‘Without white people, the animals will go!’: COVID-19 and the struggle for the future of South African conservation

This article examines the potential for online activism to contest hegemonic neoliberal conservation models in South Africa, using the Covid-19 crisis as a window onto discursive struggle. National lockdown measures during the pandemic sent the vital tourism sector of an already fragile economy into deep crisis. Neoliberal and militarized conservation models, with their reliance on international travel, are examined as affected by a conjunctural crisis, the meaning of which was contested by a broad range of social actors in traditional and on social media. In 30 online news videos, racial hierarchies of land ownership and conservation labour geographies are reproduced and legitimated, as is a visual vocabulary of conservation as equivalent with guns, boots, and anti-poaching patrols. Here, hope is represented as residing in the increased privatization of public goods, and the extraction of value from these goods in the form of elite, luxury consumption. In a corpus of posts on Twitter corpus, on the other hand, significant counter-hegemonic resistance to established neoliberal conservation models is in evidence. In their replies to white celebrity conservationist Kevin Pietersen, critical South African Twitter users offer a contrasting vision of hope grounded in anti-racist equality, a rejection of any special human-animal relations enjoyed by Europeans, and an articulation of a future with land justice at its centre. The analysis supports the idea that in the “interregnum” between hegemonic social orders, pathways towards transformed futures may be glimpsed as “kernels of truth” in discursive struggles on social media.

Understanding Political Consumerism, Political Participation, and Their Antecedents

Political consumerism is a form of self-expression where consumers boycott or buycott a brand, company, or a product. The increase in the amount of these actions in recent years has led scholars and marketers improve their understanding of how and why consumers engage in political consumerism and what its predecessors are. By employing a wide scale survey among 360 participants in Turkey, this study presents empirical and qualitative evidence for boycott behavior and investigates how other forms of political participation and individual level characteristics have an effect on political consumerism. Results suggest main reason for boycott behavior in Turkey is due to political reasons and conservatism as an individual level value orientation has a negative effect on boycott behavior. In addition, online activism and voting participation behaviors have positive effects on political consumerism.

Predicting online participation through Bayesian network analysis

Despite the fact that preconditions of political participation were thoroughly examined before, there is still not enough understanding of which factors directly affect political participation and which factors correlate with participation due to common background variables. This article scrutinises the causal relations between the variables associated with participation in online activism and introduces a three-step approach in learning a reliable structure of the participation preconditions’ network to predict political participation. Using Bayesian network analysis and structural equation modeling to stabilise the structure of the causal relations, the analysis showed that only age, political interest, internal political efficacy and no other factors, highlighted by the previous political participation research, have direct effects on participation in online activism. Moreover, the direct effect of political interest is mediated by the indirect effects of internal political efficacy and age via political interest. After fitting the parameters of the Bayesian network dependent on the received structure, it became evident that given prior knowledge of the explanatory factors that proved to be most important in terms of direct effects, the predictive performance of the model increases significantly. Despite this fact, there is still uncertainty when it comes to predicting online participation. This result suggests that there remains a lot to be done in participation research when it comes to identifying and distinguishing factors that stimulate new types of political activities.

Algorithmic Opportunity Structures and the Dynamics of Online Activism: Far-Right Mobilization on Facebook

This paper introduces the concept of algorithmic opportunity structures to explore how the efficacy of online activism is contingent on the interaction between algorithms, activists, and audiences. In particular, I examine how far-right actors have gamed ranking and recommendation algorithms by producing content designed to generate high engagement rates. This tactic attracts algorithmic amplification, increasing their visibility and reach on social media. I consider the case of Britain First, a far-right, anti-Muslim movement that used Facebook to rapidly build the largest audience of any political organization in the United Kingdom. I use digital trace data, time series analysis, and topic modeling to study Britain First’s activity, recruitment, and support on Facebook. I identify dynamic equilibria indicative of algorithmically-mediated feedback loops, highlighting how variation in these processes is largely a function of user engagement. The content of the group’s posts and exogenous events, including elections and terrorist attacks, are also associated with short-term fluctuations in online mobilization. The results suggest that Britain First’s success is attributable to its exploitation of Facebook’s algorithms, demonstrating how technological assemblages designed and controlled by corporations can structure political competition and moderate opportunities for activism.

Role and Features of Youth Political Online Activism in Modern Russia

The presented article is a study dealing with the role and characteristics of youth political online activism in modern Russia. The relevance, main aspects and criteria of the effectiveness of youth policy in the field of communication are considered. There are following basic steps suggested: to improve the effectiveness of such communication associated with a clear articulation of the needs of various groups of people through competent socio-political monitoring with independent quantitative and qualitative research. Building a constructive dialogue to promote positive, constructive and conventional activation of the political behavior of youth groups; work to overcome the apolitical and absentee tendencies of young people, as well as the expansion of the political and managerial concept of Electronic state not only formally, but also substantively, are among these steps. Further, the study analyzes the structure of protest behavior, distinguishes several levels of protest consideration, each of which has its own specifics and features for the analysis. This is the level of deep reasons and specific motive for the emergence of a public protest; the level of the dominant style of public manifestation of any protest moods, which has its basis in the predominantly psycho-emotional sphere; and, finally, the level of peculiarities of political behavior with very specific tactics and strategies of protest behavior. It draws attention to the fact that youth as a social group is heterogeneous and it seems appropriate to divide its age structure into three stages (from 14 to 20, years old, from 21 to 24 years old, and from 25 to 30 years old). The final part of the article deals with the models of virtual protest behavior. The model of a complete unstructured protest is highlighted; activity-target co-optation; proactive-loyalist; adaptation and frustration; politicized civil and local models. The results obtained to date make it possible to record the essential features of online mobilization, both based on the features of the functioning of the virtual space, and from the point of view of the main object of research: youth and the specifics of its identity and algorithms of political behavior. All this allows us to speak about the relevance of the constructed classification models for various mobilization mechanisms, which determines the practical significance of the study.

Between Horizontality and Centralisation: Organisational Form and Practice in the Finns Party

This article provides the first comprehensive analysis of the Finns Party’s (Perussuomalaiset [PS]) formal organisation and how it operates in practice. Following the framework of this thematic issue, to what extent does the PS’s organisation follow the mass-party model and how centralised is the party in its internal decision-making? Analysis of party documents, association registries, and in-depth interviews with 24 party elite representatives reveal that the PS has developed a complex organisational structure and internal democracy since 2008. However, the power of members in regard to the party’s internal decision-making remains limited, despite the party’s leadership having facilitated a more horizontal and inclusionary organisational culture after 2017. The study reveals how the party combines radically democratic elements of its leadership selection and programme development with a very high level of centralisation of formal power in the party executive, and how the party organisationally relies on a vast and autonomous but heterogeneous network of municipal associations. The article also discusses how PS elites perceive the advantages of having a wide and active organisation characterised by low entry and participation requirements, and how party-adjacent online activism both complements and complicates the functioning of the formal party organisation.

Global South tightens social media grip amid protests

Significance Civil society actors routinely use social media to spread content that fuels anti-government sentiment, to organise demonstrations and to document and amplify protest actions. Across the Middle East, Africa, South Asia and South-east Asia, repressive governments are tightening controls over these platforms, most recently under the guise of tackling COVID-19-related disinformation. Impacts Most Middle Eastern states will intensify surveillance of online discourse. African governments will routinely ban and throttle social media and shut down the internet, primarily by pressuring telecoms firms. South-east Asian governments will control online activism through new laws on ‘fake news’ and lean on telecoms firms to comply. South Asian governments favour a combination of new laws on online content and business regulations to control social media activity.

Media Control and Citizen-Critical Publics in Russia: Are Some “Pigs” More Equal Than Others?

Amid the intensification of state control over the digital domain in Russia, what types of online activism are tolerated or even endorsed by the government and why? While entities such as the Anti-Corruption Foundation exposing the state are silenced through various tactics such as content blocking and removal, labelling the foundation a “foreign agent,” and deeming it “extremist,” other formations of citizens using digital media to expose “offences” performed by fellow citizens are operating freely. This article focuses on a vigilante group targeting “unscrupulous” merchants (often ethnic minorities and labour migrants) for the alleged sale of expired produce—the Hrushi Protiv. Supported by the government, Hrushi Protiv participants survey grocery chain stores and open-air markets for expired produce, a practice that often escalates into violence, while the process is filmed and edited to be uploaded to YouTube. These videos constitute unique media products that entertain the audience, ensuring the longevity of punitive measures via public exposure and shaming. Relying on Litvinenko and Toepfl’s (2019) application of Toepfl’s (2020) “leadership-critical,” “policy-critical,” and “uncritical” publics theory in the context of Russia, this article proposes a new category to describe state-approved digital vigilantes—citizen-critical publics. A collaboration with such publics allows the state to demonstrate a façade of civil society activism amid its silencing; while state-approved participants gain financial rewards and fame. Through Foucauldian discourse analysis, the article reveals that vulnerable groups such as labour migrants and ethnic minorities could fall victim to the side effects of this collaboration.