Digital activism and collective mourning by Chinese netizens during COVID-19

This study examines the discursive practice of mourning and commenting by netizens on the final social media post made by Dr Li Wenliang, regarding it as a form of political participation and competitive discursive politics enacted in cyberspace. Discourse theory is applied to conduct discourse analysis on 4000 comments. We identified two strategies that netizens used to establish an alternative space for discourse. The first involved hidden protests expressed through multi-semantic mourning, avoiding suppression by indirectly challenging official authorities. Second, through engagement with microblogs, netizens applied personalized narratives to form a collective memory and a counter-memory space that departed from the official normative narrative. Discursive activities enacted by netizens stimulated the political agenda of resilient adjustment on the part of the authorities, leading the government to accept and incorporate public demands into policies through strategic rectification. These findings help to better understand the significant power of disorganized connective action that is reliant on affective citizens and the further development of regime resilience on the part of the Chinese political system in response to digital activities.

Black Lives Matter goes global: Connective action meets cultural hybridity in Brazil, India, and Japan

This study examines the global diffusion of Black Lives Matter (BLM) as digitally networked connective action. Combining social network analysis with qualitative textual analysis, we show that BLM was hybridized in different ways to give voice to local struggles for social justice in Brazil, India, and Japan. However, BLM’s hybridization stirred right-wing backlash within these countries that not only targeted local movements but BLM too. Theoretically, we argue that both transnational contiguities and intra-cultural tensions shape the construction of meanings—or “action frames”—as connective action crosses cultural borders. Resonant frames, which are in harmony with the values of the movement, amplify the features of the global movement that resonate with local concerns or hybridize it with a local struggle. Reactionary frames, which are hostile to movement values, may also target the global movement or its hybridization. We theorize the different roles of global and local crowd-enabled elites in transnational connective action.

Rice Bunnies vs. the River Crab: China’s Feminists, #MeToo, and Networked Authoritarianism

As censorship algorithms for digital communications evolve in China, so do netizens’ evasion techniques. In the last two decades, strategic users have employed the language of satire to slip sensitive content past censors in the form of euphemisms or analogies, with messages ranging from lighthearted frustration to wide scale resistance against repressive government policies. In recent years activists have used spoofs to discuss controversial subjects, including the president, violent arrests by the Domestic Security Department, and even the #MeToo movement. In addition to providing an outlet for criticism and free speech, spoofs can also be a powerful organizational tool for activists in authoritarian societies through their ability to facilitate decentralized, personalized, and flexible connective action. This paper investigates how feminists used spoofs for social mobilization throughout China’s #MeToo movement while evaluating potential frameworks for measuring activists’ success against the media censorship and political repression of a networked authoritarian regime.

HOW A CONNECTIVE ACTION IS DISRUPTED IN RESTRICTIVE CONTEXTS? THE CASE OF DISMANTLING #RAPE ON PERSIAN TWITTER

Having reduced the cost of political activism, social media has provided room for ordinary citizens to engage in politics, build networks, spread information, and resist oppressive regulation (Howard & Hussain, 2013; Margetts et al., 2016). The ideas of connective action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) and hashtag activism (Jackson et al., 2020) are recent endeavors to theorize such transitions. However, the existing literature has overemphasized the positive side of social media platforms, in particular Twitter, in challenging inequalities, as well as in giving voice to marginalized groups (Lindgren, 2019; Wonneberger et al., 2020). While scholars, to a lesser extent, investigated how social media are used to suppress online protest from a normative and more general standpoint (Gunitsky, 2015), the ways that a connective action could be disrupted, e.g., by state actors has not received much scholarly attention yet. This has become particularly important in recent years, as several governments across the globe have adopted new tactics to dismantle connective actions, such as the coordinated dissemination of fake news. This study sheds light on such disruptive processes by investigating how a connective action in the Iranian Twittersphere (revolving around #rape , i.e., Iranian #MeToo) was derailed.

SUBVERSIVE COMMEMORATION: MAPPING THE ASSEMBLAGE OF COUNTER-MEMORY ON TWITTER

Beyond enabling participatory forms of memory-making, digital media reconfigure power relations in memory construction. In the Philippines, we witness this through the hashtag network #ArawNgMagnakakaw (‘Day of Thieves’) to counter the heroic commemoration of the dictator Ferdinand Marcos sanctioned by the state and supported by online networks that distort and deny his crimes during his 20-year regime. This case illustrates not only how digital media facilitates the negotiation of memory by non-institutional actors, but also how it sets the conditions to resist elite narratives through non-conventional ways of remembering. This study examines the performance of counter-memory (Foucault, 1977) in the intersection of networked publics, counter-narratives, and technologies of memories. We investigate the hashtag network #ArawNgMagnanakaw by mapping its social network and analyzing its discourses as digital practices (Jones, Chik & Hafner, 2015). We argue that the network derives its power from neither elite nor collective actions, but through connective action of structures, discourses and practices of remembrance. Firstly, the locus of analysis shifts from a single actor (‘who remembers’) to the assemblage (‘what enacts the remembering’) as an agent of counter-memory, with technology shaping its possibilities and boundaries. Secondly, the assemblage’s resistance to elite commemoration surfaces silenced and neglected historical narratives (‘what is remembered’) through affective articulations of protest and subversive commemorative practices (‘how is it remembered’). We theorize the ‘assemblage of counter-memory’ as the connective, discursive, and material assemblage that enact political agency to privilege marginalized narratives and play an active role in the (re)construction of memory.

Membership Matters: Organizing Archetypes, Participatory Styles, and Connective Action

The contemporary communication landscape enables individuals to connect and engage with collective action efforts in multifaceted and ambiguous ways. This complexity makes membership in collective action groups particularly intriguing and important because of its pivotal role as a mechanism that connects individual behavior to group, organizational, and societal dynamics. This study seeks to examine the spread of membership types in the digital environment and explores how different kinds of prompts for collective action are associated with particular types of membership groups. Through a survey of participants on a popular global digital platform for collective decision-making, we found evidence of a broad range of membership types in the digital space, associated with particular prompts calling for action. The results suggest that there is a strong relationship between membership type and participatory styles of individuals. Implications of the results are discussed.

Health-Related Decision-Making of People with Thyroid Disease

Social networking sites have become increasingly important for self-diagnosis and obtaining health information, which are particularly relevant in the context of a lack of care. Their structures can further encourage the politicisation of health topics, as they offer a space for the production of crowdsourced knowledge and the amplification of activist content. Hence, it is important to examine how online discourse shapes the decision-making of specific patient groups. This article uses the conceptual lenses of health activism, connective action, and politicised illness identity to investigate health-related decision-making of people with thyroid disease. Drawing on a participatory netnography within activist spaces and 33 in-depth interviews, the study identifies contemporary decision-making paradigms and discusses the role of connective action and politicisation in this context. A typology based on salient strategic themes of decision-making is proposed. The results provide valuable input for researchers of illness identities, as well as practitioners who need to consider different patient types. They contribute to the study of socio-political dimensions of health and an increasingly important discourse that has so far been under-investigated by health communication research.

Online Donation for Covid-19 as Connective Action in Indonesia and Vietnam

This study discusses how the internet facilitated the online donation movement to help deal with the Covid-19 in Indonesia and Vietnam. The internet has critical roles in online donations by spreading information, connecting individuals, and making an online donation movement. We use the connective action concept to explain how the social movement is developed by connecting people through the loose organizational or no-organizational platform. We find that the internet and social media have an essential role in informing, connecting, and simultaneously being a means of online donation activities of individuals from various backgrounds. In this action, individuals are connected emotionally and encourage their empathy and solidarity across identities. In other words, the online connection encourages people to gather and donate as social action. However, in contrast to the connective action concept based on real (offline) action, the online donation for Covid-19 shows that individuals are connected and act online. Therefore, conceptually, the online donation case could enrich the connective action concept in the context of online connection and online action.

Media Sosial dan Connective Action: Studi Kasus Penggunaan Twitter sebagai Ruang Solidaritas selama Pandemi COVID-19

Tulisan ini membahas munculnya aksi solidaritas di media sosial Twitter. Dengan menggunakan kerangka teori connective action dan efektivitas gerakan di media sosial, tulisan ini bertujuan untuk menjelaskan bagaimana aksi solidaritas di Twitter muncul dan menjelaskan aktor yang terlibat di dalamnya. Selain itu, tulisan ini juga bertujuan untuk menjelaskan efektivitas dari aksi solidaritas. Penelitian dilakukan dengan analisis media sosial dan analisis konten. Penelitian menunjukkan bahwa aksi solidaritas yang muncul di Twitter merupakan respons atas situasi krisis akibat pandemi COVID-19. Meskipun merespons isu dalam rentang waktu yang sama dan menggunakan narasi yang serupa, aksi solidaritas yang dimunculkan oleh individu, organisasi, dan komunitas dilakukan secara personal dan tidak saling terikat secara langsung. Namun demikian, tidak semua aksi solidaritas mendapatkan impresi/engagement yang tinggi. Aktor yang menjadi opinion leader, yang dipengaruhi oleh faktor indegree, retweet dan mention, memiliki pengaruh besar dalam melakukan aksi solidaritas. This article discusses the emergence of solidarity actions on Twitter social media. Using the framework of connective action and the effectiveness of social media movements, this paper aims to explain how solidarity actions on Twitter emerge and explain the actors involved in it. Besides, this paper also aims to explain the effectiveness of solidarity actions. The research was conducted with social media analysis and content analysis. Research shows that the solidarity action that appears on Twitter is a response to the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. Although responding to issues in the same time frame and using similar narratives, solidarity actions raised by individuals, organizations, and communities are carried out personally and are not directly tied to each other. However, not all solidarity actions received high impressions/engagement. Actors who are opinion leaders, who are influenced by indegree, retweet, and mention factors, have a big influence in carrying out solidarity actions. Keywords: solidarity; crisis; opinion leader; twitter; connective action