Platforms, Protests, and the Challenge of Networked Democracy

To understand the ways in which the public sphere has become “colonized” by steering media, and fundamentally mediatized, this chapter explores the aggregate effects of two defining aspects of the Social Web—personalization and gamification, as they respectively manifest in algorithmic filtering tools and common participatory features (friending, sharing, commenting, and reacting)—on our sense of the public, on the Social Imaginary, and on our shared repertoire of meaningful social action. Whereas personalization aligns our interests with others like us based on partial data and pseudoscientific proxies, reducing our sense of the world to reflect our “tribal” predilections, gamification privileges our instant, affective reactions, bypassing our more critical, cognitive faculties. When combined, personalization and gamification accelerate our pre-existing tendencies toward imitation and conformity, destabilize crucial boundaries between public and private, and institutionalize market logics within the social world.

The adoption of Social Networking Service (SNS) and other technologies by political activists has been touted as signifying a new era of collective action wherein citizens across the democratic world can use technology to impact the political system and public sphere. Yet, actual network practices vary across cultures. In this chapter, I examine cross-national variation in collective action, looking at differences in collective action between East Asia and the West, as well as within East Asia. I argue that the effect of technology on collective action depends on specific cultural attributes related to social networks.

Perceived as an equalizing force for disenfranchised individuals without a voice, the importance of social networks as agents of change cannot be ignored. However, in some societies, social networks have evolved into a platform for fake news and propaganda, empowering disruptive voices, ideologies, and messages. Social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google hold the potential to alter civic engagement, thus essentially hijacking democracy, by influencing individuals toward a particular way of thinking.

Individuals form political opinions and take action based not only on rational evaluations of facts but also on their emotional responses to information and to political figures. New technological tools are increasingly available to detect, identify, and perhaps even alter emotional reactions to media messages and events. Political messages can be refined and targeted to elicit specific feelings among emotionally receptive audiences, encouraging them to act in particular ways. Audiences’ responses to real-world events can be monitored and perhaps even manipulated on small and large scales, providing an immediate and potentially powerful tool for affecting public opinion. Left unregulated, the political applications of these technologies represent a challenge to individuals’ political agency and, on a broader scale, to the operation of democracy.

How do political communities with politics considered offensive to mainstream political discourse use linguistic and attentional tools offered in digital environments to connect with audiences? By exploiting the myth of the digital public sphere, alt-right rhetoric avoids deliberation by relying on the concept creep inherent in the fuzzy borders of the term “prejudice,” allowing them to claim victimhood and build bridges among otherwise disparate right-wing groups and digital communities at home in the forum 4chan. The alt-right deploys attentional tools in the form of memes designed to make arguments counter to their position seem absurd. In short, the alt-right has created a way of making a simple request for inclusion, say, by remembering preferred pronouns seem like an attack on freedom of speech.

This chapter argues that higher education needs to cultivate a new medium of truth who is capable of critically interpreting and analyzing digital writing environments and its various media content and forms. This chapter explores how misinformation is dependent on an intertextual network of information that moves audiences into third spaces where the ability to stabilize truth and fact are obfuscated and distorted. The author of this chapter uses semiotic and rhetorical theory as frames to examine and analyze the rhetoric of fake news websites and the semiotic structures that make the rhetoric of misinformation possible in digital writing environments. The author then concludes that educators need to teach students how to use rhetorical frames to vet and investigate digital writing environments.

This chapter examines the evolution of Twitter from a platform for sharing ideas to one where users can engage in disruptive, negative, or nefarious activities because of platform features. We articulate this development by distinguishing Twitter’s primary design from its current deceptive use, particularly through an exploration of how users spread misinformation through the platform’s more recently modified features: the Fav to Like button, increased character limit, and the timeout function. We discuss the concepts of dark, gray, and light patterns as they relate to Twitter’s design principles. The resulting definitions allow for a better understanding and an easier detection of manipulative knowledge-sharing, and explore the development of countermeasures.

After 2016, how did antifa become known as one of the biggest threats in America? This chapter tracks data from social media and both mainstream and alternative narrative sources to begin charting the rise, circulation, and velocity of the legend of a thuggish antifa threat. Tracing the creation of the antifa narrative allows the authors to construct a picture revealing how these three particular kairotic moments were leveraged to turn protesters into violent actors threatening democracy, and how left-leaning ideas will always be subsumed or overwhelmed in current media models.

Twitter sends users conflicting messages about civic discourse, privilege, and authority with its World Leader Exception policy, which allows world leaders to violate Twitter’s terms of service. The platform’s World Leader Exception policy is a dangerous rhetorical maneuver in the gatekeeping of civic discourse, breaking Twitter’s culture of use and the norms and values Twitter’s users are accustomed to. Twitter’s interface, in its current form, hides “exceptional” violations of policies, encouraging opacity, inequity, and the civic spread of misinformation. Rather than emphasize inequity in how they apply rules encouraging rhetorical inequity, Twitter should employ technological equity in re-imagining how their interface can acknowledge civic discourse and the World Leader Exception.

Over the past decade, the use of social media and online networking tools has become popular within Indian society and by the Indian government. This research uses social network analysis in order to analyze 20,000 Twitter conversations on two major issues in Indian politics. The first topic is the controversial Foreign Contribution Regulation Act, which has been used by the current administration to strip thousands of NGOs of their ability to receive funding from abroad. The second case study looks at the issue of demonetization of currency in India. By observing how people cluster online based on their ideological, political, and religious beliefs, this work finds that social media tools are a powerful way state governments can more effectively target their messages to groups of interest in foreign nations.

During the economic, political and social crisis in Greece, citizens began to self-organize and, in many cases, replace the state, trying to help their fellow citizens with everyday problems. These new initiatives have a strong sense of solidarity which is no longer expressed by protests or activism, and they use the Internet and social media to serve their purpose: to obtain or give know-how and gather or give help. This chapter aims to present the Self-organized Social Solidarity initiatives in the form they have appeared in Greece. Through their features, efforts will be made to define them in relation to other social structures. Moreover, using data on how these initiatives use the Internet and social media, it will be decided whether someone can talk about digital solidarity in Greece.

Using case studies, this chapter explores the characteristics of digital Chinese feminist activism manifested in the Chinese #metoo movement in a transnational context while accounting for its sociopolitical conditions locally. We argue against the simplistic binary perspective of freedom versus control in Chinese social movements because of the complex relations among the technical dimensions of digital media and the social, cultural, and political dimensions of social media platforms Weibo and WeChat. In turn, we offer a more nuanced picture of how feminist netizens and activists interact with changing forms of state surveillance and information control, as well as a patriarchal and nationalist internet culture and how transnational influences both support and challenge the development of productive changes in gender equality in China.

This chapter examines how members of a political community maintain the boundaries of a group identity through the persistent circulation of constitutive rhetoric. Working from a codex of 380 mentions of the phrase “Founding Fathers” from the notorious pro-Trump subreddit, /r/The_Donald, I detail how members of an online political community use calls to America’s past to legitimize their political identity. Ultimately, I argue that the narrative of the Founding Fathers becomes a way for members to cast themselves as marginalized even while aligning themselves with persons in power.

The extension of digital networks has led to an increased democratization in the international politics and is increasingly providing virtual, yet effective spaces for political mobilization, lending voices to dissent across conflict regions. These digital spaces, while facilitating more effective tools for conveying dissent, are challenging state authoritarianism across the world. Significantly, social media paved the way for democratization during the ‘Arab Spring’ in the Middle East; however, the culture of digital dissent has posed serious challenges for complex democracies like India. In the Kashmir region, the disputed territory between India and Pakistan, social media have played an effective role during recent mass mobilization for ‘right to self-determination’ and growing armed resistance. Censorship and cyber-policing have been adopted by government agencies to counter the ‘anti-national’ narrative being propagated through social media during the turmoil. Frequent Internet bans in Kashmir territory have been widely criticized by international organizations like UNO and Amnesty International as well as by many political analysts across the world as an arbitrary act to sabotage dissent and to serve as a form of ‘collective punishment’ for the people in the region. This chapter aims to explicate on the emerging phenomenon of online mobilization in the region and how social media activism is posing a major challenge to the Indian state in Kashmir. Moreover, it will discuss how the government and its agencies in the region are persistently adopting methods to curb freedom of speech and expression by censoring social media networks, to obstruct and muzzle online dissidents.

During political debate broadcasts, social media platforms allow members of the public to come together to express, in real time, their opinions of candidates and issues. Focusing on the first televised presidential debate between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in 2016, this study explores the ways in which members of the public joked about, derided, and fact-checked candidates on Twitter as the debate happened. We find that the debate audience used the platform mostly to share humorous quips and attack candidates. However, users also shared fact-checks and expressed their dissatisfaction with debate participants, seeking to hold debaters accountable. They challenged not only Trump and Clinton, but also the debate moderator. By challenging facts and making substantive critiques, Twitter users acted as a Fifth Estate.

The opposition to the attempted construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope Mauna Kea in Hawai‘i demonstrates how claims of sovereignty are made through digital composing. Just as the United States imposed colonial violence onto Native Americans and gained political power, so too did it impose rhetorical violence onto Native Americans by gaining power over terms and control of deliberation. The preclusion of argumentative discourse by colonized people acts as the procedural rhetoric of empire. This chapter analyzes #WeAreMaunaKea as a more humanistic form of content management insofar as hashtags allow for greater agency within the procedural rhetorics of online algorithmic environments and demonstrates how Native Hawaiians operate within the same algorithmic procedures that have led to their absence toward greater sovereignty.