Feminist movements are currently asserting themselves by the capacity of involvement and aggregation of activists and the public identified with the feminist cause, who have in common both the struggle for women's rights and the spaces where they create existence and attribute dimension to that struggle: digital social networks. The purpose of this article is to understand the communication strategies, supported by dialogue, that underlie this aggregation and sharing of meaning when it comes to feminism and its close connection with the fight for gender equality, the end of gender violence or the eradication of racism. Based on the theoretical review on networked PR (Grunig, 2009; Kent, 2017), networked dialogue (Theunissen & Wan Noordin, 2011; Smith & Taylor, 2017; and networked feminism (Fullagar, Parry and Johnson, 2019; Keller, Mendes & Ringrose, 2018; Araüna, Willem & Tortajada, 2019; Yang, Uysal & Taylor, 2017), we applied content analysis (Bardin, 2006) to publications and digital interactions on two Portuguese feminist platforms. Thus, in an adaptation of the model proposed by Lane and Kent (2018) - Dialogic Engagement Interaction - this exploratory study analyzes the dialogical involvement of Coletiva and INMUNE - Instituto da Mulher Negra de Portugal. The analysis results, however, shows a low level of dialogical involvement between organizations and their audiences and, consequently, a reduced collective force to stop online hate clusters with increasing protagonism and with highly technological and effective modus operandi. Thus, the outcomes indicate that the two platforms analyzed do not apply communication strategies through dialogue, limiting exchanges between the organization and the public to the classic top-down communication option, summarizing the practice of dialogical involvement in social digital media to the publication unidirectional content and openness to comments and other reactions. As for the hypotheses raised, only one of them was validated, taking into account that 1) there was no significant dialogical involvement in the content analysis of the two feminist platforms, and 2) although we were unable to verify in the content analysis of the two feminist platforms, the theoretical review validated the idea that online anti-feminist and hate clusters can be fought by online anti-feminist and anti-hate clusters with the same effectiveness in spreading messages as the former. And here, the networked PR must take the strategic and tactical leadership of the action.
This work also proposes a model for the analysis of dialogical involvement in digital social networks based on the broader initial proposal of Lane and Kent (2018). The model we propose comprises six categories: 1) existence of comment(s), sharing(s) and / or emoji(s); 2) existence of comment(s) and answer(s); 3) existence of dialogue (with the five dialogical principles: mutuality, propinquity, empathy, risk and commitment; see in Kent, 2017).; 4) existence of freedom to choose the theme and the dialogical flow (when both parts – public and organization – are given freedom to choose the topic and flow of dialogue); 5) without agenda or manipulation (when there is no intention to put issues on the agenda, essentially, those that indicate manipulation); and 6) rhetorical (when a persuasion strategy is applied by both parts participating in the dialogue).
An Exploratory Study of COVID-19 Information on Twitter in the Greater Region
