“BATTLES OVER ISSUES” IN NETWORKED PUBLICS: INVESTIGATING THE DISCURSIVE MOBILIZATION OF THE ANTIFASCIST FRAME ON TWITTER

In this article we explore the discursive mobilization of movement frames within networked publics—a form of unorganized digital activism through which movement organizations, activists, and citizens politicize ordinary conversations by engaging in adversarial meaningmaking dynamics online. Leaning on large-scale semantic network analysis and content analysis, we investigate the mobilization of the frame of antifascism within the conversation that sparked on Twitter after the brutal shooting of a group of African citizens by an Italian neofascist militant in 2018. We pay particular attention to how the discursive mobilization of the frame of antifascism occurs immediately after the shooting and how it evolves particularly in connection with offline protests. Our results shed light on the fluid nature of discursive mobilization patterns which underpin both the identification with the antifascist tradition and attempts to delegitimize this instance of collective action

Exploring Russian Cyberspace: Digitally-Mediated Collective Action and the Networked Public Sphere

This paper summarizes the major findings of a three-year research project to investigate the Internet's impact on Russian politics, media and society. We employed multiple methods to study online activity: the mapping and study of the structure, communities and content of the blogosphere; an analogous mapping and study of Twitter; content analysis of different media sources using automated and human-based evaluation approaches; and a survey of bloggers; augmented by infrastructure mapping, interviews and background research. We find the emergence of a vibrant and diverse networked public sphere that constitutes an independent alternative to the more tightly controlled offline media and political space, as well as the growing use of digital platforms in social mobilization and civic action. Despite various indirect efforts to shape cyberspace into an environment that is friendlier towards the government, we find that the Russian Internet remains generally open and free, although the current degree of Internet freedom is in no way a prediction of the future of this contested space

Digital vernetztes Handeln verstehen: Eine Fallstudie zu #HomeToVote und dem irischen Abtreibungsreferendum 2018

Digitally networked action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) has become a prominent political reality. This article explores the evolution of digitally networked action, considering the Twitter hashtag #HomeToVote in 2018 as a relevant case. The case study features the return of Irish expatriates to their home country to vote in the referendum on abortion rights, since no postal votes were available to Irish citizens abroad. We investigated how actors participated in digitally networked action on Twitter, viewed from three perspectives: composition, diffusion, and dynamics. Through an @-mention network with 7,373 edges and 5,198 nodes, built on all original tweets (N = 33,927) about #HomeToVote, we interpreted the digitally networked action based on social interaction and information distribution between and beyond categorized subgroups of actors during four phases. The early phases of #HomeToVote are related to engagement and mobilization, while the latter phases are associated with experience sharing and solidarity declaration. Throughout the development of #HomeToVote, individuals and organizational actors show collective endeavors to promote digitally networked action, while media actors use Twitter to consistently depict moments of #HomeToVote. The findings suggest that #HomeToVote, as an organizationally enabled advocacy network, has a large political capacity to share communication linkages, facilitate flexible affiliations, and employ personalized engagement mechanisms.Dieser Artikel untersucht den Twitter-Hashtag #HomeToVote im Jahr 2018 als relevanten Fall der Entwicklung der „digitally networked action“ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). In der Fallstudie geht es um die Rückkehr irischer Auswanderer in ihr Heimatland, um an dem Referendum über Abtreibungsrechte teilzunehmen, da irischen Bürger*innen im Ausland keine Briefwahl möglich war. Wir untersuchten, wie Akteure an der „digitally networked action“ auf Twitter teilnahmen, aus drei Perspektiven: Zusammensetzung, Diffusion und Dynamik. Anhand eines @-mention-Netzwerks mit 7.373 Kanten und 5.198 Knoten, das auf allen Original-Tweets (N = 33.927) zum Thema #HomeTo-Vote aufgebaut wurde, interpretierten wir die „digitally networked action“ anhand der sozialen Interaktion und Informationsverteilung zwischen kategorisierten Untergruppen von Akteuren innerhalb von vier Phasen. Die frühen Phasen von #HomeToVote stehen im Zusammenhang mit Engagement und Mobilisierung, während die späteren Phasen mit Erfahrungsaustausch und Solidaritätserklärungen verbunden sind. Während der gesamten Entwicklung von #HomeToVote zeigen Individuen und organisatorische Akteure kollektive Bemühungen, um „digitally networked action“ zu fördern, während Medienakteure Twitter nutzen, um Momente von #HomeToVote konsistent darzustellen. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass #HomeToVote als organisatorisch ermöglichtes Advocacy-Netzwerk eine große politische Kapazität hat, um Kommunikationsverbindungen zu teilen, flexible Zugehörigkeiten zu erleichtern und personalisierte Engagement-Mechanismen zu ermöglichen

Contentious Responses to the Crises in Spain : Emphasis Frames and Public Support for Protest on Twitter and the Press.

This research analyzes how different types of frames adopted by news organizations and social media affected the support for protests against austerity measures in Spain. We pay special attention to the individual understandings of the crises based on materialistic grievances and nonmaterialistic accounts of the economic crises. We identified frames using a supervised approach and a data set of 2 million tweets gathered during the major demonstrations of the Indignados Movement between 2011 and 2013. Our second data set included the news-related content published by the top Spanish newspapers, in terms of circulation, during those demonstrations. We found that support for antiausterity protests was conditioned by understandings of the crisis. Frames addressing the political system were negatively related to the support for protests against austerity measures, as compared with those referring to the crisis as an economic matter. In addition, more challenging and controversial frames generated lower acceptance of the protests among the population than those that primed social problems

Twitter and non-elites. Interpreting power dynamics in the life story of the (#)BRCA Twitter stream

In May 2013 and March 2015, actress Angelina Jolie wrote in the New York Times about her choice to undergo preventive surgery. In her two op-eds she explained that - as a carrier of the BRCA1 gene mutation - preventive surgery was the best way to lower her heightened risk of developing breast and ovarian cancer. By applying a digital methods approach to BRCA-related tweets from 2013 and 2015, before, during and after the exposure of Jolie’s story, this study maps and interprets Twitter discursive dynamics at two time points of the BRCA Twitter stream. Findings show an evolution in curation and framing dynamics occurring between 2013 and 2015, with individual patient advocates replacing advocacy organisations as top curators of BRCA content and coming to prominence as providers of specialist illness narratives. These results suggest that between 2013 and 2015, Twitter went from functioning primarily as an organisation-centred news reporting mechanism, to working as a crowdsourced specialist awareness system. This paper advances a twofold contribution. First, it points at Twitter’s fluid functionality for an issue public and suggests that by looking at the life story – rather than at a single time point – of an issue-based Twitter stream we can track the evolution of power roles underlying discursive practices and better interpret the emergence of non-elite actors in the public arena. Second, the study provides evidence of the rise of activist cultures that rely on fluid, non-elite, collective and individual social media engagement

A customisable pipeline for continuously harvesting socially-minded Twitter users

On social media platforms and Twitter in particular, specific classes of users such as influencers have been given satisfactory operational definitions in terms of network and content metrics. Others, for instance online activists, are not less important but their characterisation still requires experimenting. We make the hypothesis that such interesting users can be found within temporally and spatially localised contexts, i.e., small but topical fragments of the network containing interactions about social events or campaigns with a significant footprint on Twitter. To explore this hypothesis, we have designed a continuous user profile discovery pipeline that produces an ever-growing dataset of user profiles by harvesting and analysing contexts from the Twitter stream. The profiles dataset includes key network and content-based users metrics, enabling experimentation with user-defined score functions that characterise specific classes of online users. The paper describes the design and implementation of the pipeline and its empirical evaluation on a case study consisting of healthcare-related campaigns in the UK, showing how it supports the operational definitions of online activism, by comparing three experimental ranking functions. The code is publicly available.Comment: Procs. ICWE 2019, June 2019, Kore

Systematically Monitoring Social Media: the case of the German federal election 2017

It is a considerable task to collect digital trace data at a large scale and at the same time adhere to established academic standards. In the context of political communication, important challenges are (1) defining the social media accounts and posts relevant to the campaign (content validity), (2) operationalizing the venues where relevant social media activity takes place (construct validity), (3) capturing all of the relevant social media activity (reliability), and (4) sharing as much data as possible for reuse and replication (objectivity). This project by GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and the E-Democracy Program of the University of Koblenz-Landau conducted such an effort. We concentrated on the two social media networks of most political relevance, Facebook and Twitter.Comment: PID: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-56149-4, GESIS Papers 2018|

Networked partisanship and framing: A socio-semantic network analysis of the Italian debate on migration

The huge amount of data made available by the massive usage of social media has opened up the unprecedented possibility to carry out a data-driven study of political processes. While particular attention has been paid to phenomena like elite and mass polarization during online debates and echo-chambers formation, the interplay between online partisanship and framing practices, jointly sustaining adversarial dynamics, still remains overlooked. With the present paper, we carry out a socio-semantic analysis of the debate about migration policies observed on the Italian Twittersphere, across the period May-November 2019. As regards the social analysis, our methodology allows us to extract relevant information about the political orientation of the communities of users—hereby called partisan communities—without resorting upon any external information. Remarkably, our community detection technique is sensitive enough to clearly highlight the dynamics characterizing the relationship among different political forces. As regards the semantic analysis, our networks of hashtags display a mesoscale structure organized in a core-periphery fashion, across the entire observation period. Taken altogether, our results point at different, yet overlapping, trajectories of conflict played out using migration issues as a backdrop. A first line opposes communities discussing substantively of migration to communities approaching this issue just to fuel hostility against political opponents; within the second line, a mechanism of distancing between partisan communities reflects shifting political alliances within the governmental coalition. Ultimately, our results contribute to shed light on the complexity of the Italian political context characterized by multiple poles of partisan alignment

Tracing the Emergent Field of Digital Environmental and Climate Activism Research: A Mixed-Methods Systematic Literature Review

Following Fridays for Future’s transnational mobilization, research into digital environmental and climate activism has rapidly grown. We contribute to the solidification of this emerging field through a mixed-methods systematic literature review. We quantitatively analyze 138 peer-reviewed articles regarding their theories, methodologies, and empirical focus. To identify research trajectories and emerging fields of interest, we add an in-depth qualitative analysis of influential publications. Research interest has grown rapidly and shifted from various areas of environmental grievance towards climate change as the primary focus. The field is driven by theories of framing, connective action, and (in)visibility. It is methodologically diverse, but geographically biased towards the West. Popular approaches include ethnographic case studies and Twitter studies, while other platforms receive limited attention. We diagnose a need for more comparative and relational approaches going beyond individual cases, countries, and platforms