Fake profiles, trolls, and digital paranoia: digital media practices in breaking the Indignados movement

Abstract

ABSTRACT While social movement studies have long focused on the formation and dynamics of social movement coalitions and “boundary spanning’, much less attention has been paid to why and how social movement alliances break down and dissolve. Expanding theoretical reflections on the ‘dark side of digital politics’, the current paper bridges critical Internet research and research on movement coalitions and explores how subversive digital media practices deepened existing conflicts within the Indignados movement. Drawing on qualitative content analysis of activists’ texts, I outline the specific digital practices that fuelled the unmaking of the movement: trolling discussions, creating fake profiles in order to infiltrate closed groups, hijacking social media accounts, and manipulating voting systems. On a more general level, the paper analyses also how conflicts between activists have been affected by the possibility to capture and ‘save’ internal discussions and to disseminate snippets of them with the help of screenshots. The use of screenshots as instruments of proof, persuasion and manipulation has become a crucial and often underestimated subversive digital practice in contemporary activism. At the same time, I find that activists have developed strategies to cope with digital subversion and to fix broken connections in the name of new political projects, such as Podemos. Thus, the paper argues first, that technology is political and can be used to dissolve alliances and construct boundaries, and second, that the very notion of the ‘political’ should be enriched to go beyond the friend-enemy distinction and take into account forgiveness and compromise.