Political activism in social media (e.g. of Moscow, Ekaterinburg and Shies)

The purpose of the research is to study the practice of its manifestation in the modern political process of Russia, in particular in Moscow, Yekaterinburg and Shies, based on the analysis of scientific ideas about political activism in social networks. The main methods in the work are the comparative political science approach, case-study and content analysis. The analysis of recent political events shows that modern online technologies and forms of civic participation are gaining great importance in political discourse. With the advent of the Internet, the approach to an audience in the media space and the forms of interaction have changed. There are spontaneous emergence of Internet activism in Russia and the growth of its influence which were described. The role of the Internet in activating citizenship was examined, the main channels / Internet platforms (YouTube, telegram channels, etc.) and their functions in Internet activism were highlighted. It is argued that online activism and subsequent offline actions were shaped by network structures as unique events open to any participant. A study of political protest actions in recent years shows that, at this stage of the developing civil society in Russia, Internet activism, which has consolidated various segments of the locals around solving political issues, contributes to civil mobilization and raises awareness of protests. In some cases, the agenda in the Russian media can be formed mainly due to the activation of the masses in the digital environment. It is concluded that in the short term because of the growing dissatisfaction with conventional forms of political participation, the confrontation between authorities and society in the Internet can create a new political reality in Russia. Protest actions organized using the Internet, previously not frequent, have become very common in Russian politics in recent years. The practical significance of the work lies in the area that the results of the study make a certain contribution to development of the theoretical base of researches on Internet activism.

The History of the Transformation of Internet Activism in Belarus (on the Example of Political Protests of 2020—2021)

The article examines the problem of political participation in the digital environment on the example of protest activity observing in Belarus. It is shown that modern Internet technologies make it easy to combine new forms of civic activism with offline practices through social media and Telegram channels. It is argued that social networks and Internet activism in general indirectly form the political agenda and are significant factors in the creation of public reflection on political processes. New forms of civil interaction have appeared in digital reality, which were impossible without online technologies, and before the surge of protest activity in the post-Soviet space were considered insignificant quasi-political participation of the minority. Whole communicative autonomous systems created in social networks and messenger applications allow political activity bypassing traditional rules and frameworks, which, according to the author, is nothing more than a qualitative transformation and complication of political participation, both structurally and in scale. The Belarusian format of the protest showed that in the current conditions the success of a political campaign may not be due to clear coordination and competent management emanating from the core of protest. Analyzing political cases, it is concluded that modern protest practices, decentralized formed in the network, in an offline manifestation are very mobile and do not require significant expenditure of forces and resources. In conclusion, the author concludes that political participation in Belarus, conditioned by Internet resources and advanced technologies, from 2020 to 2021 acquired the features of a conventional active opposition political movement, although historically, political absenteeism prevailed in the country's civil society. Thus, the events in Belarus under consideration are unique and are a sign of more global modern transformations of politics.

Protest, Internet Activism, and Sociopolitical Change in Sub-Saharan Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa has been the scene of a sizeable wave of social and political protests in recent years. These protests have many aspects in common, while at the same time there is a certain historic continuity connecting them to previous protests, with which they also have much in common. What makes them new, however, is a hybrid nature that combines street protest and online action, making them similar to protests occurring in other parts of the world during the same period. Based on a literature review and field work on three countries, Senegal, Burkina Faso, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, this article addresses some of the main features of what some authors have called the “third wave of African protests.” The study points out how the digital environment is galvanizing a new process of popular opposition and enabling both greater autonomy for actors promoting the protests and greater interaction at the regional level. With the sociopolitical impact in the short and medium term still uncertain, the third wave of African protests is giving birth to a new political and democratic culture in the region as a whole.

Citizens' activity in social networks: factors of influence

This article is devoted to the study of Internet activism, as well as the analysis of external factors that directly or indirectly affect the activity of citizens in social networks. The authors consider the concept of Internet activism, its "actions" in the network, as well as various points of view of researchers in the field of civic activism on the effectiveness of this method of political participation of citizens. The main part of the paper presents the materials of modern research that examines civil activity on the Internet, as well as the reasons for high or low civil Internet activity. Based on the materials reviewed, the authors identify the main factors of citizens ' activity in social networks. In order to identify the dependence of the number of requests from citizens in social networks on other external factors, the authors conducted their own research. The paper uses the method of sociological analysis, namely the calculation of Spearman's rank correlation coefficient, to determine the dependence of the number of requests from citizens of the Yaroslavl region in social networks on the population of the region, as well as on the level of Internet penetration in municipalities of the region. The analysis showed that the number of complaints, complaints about problems, requests from the population to Executive authorities in social networks in the Yaroslavl region depends on the number of people living in various municipalities of the region, as well as on the level of penetration of residents of these municipalities into the Internet space. The results of the analysis also allow us to conclude that the above indicators can estimate the activity of citizens in social networks in a particular region.

Principles of Stacktivism

In this essay a new form of Internet activism is proposed: stacktivism. Building on hacktivist practices, this form of code and standard development as political struggle is envisioned to connect different layers of the techno-protological stack (also known as the Internet) in order build bridges between different, still isolated institutional levels and disciplinary practices such as grassroots wifi-access initiatives, interface design, geeks, computer scientists and governance experts. How do we envision a public stack that goes beyond the structures such ICANN, IETF and IGF that can take up the task to rebuild the Internet as a decentralized, federated, public infrastructure?

From #MeToo to #HimToo in Academia

The #MeToo movement has been celebrated for centering the voice of survivors of sexual violence, and the new visibility that it has brought to issues that have long been of marginal interest to mainstream media and public discourse. In the context of the limits of the #MeToo movement, this chapter draws attention to a different kind of feminist Internet activism—the #HimToo movement in India—which entailed the compilation and circulation of a list of predatory men in academia. Apart from the predictable backlash from anti-feminists that this list attracted, it was also denounced by self-proclaimed feminists for its abandonment of due process for institutional remedies in favor of what was deemed “vigilante” action. In light of these debates, this chapter examines the limits and potential of emerging forms of collaborative feminist activism that seeks to transform violence-tolerant cultures and practices within educational institutions.

Emerging Forms of Social-Union Organizing Under the New Conditions of Turkish Capitalism: A Class-Capacity Analysis

How has Turkey’s working-class movement adapted to the new conditions of capitalism? What alternative forms of struggle have emerged to address precarization under neoliberalism? Providing a bottom-up account of social-union activism based on interviews with union activists, we argue that neoliberal capitalism structurally incapacitates working-class organizing in Turkey through a process of precarization, strongly expressed in the flexibilization of labor and further amplified by sociogeographical unevenness and cultural identities. These challenges are addressed through innovatory methods of bottomup organizing such as white-collar forums of exchange, internet activism, the accentuation of the emotional and gendered dynamics of class struggle, solidarity actions with blue collars, and various forms of street activism.

Las Periodistas Paramos in Spain: Professional, feminist Internet activism

This article analyses how the group Las Periodistas Paramos (We the Women Journalists Stop) arose and developed within the context of the feminist strike that took place in Spain on 8 March 2018 (‘8M’). The purpose of this research is to understand how this community began and its typology, to analyse the selection of digital tools in the process and to outline the strengths and weaknesses of the group on the basis of participants’ experiences. Using three qualitative methods, specifically an interview, non-participant observation and focus groups, the group’s collective work dynamics and its evolution are defined. The results obtained show that this is a community of interest that has collaboratively broadened its initial objectives, surmounted ideological differences, contributed to the feminist movement and grown exponentially by expanding its activities to embrace other Spanish cities and foreign correspondents.

A Gradual Political Change?

In order to understand the contradiction of freedom versus control regarding the internet use in an authoritarian rule, this study is designed to explore a gradual political effect by investigating the agenda-setting effect of internet activism on government political agenda in China from 1994 to 2011. In total, 144 internet activism cases and 526 articles from official newspapers are collected for the analysis and discussion. The results suggest a bottom-up agenda-setting effect from online activism on political agenda, and this agenda-setting effect includes a potential transition from issue level to attribute level. This study also finds that the development of online activism itself obtained a stronger attention from official media, and the continuous growth of activism in forms and scopes generated constant pressure that finally gradually brought about the change of government behavior and strategy.