication is the property of Etkilesim 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 explores the intricate relationships between demographic profiles and perceptions of digital politics, e-democracy, and related aspects. A sample of 640 participants from diverse backgrounds in the Visayas and Mindanao regions of the Philippines was surveyed, encompassing age, gender, educational level, employment status, monthly household income, and residential area. Correlation analysis unveiled significant associations between these variables and participants' perceptions of setbacks, political exposure, engagement, and integrity. Age exhibited correlations with educational level and employment status, suggesting that younger individuals tend to possess higher educational achievements and are less likely to be employed full-time. Gender correlated with increased political engagement among female participants, hinting at differing inclinations toward political activities. Educational level emerged as a significant factor in participants' perspectives on exposure, employment status, and income, highlighting its impact on nuanced political perceptions. No substantial correlations were found between residential area and other variables, indicating that geographical location may not strongly influence political perspectives in the digital age. However, correlations underscored age's potential influence on perceptions of digital political and e-democracy-related setbacks. This research enhances understanding of how demographic factors intersect with perceptions of digital politics and e-democracy, providing insights for policymakers and practitioners to design tailored strategies for informed and inclusive political engagement. The study contributes to the ongoing discourse on digital democracy, underscoring the importance of continued investigation into the dynamic interplay of demographics and political perceptions in the evolving digital landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The guest editor of this issue, Sergey Volodenkov, is a recognized expert in digital political communications, manipulation and propaganda technologies in modern informational confrontations, public consciousness management, problems of national information security and hybrid wars. His editorial article presents this thematic issue dedicated to the phenomenon of digitalization of political processes and digital politics in general. The purpose of the issue is to demonstrate the achievements of Russian political scientists who develop their original approaches and work in collaboration with foreign academics in political communication studies and demonstrate the lines of the most rigorous research.

Modern state faces the need to adapt to the changing external environment, which is characterized by intensive digital technological transformations. Thus, it is important to determine how contemporary state and its power institutions adapt to digital technological transformations and identify the key risks, threats, and challenges associated with such adaptation. To do so, the authors of the article conducted a corresponding international expert study, which allowed them to determine the degree of digital technological transformations’ influence on the functioning of traditional states and their power institutions. Also, based on the integration of expert assessments, the authors identified the essential characteristics of digital technological transformations’ effect on contemporary institutions of state power. The study results concluded that the digitalization of contemporary states and their adaptation to current technological transformations is a complex and largely ambiguous set of processes. These include both political opportunities and the associated risks, threats, and challenges for both the state and its institutions, as well as directly for the civil society, which is rapidly increasing its complexity and diversity through intensive digitalization. This brings to a wide range of scenarios for forming state and political management models in the context of a rapidly emerging digital technological reality of a new type. The article proves that the adaptation of the traditional state as a management system to the technologically more complex environment is necessary to ensure the effective viability of both the state itself and its institutions.

Open government (OG) is an increasingly used management model among the public administrations of European countries and of the European Union, which is currently working on The Path to the Digital Decade. This supposes the application of measures to promote proximity and citizenship's prominence in many public policies, leading to improved quality of democracy. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has contributed to a forced digitalization of many public services. Despite the fact that studies on OG do not usually focus on them, political parties are essential actors for the success or failure of OG measures, both from a bottom-up and a top-down perspective, on public administration transformation. Moreover, political parties are transforming themselves into more open organizations at the same time. We define open parties as political parties with high standards in transparency, participation, and collaboration. They also feature high degrees of organizational digitalization. This article proposes a framework for analyzing political parties' openness and explores available empirical data on different aspects related to OG in the European context. We have found that most parties possess a good level of local organizational strength but still need to reach better levels of anticorruption commitment, to form stronger ties with affiliated organizations, and especially to improve the participation of members and activists in their decision-making. Furthermore, elitism, clientelism, and populistic rhetoric represent significant obstacles that could hinder the party reform process.

The belligerent us-versus-them divide typical of populism is central to the expression of contemporary politics. Political leaders and their social media entrepreneurs, however, are increasingly embracing nonantagonistic measures to embolden their appeals to different publics. Using the concept of mediation, banal populism represents a complex bundle of nonconflictual and fun practices that target the personal and political sensibilities of the digital publics. Through an analysis of vlogs of Philippine leaders Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Sara Duterte, this article presents the narratives of local politics, light moments, sectoral people, and golden years and unity, and traces the implications of these accounts on the affordances and democratic limits of networked platforms. Banal populism seductively captures the shared sentiments of the digital publics much as it portends a spoiling impact on free speech and political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A noteworthy limitation among existing studies on the use of online technologies by political parties is the focus on elections. This study extends the frontiers by examining the extent to which Nigeria's political parties use their websites, as well as Facebook and Twitter platforms to communicate and mobilise citizens during and beyond elections. Using web assessment survey, data collected from the online platforms of registered political parties in February 2015 and February 2017 were analysed—to see trends in online activities during (2015 elections) and outside of elections (2017). The study reveals that the parties are caught in the web of the contradictory possibilities of digital engagement. On the one hand, is an online quiescence in the period between elections, which is premised on poor party institutionalisation. On the other hand, the parties are largely unable to reverse elements of institutionalisation challenges by leveraging digital tools to develop roots in the society and boost their public image. This quandary helps to demonstrate where the Nigerian party system fits in the equalisation versus normalisation debate on the utility of digital tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aims. Conceptualization of technopolitical sphere impact on recursive processes of public policy; defining key problems that inhibit public authorities from improving digital politics stability essential for developing public policy recursive potential.Methods. The work is based on institutional approach traditional for conducting interdisciplinary research about using informational and communicative technologies in politics and governance. Moreover, it is helpful for considering meaning of public institutes in the scope of conceptualization of technopolitical sphere stability and recursiveness as an attribute of public policy.Results. Recent approaches to understanding the essence of public policy define the efficiency of shaping political agenda, developing and making decisions as more and more dependent on expert knowledge and ways of political participation. Based on the recursiveness as a public policy attribute there is made a point of expert knowledge for building and keeping feedback linking between system elements as a key principle of public policy change as an «epistemic thing». Recursive processes progression depends on stability of technopolitical sphere that rests upon quality, direction and dynamics of institutional change, political inclusiveness. As for Russia, building technopolitical infrastructure necessary for recursive processes is in progress now and meet a wide range of political and governmental rigidity, legal framework insufficiency. In order to overcome it, public authorities shall pay attention to total improving the digital literacy, coordination, legal framework update and developing new institutes of digital intersectoral collaboration.Conclusion. In public policy and its actors recursiveness serves as a principle of systematic monitoring politics and governance which defines evolutional dynamics of these processes. Digital politics creates conditions for building recursive processes into the context of shaping political agenda, developing and making decisions. The research results highlight issues significant for contemporary political science in the context of technopolitical national development and can be enhanced with both theoretical and applied research.

Interest groups capitalize on the opportunity to influence salient U.S. Supreme Court confirmations, while pursuing organizational and policy goals and hoping to mobilize the public. We test the opportunities and limits of ad influence on political mobilization specifically looking at calls to action (i.e., donations, contacting senators, and social media engagement). By analyzing responses to real interest group-produced video ads from Amy Coney Barrett’s and Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nominations, we discover ads can potentially influence individuals’ political behavior online and spur offline political engagement. Specifically, we find name recognition, partisan congruence, and positive tone positively influence respondent engagement in calls to action. We find ad format in terms of forced exposure and negative tone decrease engagement likelihood. Our study contributes novel insights into the role of online advertising in shaping political behavior around nominations in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have turned their attention to how the rise of digital technologies is reshaping political life in contemporary society. Here, we analyze this issue by distinguishing between two classification technologies typical of pre-digital and digital eras that differently constitute the relationship between individuals and groups. In class-based systems, characteristic of the pre-digital era, one's status as an individual is gained through membership in a group in which salient social identities are shared in common with other group members. In attribute-based systems, characteristic of the digital era, one's status as an individual is determined by virtue of possession of a set of attributes that need not be shared with others. We argue that differences between these two types of classification technologies have important implications for how persons attach (or fail to attach) to groups, and therefore what kinds of political mobilization are possible. We illustrate this argument by examining contention over the use of gender as a variable in the pricing of risk in insurance and credit – two markets in which individuals directly encounter class-based and attribute-based systems of classification, respectively. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In transitional democratic countries with significant digital media user bases, the “authoritarian turn in digital media” has resulted in new forms of media control designed to counter critical media exposure. This article investigates the ongoing digital pressures experienced by Indonesian media organizations and investigative journalists by the partisan supporters of the country’s new authoritarian political leaders. This article provides a critical review of the forms of media control that have emerged in Indonesia within the past five years (2015–2020), giving special attention to the doxing allegedly faced by several news media and journalistic projects: IndonesiaLeaks; Tempo magazine; and WatchDoc. Applying qualitative methods (observation, semi-structured interviews, review of documents), this study finds that the rise of non-state and societal control over critical media leads to self-censorship amongst media and journalists. This study shows that online trolls, doxing, and hyper-partisan news outlets are used as new forms of media control. Control is also exerted by paid-social media buzzers, whose online identity is established by their use of digital and social media platforms to manipulate information and counter critical news regarding incumbent and oppositional political leaders. This article contributes to the academic debate on the intended forms of media control in digital politics of transitional democracies.

Engaging with the special issue theme of media freedom 'from below,' this article contributes ethnographically grounded and comparative research of two democratic Southeast Asian countries dealing with urgent threats to media freedom and democracy: Indonesia and the Philippines. Our research identifies the main disinformation work models in Southeast Asia, most notably through the use of buzzers (Indonesia) and trolls (the Philippines). Our research examines the increasingly gray area between trolls, buzzers and disinformation, and their increasing relationship to political elites. By explaining recent practices of political disinformation campaigns and journalist harassment, we aim to deepen understanding as to how these campaigns are organized in order to prevent them in the future. This article ultimately calls for a critical collaboration with diverse stakeholders in countering 'fake news' by examining four dominant disinformation work models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 paper offers an analysis of crowdfunding adoption by political party in Indonesia to achieve its funding targets. This study's significance is that it will explore the phenomenon of the use of crowdfunding for political causes, which is an under-researched topic and provide a new contribution to knowledge that raises awareness of the potential and challenges of the use of crowdfunding by a political entity. By having a case study on Partai Solidaritas Indonesia (PSI), which is one of the political parties in Indonesia, this paper presents questions on the strength and weaknesses of PSI crowdfunding campaigns. It then draws analysis on the implications of this funding model beyond political votes. The findings suggest that PSI is not successful in managing its crowdfunding campaigns, and despite a high level of social media engagement, its campaign lacks coordination.

This article explores inclusivity in the context of digital politics. As online campaigns and digital participation become increasingly central to democratic politics, it is essential to better understand the implications of this shift for marginalized and politically vulnerable people. Focusing on people with disabilities, this study applies a grounded theory approach to investigate what factors shape inclusivity in digital politics and begins to theorize this under-researched concept. Through interviews with self-advocates and election professionals with disabilities involved in innovative digital mobilization efforts for progressive US political organizations and campaigns, as well as a review of related strategies, this article illuminates digital inclusivity as a "process" connected to, but also distinct from the "outcomes" of social and political inclusion and exclusion. Key incentives and obstacles are identified, and emerging principles of digital inclusivity that are simultaneously community-rooted and sensitive to the context of contemporary US politics are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A complete analysis of protest activity in the XXI century is not possible without an account of complex interrelations between online and offline behavior of different actors. Social media and the whole internet-space become a placement for new forms of behavior that transform the classical types of protest activity. Digital placements are not neutral to the communication due to specific laws and characteristics of online-interactions that affect the way actors try to communicate in the online and the extent they succeed doing that. This work investigates the influence of quantitative characteristics of text style on communication around protest movement in social media. The set of used characteristics consisted of mean length of a word in a post, the number of words in a post, a fraction of question marks over number of words in a post, a fraction of exclamation marks over number of words in a post, a fraction of brackets over over number of words in a post and a dummy on the difference between opening and closing brackets. Using regression analysis on a sample of original posts published in social media “Vkontakte” in 2018, we found that quantitative characteristics of text style have statistically significant impact on the promotion of the politically engaged posts. However, the predictive ability of these predictors to describe the variation between activity and broadness of protest communication in different context was inconsiderable.

In January 2018, a spontaneous march of young men from the region of Waziristan descended upon the Pakistani capital of Islamabad, dramatically exploding the myths about the so-called war on terror in the "tribal" border zone with Afghanistan. This organic mobilisation became the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM), a civil rights uprising embodying the repressed rage of a generation of Pashtun youth that had come of age in the shadow of violence propagated by the unholy nexus of US drones, the Taliban and Pakistan's security establishment. In this commentary, the PTM's emergence as a response to the brutalisation of Pashtun society on what remains a colonial frontier hundreds of years since the British conquest is counterposed to a right-wing populist upsurge led by current Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, whose primary constituency of support is a myopic middle-class strata in metropolitan areas. This confrontation between left and right populisms reveals growing social polarisation under the backdrop of rapid demographic change in a rentier state dominated by an all-powerful military establishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of Western European countries have recently seen the emergence of 'digital parties'. This term refers to a new wave of political organisations committed to transforming intra-party democracy (IPD) through the adoption of online 'participatory platforms', sections of their official websites where registered members can debate and decide on various issues. In this article, I assess the democratic quality of online participatory platforms in the Five Star Movement in Italy and Podemos in Spain, examining various features embedded in them – discussions and proposals, elections of party officials and candidates and referendums – and evaluating their degree of inclusiveness, centralisation and institutionalisation. I argue that contrary to their promise to introduce a more membership-controlled and inclusive democracy, IPD in digital parties is strongly top-down. What these formations offer is a plebiscitarian 'reactive democracy' where members have little say over the process and are mostly left with ratifying decisions taken by the party leadership. This state of affairs calls for a critical rethinking of digital technology's potential for transforming IPD. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Undersea communication cables are the core critical infrastructure of the digital age. 99% of all transoceanic digital communication—financial transactions, emails, or voice messaging—is transported through undersea fiber-optic cables. The global submarine cable network is a critical infrastructure that does not receive the analytical attention it deserves. We argue that cable security is a core dimension of current and future international security governance. We present the first systematic survey of the academic discourses that investigate the politics, governance, and protection of submarine data cables. Three rather narrow literatures study the cables (1) as under threat from hybrid warfare and terrorism, or treat the cable network narrowly as a (2) technical or (3) regulatory problem. We demonstrate the need for broadening out the research agenda and addressing key questions of security governance and geopolitics of this increasingly critical infrastructure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the last decade, one can notice the huge interest of researchers in the field of cyberpolicy, which is primarily due to the widespread use of the Internet in the public space. This fact is also an impulse for conducting interdisciplinary research that combines knowledge from social sciences on the one hand, and uses content from technical sciences on the other. Compared to the form of conducting election campaigns in the 20th century in the U.S., during the 2016 election campaign there were significant changes in the conduct of political struggle. These changes consist above all in the use of cybernetic tools, which to a large extent, however difficult to determine, shaped electoral behavior. The contemporary political competition is more and more dependent on technology, which becomes the main element of the professionalization of election campaigns. Investigating the impact of cyberspace on electoral results is a big challenge, considering the fact that the area of cybertechnology is extremely complex. Cyberspace has now become a field for many political phenomena that are constantly evolving and in most cases their importance is immense for the functioning of the political system. The article is intended to deal with selected phenomena related to cybertechnology that were compared with other events from the U.S. election campaign in 2016. The article aims to investigate selected events resulting from the use of cybertechnology, which had an impact on electoral behavior.

Commentary: West Papua has one of the most repressive media landscapes in the world. Consequently, West Papuans have increasingly harnessed social media platforms to broadcast human rights violations committed in West Papua. Through this, Pacific Islanders around the region are increasingly leveraging social media as a political tool for showing solidarity and support for West Papuans. As a result, in recent years there has been a regional groundswell in support for West Papuan demands for self-determination, with prominent political figures such as Peter O’Neill of Papua New Guinea, and Gordon Darcy Lilo alluding to the awareness on West Papuan issues that have been raised through social media. This commentary explores how the rise of West Papua solidarity, is resulting in a heightened Pacific regional consciousness at the community level.

Copyright of Revista de Comunicación 'Vivat Academia' is the property of Facultad de Ciencias de las Informacion de la Universidad Complutense (Espana) 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.)

The last decade has seen the meteoric rise of data campaigning as a central concern of political campaigns. This article offers insight into how journalists and political professionals construct practices of data campaigning as all-powerful despite the limited empirical findings to that effect. Specifically, this research delves into how journalistic coverage of campaigns' use of data and analytics has often relied on inflated accounts of the objectivity of analytics, the belief that more data necessarily means more and better knowledge, and narratives of objective outsiders – notably geeks, hackers, nerds, and scientists – that situate analytics staffers as strange and different, and as uniquely qualified to access the truth. To do this, I engage in critical discourse analysis of popular coverage of data campaigning in the US in the years 2008–2016. Ultimately, denaturalizing these narratives helps reveal how they contribute to defining this "new" campaign strategy as fundamentally concerned with finding objective answers to solvable problems and are key to political professionals' maintenance of organizational power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

West Papua has one of the most repressive media landscapes in the world. Consequently, West Papuans have increasingly harnessed social media platforms to broadcast human rights violations committed in West Papua. Through this, Pacific Islanders around the region are increasingly leveraging social media as a political tool for showing solidarity and support for West Papuans. As a result, in recent years there has been a regional groundswell in support for West Papuan demands for self-determination, with prominent political figures such as former Prime Minister Peter O'Neill of Papua New Guinea, and Gordon Darcy Lilo alluding to the awareness on West Papuan issues that have been raised through social media. This commentary explores how the rise of West Papua solidarity is resulting in a heightened Pacific regional consciousness at the community level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Like other political institutions in Canada, the judiciary has entered the digital age. Indeed, Canadian courts have been using Twitter for almost a decade. Despite this, there has been very little systematic examination of how Canadian courts use Twitter and the nature of the content they produce. While digital technologies create new challenges for all political actors, this is especially so for the courts, which exist in a very "traditional and conservative environment". In this research note, we develop a framework for analyzing court-produced content on social media. This framework draws from concepts from digital politics and legal studies. We then apply this framework by conducting a content analysis of tweets from active court Twitter feeds in Canada. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Local power requires a differentiated communicational analysis with strategies appropriate to its context in the immediate scenario which social networks impose on those who engage in proximity governance. In this sense, this exploratory case study arises from an interest in communication as a tool for strategic and political operationalization, at the level of the preliminary diagnosis on digital communication within the Lisbon local government between November 2017 and May 2019. The objective has been to analyse digital data taken from the official Facebook pages of the 24 Local Councils and cross-referencing them with voter turnout data and, in a descriptive analysis of the information gathered, to arrive at an initial interpretation of the evolution of the performance and degree of involvement of electors and voters in digital municipal communication in Lisbon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2012, the Aam Aadmi (common man) Party (AAP) made its debut on the Indian political scene on a platform promoting ethical politics, anticorruption action and active citizenship. Inspired by the AAP's call to "change politics," many nonresident Indians (NRIs) in the U.K. Indian diaspora joined an international network of groups that provided support for the party in subsequent successful election campaigns. This article follows the ways in which digital media played a key role in the formation of intense individual attachments to the party, and how, for some, it became the means through which disillusionment with the party and its project was expressed. By attending to digital politics in the Indian diaspora as it plays out in this relatively recent political formation, we can gain a new perspective on the circulations, connections, and class values through which postliberalization projects to reform the nation are worked on from beyond its borders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this special issue, we examine the two decades of digital media expansion in India, the world's second largest Internet user domain, to propose the idea of "millennial India." Millennial India highlights the processes of digitalization as a distinct sociopolitical moment entailing new conditions of communication, and the stakes of "millennials" who are drawn to digital media to articulate political matters. These processes, we suggest, have led to a democratization of public participation through the self-activity of online users. Qualifying the assumption that participation leads to empowerment, we show that a politics of civic action has grown simultaneously with violent exclusions via digital circulation. Millennial India emphasizes the need to take a contextual approach to global digital politics, and recognizes the continuities in the structures of political action in as much as the disruptions engendered by digital infrastructures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attends to the ways in which user-generated video content presumed destined for online social media circulation polices the sensible and, in turn, is policed because of its capacity to reveal the messy, turbulent politics of the everyday. Focusing on an incident that targeted African students and entrepreneurs residing in Delhi, the article argues that the policing of user-generated audio-visual content of unfolding events in this milieu reveals a politics of the sensible that imagines digital circulation beyond national borders as a key site of contestation and that pushes us to reconsider simplistic ideas that valorize the democratization of representation as an interruption of the social order in one sociotemporal scale. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]