The ‘proper’ way to spread ideas through social media: exploring the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms as perceived by Italian activists

Social media have become a relevant arena for different forms of civic engagement and activism. This article focuses on the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms as they are perceived by Italian activists. Instead of focusing on single protest movements, or on single platforms, we adopt a media ecological approach and consider a variety of environments where people can choose to express protest‐related content. Our main goal is to explore whether, and how, the affordances and constraints of different social media platforms are perceived by users, and how such perceived differences are integrated in everyday social media activities. To this end, we combined in‐depth interviews with an adapted version of the cognitive walkthrough and thinking aloud techniques. Respondents reported that they act on social media platforms according to specific representations of what each platform ‘is’, and how it works. Such perceptions affect users’ protest‐related social media practices. Although they perceive major social media platforms filtering strategies and are aware, to different extents, of their commodified nature, they report continuing to use them for activism‐related communication, often adopting an instrumental approach.     

Decisions to Make a Difference: The Role of Efficacy in Moderate Student Activism

Radical student protest has declined in the USA since the 1960s, but less militant forms of campus activism have continued to be a substantial part of larger social movement efforts. However, little research examines participation by today's youth in these moderate campus-based social movement organizations. This study addresses our lack of knowledge about less sensational forms of student activism with fieldwork and semi-structured interviews that illuminate the reasons for undergraduate participation in a student-led environmental group. The data show how school and employment considerations, career goals and social networks influence student decisions to join the organization. Moreover, the findings demonstrate the importance of organizational outcomes to participatory decisions. Students were led to actively participate according to their determination of the social movement organization's ability to achieve tangible goals and the perceived necessity of their contribution.     

Survivor: spectators and gladiators in the US environmental movement, 2000–2010

What motivates people to participate in which forms of environmental activism? To address this question, we revise empirical models examining environmental activism by disaggregating the outcome variable of movement participation and dichotomizing two key motivational factors. Using repeated cross-sectional data from the US General Social Survey of 2000 and 2010, this study conducts logistic regression of four forms of participation on perceived severity and sense of efficacy, while accounting for biographical availability and political engagement. Results from regression analysis show that vocabularies of motive have substantial impacts on an individual’s likelihood of: (1) signing a petition; (2) giving money; (3) joining a group; and (4) joining a protest or demonstration. Their effects are large enough to override the noticeable impacts of liberalism and education. This study also finds that the level of participation in the movement across all forms has decreased between 2000 and 2010. These findings direct our attention to the limited capacity of the public sphere to accommodate the environmental movement during the last decade, as well as to potential changes in environmental activism in the coming decades that may mobilize those previously less likely to participate.     

Environmental protest in New Zealand (1997–2010)

Protest actions are an important indicator of public concern, raising awareness and highlighting perceived failings in administrative practices. With increasing prominence of environmental challenges there has been a move for states to incorporate stakeholders, potentially reducing the need for such confrontational actions. This article uses protest event analysis and case comparison to examine the scale and character of environmental protest actions in New Zealand from 1997–2010. This period was one of relative socio‐economic stability, coupled with growing awareness of environmental challenges. The article considers the relative level of action of grassroots groups and more formalized NGOs, asking which issues generated protest actions and which factors contributed to environmental campaign outcomes. The findings suggest that, although protest actions can strengthen campaigns, the outcomes ultimately remain heavily dependent on the priorities of the state.     

“I Will Be Out There Every Day Strong!” Protest Policing and Future Activism Among Ferguson and Baltimore Protesters

An established body of literature shows that people engage in protest events for a number of reasons, including grievances, collective identity, increased efficacy, and emotions. However, it is unclear what happens to individuals’ motivation toward protest participation as they experience the reality of repressive policing. This study contributes to the theoretical body of knowledge of protest policing and social movements by investigating the microlevel processes that affect protest participation. Specifically, we build from the insights of previous research by examining how 102 Ferguson and Baltimore protesters with varying levels of commitment—revolutionary, intermittent, tourist—experienced repressive policing and how such tactics affected their subsequent decision to engage in future activism. Our findings suggest that those with the strongest commitment toward protest goals experienced the most repressive tactics, and yet did not seem to be deterred in their motivation to be engaged in future protests. In contrast, while repressive tactics appeared to deter the less committed individuals from street protests, they remained motivated to engage in other forms of civic engagement.     

Party activism: the permeability of the asylum protest arena in Austria

ABSTRACT

This article contributes to the growing field of studies on party–protest linkages that highlight the dynamic nature, complementarity and fuzziness of the parliamentary arena and protest arena. Taking the policy field of asylum, it investigates, first, the conditions for the permeability of the protest arena for party activism and, second, the ways in which party activism shapes and transforms the protest arena. The empirical observations refer to Austria, which has a political framework with highly politicized immigration, strong political parties and a weak protest culture. Methodologically, the paper combines a protest event analysis with two in–depth case studies on protests. The authors argue that the openness of the asylum protest arena for parties is characterized by modest protest demands, and depends on the dominant political position as well as the decision making structure regarding the protest issue. The article demonstrates that pro-asylum protests are less open to political parties than anti-asylum protests, which are in tune with the dominant political position on asylum in Austria. The findings also show that anti–asylum protests are not only more likely to attract the involvement of political parties, but also tend to become instrumentalized for party–competitive ends. Pro–asylum protests, in contrast, keep their substantive, grievance–focused orientation even when political parties step in.     

WHEN A WAR IS NOT A WAR:

In this article I juxtapose American media coverage of the Gulf war and the war on abortion in 1991 to trace the meanings and possibilities for identity and activism mobilized by both. While the two wars seem unrelated, I examine the techniques through which the news coverage of both marginalized social protest and women's place within the national imaginary. In the news, protesters and women were positioned outside the sphere of normal politics and reasonable opinion. In this way, the news created a mythic community of "people like us" in opposition to women and activists. Through this marginalization of protest, broadcast news contained the threat of activism to the national imaginary of the United States in both conflicts.     

Communicating Global Activism

Many observers doubt the capacity of digital media to change the political game. The rise of a transnational activism that is aimed beyond states and directly at corporations, trade and development regimes offers a fruitful area for understanding how communication practices can help create a new politics. The Internet is implicated in the new global activism far beyond merely reducing the costs of communication, or transcending the geographical and temporal barriers associated with other communication media. Various uses of the Internet and digital media facilitate the loosely structured networks, the weak identity ties, and the patterns of issue and demonstration organizing that define a new global protest politics. Analysis of various cases shows how digital network configurations can facilitate: permanent campaigns; the growth of broad networks despite relatively weak social identity and ideology ties; transformation of individual member organizations and whole networks; and the capacity to communicate messages from desktops to television screens. The same qualities that make these communication-based politics durable also make them vulnerable to problems of control, decision-making and collective identity.     

Disability activism in the new media ecology: campaigning strategies in the digital era

This article examines the changing nature of disability activism through the influence of social media. As disabled people in the United Kingdom have been subjected to acute austerity, this has coincided with a new era of disability activism channelled through increased social media participation. Drawing on the analysis of one group’s online activities and a qualitative content analysis of disability protest coverage in traditional news media during the 2012 Paralympic Games, this article positions this shift in the broader framework of ‘new media ecology’. We explore how emerging structures of disability activism have begun to offer a more visible profile to challenge government policy and negative stereotypes of disabled people. This highlights the usefulness of campaigning strategies for generating favourable news coverage for disability protest.     

#IAmNotAfraidToSayIt: stories of sexual violence as everyday political speech on Facebook

ABSTRACT

The debate about the power and influence of networked publics often focuses on large-scale political events, activist campaigns and protest activity – the more visible forms of political engagement. On the other hand, digitally mediated activism is often questioned and sometimes derided as a lesser form of dissent, as it is easier to engage in, highly affective, and offers few assurances of sustainability of the change it calls for. But what about everyday political speech online, where social media platforms can contribute to a personalisation of politics? Can social media users express their views online and make a difference? This paper analyses around 3500 Facebook posts stemming from the #ЯНеБоюсьСказати (Ukrainian for #IAmNotAfraidToSayIt) online campaign that was started in the Ukrainian segment of Facebook in July 2016 by a local activist to raise awareness of how widespread sexual violence and sexual harassment are in the Ukrainian society. The paper argues that networked conversations about everyday rights and affective stories about shared experiences of injustice, underpinned by the affordances of social media platforms for sharing and discussing information and participating in everyday politics, can emerge as viable forms of networked feminist activism and can have real impact on the discursive status quo of an issue, both in the digital sphere and beyond it.     

Why are migrant campaigns different from homeland campaigns? Understanding belonging in context among UK‐Sudanese activists

Migrant communities' homeland‐oriented political campaigns are always related to, but often different from, the activism in which local people engage in their homeland setting. In seeking to understand the observed disparities between migrant campaigns and homeland activism, several studies have demonstrated the influence of contextual factors like political opportunity structures on homeland‐oriented migrant politics. Complementing these studies are works that focus on changes to identity and belonging associated with migration and resettlement. In this article, I build on these debates by offering a combined analysis of the intersections between, and interplay of, contextual and identity‐based factors. I use this analytical approach to examine the case of Sudanese political activists resident in the UK. I demonstrate how forms of belonging emerge here as part of – and not in isolation from – the strategic navigations of multiple political contexts and opportunities. In doing so, I contribute to our understanding of how belonging can be contextualized to serve as an analytical lens for understanding homeland‐oriented migrant activism.     

Demonstrating in the internet age: a test of Castells’ theory

ABSTRACT

Some social movements researchers argue that the Internet globalises protest and equalises cross-national inequalities in opportunities for activism. Critics warn against such techno-optimism, highlighting continued individual-level inequalities and country-level variation in protest participation. In this paper, we operationalise Manuel Castells’ theory of social movement development to test the extent to which contemporary demonstrators share the characteristics of global activists. We also examine how country-level economic and political institutions affect levels of protest and moderate the relationship between individual-level predictors and activism. We find support for Castells’ contention that use of online media is a significant predictor of protest. However, we also find that having a sense of global connectedness does not significantly affect one’s likelihood of engaging in demonstrations. Protest participation continues to be stratified by traditional markers of social privilege including education and gender. Moreover, national political and economic contexts have independent effects on protest and moderate how individual-level political and economic grievances affect civic engagement.     

Protest camps: an emerging field of social movement research

Recently protest camps have emerged around the world as a highly visible form of protest. Part and parcel of new social movement activism for over 40 years, they are important sites and catalysts for identity creation, expression, political contention and incubators for social change. While research has punctually addressed individual camps, there is lack of comparative and comprehensive research that links historic and contemporary protest camps as a unique area of interdisciplinary study. Research on the phenomenon to date has remained punctual and case based. This paper proposes to study protest camps as a distinct new field of research in social movement studies. Existing literature is critically reviewed and framed in three thematic clusters of spatiality, affect and autonomy. On the basis of this review the paper develops a research approach based on the analysis of infrastructures used to make protest camps. We contest that an infrastructural analysis highlights protest camps as a unique organizational form and transcends the limits of case‐based research while respecting the varying contexts and trajectories of protest camps.     

I Was a Teenage Vegan: Motivation and Maintenance of Lifestyle Movements

Recent research has pointed to the rise of socially conscious consumption and of lifestyle movements or social movements that focus on changing one's everyday lifestyle choices as a form of protest. Much of this research addresses how adults maintain socially conscious consumption practices. Using interviews with youths who are vegan—strict vegetarians who exclude all animal products from their diet and lifestyle—I isolate the factors influencing recruitment into and retention of veganism as a lifestyle movement. I show that initial recruitment requires learning, reflection, and identity work, and that subsequent retention requires two factors: social support from friends and family, and cultural tools that provide the skills and motivation to maintain lifestyle activism. I also show how participation in the punk subculture further facilitated these processes. This work contributes to studies of youth subcultures and social movements by showing how the two intersect in lifestyle movement activism.     

Dissecting the Conditions of Political Protest. An Exploration of Interaction Effects in the Explanation of Political Protest

This study addresses the conditions for the participation in protest activities. Starting from social psychological value expectancy theory and the theory of collective action, we study the effects of political discontent, perceived political influence (efficacy), norms to participate, identity, and membership in protest encouraging networks (“social incentives”) on protest. This study challenges the common assumption that these factors have additive effects only and provides a detailed analysis of interaction effects. Another contribution is the theoretical derivation of interaction effects. Our empirical analyses refer to the protests in Leipzig (East Germany) in 1989 under communist rule. Two‐way interactions are found between the following pairs of variables: discontent, influence, and norms. “Identity” (i.e., identification with West Germany) only interacts with discontent. Furthermore, identification is a surrogate for discontent: If identification is strong, discontent no longer influences protest. If identification is weak, increasing discontent raises protest.     

Workers’ rights defence on China's internet: an analysis of actors

The discourse of ‘rights defence’ (weiquan), referring to the grassroots’ struggle for legal redress after their lawful interests are encroached upon, has gained increasing popularity in China in the last two decades. Given the ubiquity of the Internet nowadays, rights defence activities also take place online; in a small number of cases, they develop into a form of online activism. But what determines or contributes to the online visibility of some rights defence cases and the invisibility of others? In this paper, we investigate this by examining three highly visible workers’ rights defence campaigns in comparison with three similar cases that received almost no attention. Analysing the various actors involved, we argue that online rights defence tends to become visible and develop into online activism when one key actor, the state, which ought to be an impartial source of justice, is perceived to be collusive or to be playing an active role in the encroachment of people's rights and interests.     

Youth,activism, and social movements

There has been considerable debate over the extent and role of young people's political participation. Whether considering popular hand‐wringing over concerns about declines in young people's institutional political participation or dismissals of young people's use of online activism, many frame youth engagement through a “youth deficit” model that assumes that adults need to politically socialize young people. However, others argue that young people are politically active and actively involved in their own political socialization, which is evident when examining youth participation in protest, participatory politics, and other forms of noninstitutionalized political participation. Moreover, social movement scholars have long documented the importance of youth to major social movements. In this article, we bring far flung literatures about youth activism together to review work on campus activism; young people's political socialization, their involvement in social movement organizations, their choice of tactics; and the context in which youth activism takes place. This context includes the growth of movement societies, the rise of fan activism, and pervasive Internet use. We argue that social movement scholars have already created important concepts (e.g., biographical availability) and questions (e.g., biographical consequences of activism) from studying young people and urge additional future research.     

HOW DO POLITICAL OPPORTUNITIES MATTER FOR SOCIAL MOVEMENTS?: Political Opportunity,Misframing, Pseudosuccess,and Pseudofailure

A longitudinal case study of Korean white-collar labor movements, which newly thrived in the democratizing atmosphere after the 1987 June Democratic Struggle, confirms that political opportunity is an important external factor that impels movement dynamics toward political protest and interunion solidarity. However, the impact of political opportunity is more complicated than the political process model suggests. First, it is not objective but perceived opportunity that is causal for movement dynamics: Opportunity is filtered through participants' interpretations, which shape their responses to it. The effect of political opportunity is mediated by participants' subjective conclusion (often inaccurate) that a movement goal has been promoted or obstructed by a particular source (source attribution). Without this framing mediation, the impact of political opportunity remains indeterminate, as a single opportunity structure may produce disparate movement dynamics and, conversely, movements may mobilize under both contracting and expanding opportunities. Second, the causal impact of perceived opportunity–whether perceived contraction or expansion–is contextually specific and contingent. When union members consider their attempts to achieve goals a failure and ascribe the failure to government intransigence, anti-government sentiments facilitate political protest. In contrast, success attributed to the efficacy of collective action nurtures solidarity consciousness and labor collectivity. In either event, movement dynamics improve.     

Undercover policing and the spectre of ‘domestic extremism’: the covert surveillance of environmental activism in Britain

The spectre of environmental ‘domestic extremism’ has long been postulated by police leaders and security analysts in Britain. It is a narrative that has justified the commitment of enormous amounts of government resources towards police intelligence work directed at non-violent direct action campaigns. Most controversially, this has included the long-term infiltration of environmental (and other) activist groups by undercover police. This article provides a critical analysis of the justifications put forward in support of the covert surveillance of environmental activists in Britain. The paper proceeds by way of a single case study – a high profile, environmental direct action protest in the north of England – in order to reveal the levels of abuse, manipulation and deception at the basis of undercover protest policing. Through their court case, the activists involved with this action were able to obtain rare insights into the police authorisation documents for the undercover operation that had led to their arrests. An analysis of these documents provides us with a glimpse of the contradictory justifications given by senior police officers for infiltration – now under scrutiny by a public inquiry.     

DOES ANTIREGIME ACTION UNDER COMMUNIST RULE AFFECT POLITICAL PROTEST AFTER THE FALL?

This article addresses the effects of political protest at a certain time on the actors' protest at a later time. I argue that if there is an effect it is indirect: political protest leads to a change in certain variables that affect participation at a later time. In a first step, these variables are specified, based on previous research. It is assumed that public goods preferences (i.e., political, economic, social discontent, and political alienation), weighted by perceived personal influence, a felt obligation to protest, and integration into protest-promoting networks are the major causes for participation in political protest. In a next step, I propose a theory specifying the effects of protest participation on these variables. The hypotheses are tested by panel data collected in Leipzig (East Germany) referring to the situations of 1989 and 1993. The most important results are that participation in antiregime action in 1989 led to political, social, and economic satisfaction and increased perceived political influence in 1993. There were no effects of participation in the protests in 1989 on accepting felt obligations to protest and on integration into protest-promoting networks in 1993.