Introduction: Social Media and Civic Engagement

Social media have been praised for their potential for facilitating civic engagement. At a time when one of the most difficult problems facing democracy in the Western hemisphere is the decline in citizens’ participation in politics (Dahlgren, 2009), this potential has been vested with hopes that social media can help reinvigorate extra-parliamentarian political participation — i.e. participation beyond the rights and obligations of liberal citizenship (e.g. voting) — and thus strengthen democratic accountability at national and international levels (e.g. Castells, 2013; Van Laer & Van Aelst, 2010). These accounts have highlighted new possibilities for bottom-up, self-organizing participation such as direct democracy and for bypassing mass media gatekeepers and taking action to address issues directly. At the same time, sceptics have pointed to challenges social media pose to extra-parliamentarian political participation. These accounts have highlighted the dominance of commercial interests, individualization, non-committal participation — or ‘clicktivism’ — and security and censorship (e.g. Dahlgren, 2013; Gladwell, 2010; Juris, 2012; Uldam, 2014).