Digital Activities Research Articles

Unveiling the layers of data activism: The organising of civic innovation to fight corruption in Brazil

Developed by tech-savvy citizens, Rosie is a bot that autonomously checks the public spending of elected representatives of the Brazilian Lower Chamber and uses Twitter to engage peoplein discussing suspicious findings. Rosie is the most visible face of Operação Serenata de Amor (Operation Love Serenade), a data-enabled activism initiative that revolves around the creation, use and dissemination of open data to hold politicians accountable and empower citizens to react against the misuse of public funds. The article draws on an original data set – including interviews, participant online observation notes and secondary qualitative materials – to examine Operação Serenata de Amor, focusing on how material and symbolic elements related to both human and non-human actors shape the organisational patterns of this type of initiative. The findings suggest that there are three organisational patterns, each with further specific challenges, based on the presence of three modes of participation that depend on different types of engagement with digital technologies and data. Findings indicate that data-enabled activism can emerge with typical characteristics and values of tech startups, such as the goal of creating a sustainable budget and providing strategic content by validating it with user feedback, while also retaining some traits of online activism, such as ad hoc and temporal networks of highly autonomous actors concerned with specific contentious issues. In this respect, the eventual demobilisation of Operação Serenata de Amor's initiators due to commercial values and struggles to maintain it active and engaging can be seen as a cautionary tale for data-enabled activism, particularly for initiatives closely associated with civic innovation and social tech startups.

The Impact of the Internet-Based Activities on Developing Grade 4 Students’ Performance in English Vocabulary

The Impact of the Internet-Based Activities on Developing Grade 4 Students’ Performance in English Vocabulary

Upgrade Student Engagement in Online Discussion

This case study specifically examines flaws in the design of online conversations created using Salmon's five-stage model, and highlights how easy it is to overlook key aspects when planning an online campaign. In the case study, the topics chosen for discussion failed to resonate with many students on a personal level. This demonstrates the importance of identifying flaws in the design of online conversations created using Salmon's five-stage model and highlights how easily these issues can be overlooked during event planning. It emphasizes the concept that participation is a prerequisite for community development. This article, therefore, explores how skilled community development practitioners can effectively address and overcome barriers to participation by stimulating personal and emotional interest. By understanding the importance of relationships and emotional engagement, educators can create online activities that truly motivate and engage students, resulting in a more vibrant and engaging online learning community.

Tech worker activism against gender discrimination in China

This article discusses the discriminatory, anti-women workplace culture in China’s tech industry and how tech workers organise online activism in response. In August 2021, an online petition broke out to demand justice for a sexual crime victim at the Chinese e-commerce enterprise Alibaba. This is a powerful example of digital activism leaping beyond the constraints and challenges of labour organising in the global tech sector. The article shows how social media could bring new possibilities to the tech worker movement in both authoritarian and democratic countries.

Regional Youth in Search of Civic Identity: Digital Participation and the Observer Model

Introduction. At present, the tasks of forming civic identity actualize the issues of digital civic participation and understanding the specifics of online activism as a factor and indicator of youth civic identity. The purpose of the article is to build a typology of models of digital civic activism and analyze observational models as a mechanism for the manifestation of civic identity. Materials and Methods. The study is based on the results of a survey of residents of the Sverdlovsk region aged 14–25 years (n = 1 150). The object includes students (schoolchildren, secondary vocational schools and higher educational institutions) and working youth. The use of correlation analysis and the calculation of power-law averages made it possible to determine the relationship between digital participation models and the manifestation of civic identity. Results. A typology has been made based on the status of involvement, three categories have been constructed: observers, doers, digital passivists. Young people include an observer position in the forms of manifestation of civic digital activism. The group of “observers” inside is heterogeneous and can be differentiated by the intensity of the use of digital practices. It is determined that the discrepancy between self-identification as an observer and real practices of digital civic participation create internal contradictions in the formation of civic identity. Discussion and Conclusion. The study made it possible to determine that young people’s identification of themselves as “citizen observer” is a convenient model for them, which allows them to overcome the contradictions of identity and performs a number of functions. The transformation of the position of an “observer” into an interested one and easily switching from an outside observer to an active participant and vice versa was recorded. The results can be used in the development of regional youth pro

E-Engaging on Electoral democracy in Uganda: A Correlational Study

Limited citizen participation in elections, politics, and leadership remains a governance challenge globally especially in Low developed countries like Uganda. Citizens have over time through traditional methods, been encouraged to participate in elections; however, without internet use, no meaningful participation may be achieved. Electoral democracy has been one of the cornerstones of democracy all over the world. Without free, inclusive, fair, transparent, open, and credible elections being conducted, with meaningful representation of the people, the power of the people cannot be achieved. The objective/ purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine the effect of E-Engaging on Electoral democracy in Uganda. This study took both the quantitative paradigm and qualitative approach, thus the adoption of mixed methods research in order to capture the conflicting ideas of reality with more focus on the quantitative approach. A correlational research design was adopted and a sample size of 472 respondents was selected. The Pearson Correlation Coefficient tests were used for the hypotheses. The results show that there exists a statistically significant and positive association between E-engaging and electoral democracy, based on Pearson’s correlation coefficients. The study recommends that there is a need to design easily downloadable mobile applications that can be utilised for online campaigns, online voter education and online voting. These should however, be first sampled like in a university election before being used in a general election to rule out their effectiveness and efficiency. These should also have internal security systems designed for the security of the ballot papers if it is for online voting in order to reduce the levels of voter bribery, ballot stuffing, delayed delivery of electoral materials and vote rigging.

Reconceptualizing Cross-Cutting Political Expression on Social Media: A Case Study of Facebook Comments During the 2016 Brexit Referendum

ABSTRACT Political communication research has long sought to understand the effects of cross-cutting exposure on political participation. Here, we argue for a paradigm shift that acknowledges the agency of citizens as producers of cross-cutting expression on social media. We define cross-cutting expression as political communication through speech or behavior within a counter-attitudinal space. After explicating our conceptualization of cross-cutting expression, we empirically explore: its extent, its relationship to political arguments, and its implications for digital campaigning during the 2016 Brexit Referendum. Our dataset, comprising 2,198,741 comments from 344,884 users, is built from Facebook comments to three public campaign pages active during the Brexit referendum: StrongerIn, VoteLeave, and LeaveEU. We utilize reactions data to sort partisans into “Remain” and “Brexit” camps and, thereafter, chart users’ commenting flows across the three pages. We estimate 29% of comments to be cross-cutting, and we find strong correlations between cross-cutting expression and reasoned political arguments. Then, to better understand how cross-cutting expression may influence political participation on social media, we topic model the dataset to identify the political themes discussed during the Brexit debate on Facebook. Our findings suggest that political Facebook pages are not echo chambers, that cross-cutting expression correlates with reasoned political arguments, and that cross-cutting expression may influence the online voter mobilization potential of political Facebook pages.

The Online Battlefield: How Conflict Frames in Political Advertisements Affect Political Participation in a Multiparty Context

This article examines how politicians’ conflict framing strategies in online campaign advertisements affect citizens’ political participation in a multi-party context. We rely on a unique combination of innovative research methods to do so, including a four-wave panel survey, a content analysis of Facebook browser-tracking data and a mobile experience sampling survey with data donations. All data were collected during the 2021 Dutch general elections. We find that conflict framing can discourage citizens from engaging in low-effort forms of political participation, such as discussing politics, signing a petition and visiting political websites. The results show that conflict frames can demobilize citizens because they lower enthusiasm and are perceived as less informative. Our study provides insights into the potential unintended consequences of using conflict framing as a campaign strategy in a multi-party setting.

“Periods Don’t Stop for Pandemics”: The Implications of COVID-19 for Online and Offline Menstrual Activism in Great Britain

Menstrual activists have long adopted an intersectional approach in their work to reduce period poverty, eradicate menstrual stigma, and educate audiences about health and sustainability. By forcing offline activities to cease, COVID-19 created unprecedented barriers for menstrual activists, including the closure of offline spaces and social distancing. Lockdown, however, provided a unique opportunity to assess the effectiveness of digital activism and created valuable knowledge that will have a long-term impact on the aims and practices of menstrual activists. Interviews conducted with 32 menstrual activists across Great Britain demonstrate that although digital technologies help to raise awareness among more privileged audiences, they are less effective for conducting intersectional activism that supports communities who are disadvantaged by factors such as race, class, or disability. Furthermore, as activists often focus on the material needs of menstruating women and people, relying solely on digital communication considerably reduces the effectiveness of their work.

Transnational Rhetorical Circulation in the Splinternet Age

ABSTRACT The splinternet continues to chip away at transnationally networked publics and reconfigure the digital landscape along national borders. What would a fractured cyberspace mean for conceptualizing transnational rhetorical circulation? How might we rethink our approaches to tracing transnational rhetorical circulation in the splinternet age? This essay begins by contextualizing the infrastructural and geopolitical conditions for transnational circulation, focusing on the implications of the splinternet, and then discusses how we may reconceptualize the notion of place in tracing transnational circulation in a splintered cyberspace. The reconceptualization of place is illustrated with an analysis of how the global online campaign in the name of “stop Russian invasion” and “stand with Ukraine” in 2022 was suspended, repurposed, co-opted, and rejuvenated across the border of the splintered network of China.

Disconnective action: Online activism against a corporate sponsorship at WorldPride 2021

Disconnective action, this article argues, is an important supplement to the logic of connective action, which enables social movements to organize informally online. Through the (threat of) disconnection, members may (re)assert their agency in relation to social movement organizations. In conducting a case study of LGBTI+ community members’ protests of a corporate sponsorship of WorldPride 2021, we establish disconnective action as a particular form of within-movement activism that relies both on social media affordances and the conditions of possibility of hybrid media ecologies. Thus, we explore how individual members of the LGBTI+ community were able to influence the formal organization of WorldPride 2021, as the threat of community members’ disconnection from the event led the organizers to terminate a corporate sponsorship. On this basis, we conceptualize disconnective action as a central means for individual activists to shape the movements of which they are part.

The hybrid political role of feminism on Twitter during COVID-19: SISMA Mujer in Colombia

Twitter proved to be strategic for the dissemination of information, and for the activation of feminist social movements. This article identifies the patterns of representation around feminist movements on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. We analyzed the discourse around a Colombian NGO known as Sisma Mujer, in a corpus of 4415 tweets posted during the first year of COVID-19. The results showed five significant topic categories: gender-based violence, women in peacebuilding, women's human rights, gender equality, and social protest. This activity re-contextualized the online activism of this movement into a new, hybrid role with important political implications for the social movement. Our analysis highlights this role by pointing out how feminist activists framed gender-based violence to generate a discourse on Twitter.

Storying ableism: proposing a feminist intersectional approach to linking theory and digital activism

By addressing ableism through social media and other digital outlets, feminist disability activists share stories on what it means to be human from an intersectional perspective, and their storying is a way of understanding and theorising the world. However, the possibilities of digital disability activism to story ableism within broader feminist debates are underexplored. Storying as an anti-hegemonic approach to theorising ableism further from an intersectional perspective, implemented through an activist-academic working alliance, contributes to speaking otherwise about disability and draws attention to disability perspectives in feminist theory. In this article, I propose a feminist intersectional approach to storying ableism that exposes manifestations of ableism in its intersections with classism, racism and sexism at structural, identity and representational levels. I then argue for digital disability activism as a means of storying ableism, provide examples of such storying and describe the potentials and principles of digital activist storying. While the creation of further theory is central to the proposed approach, the connection of intersectionality theory with ableism and feminist disability theory serves as its foundation. I discuss how linking ableism with intersectionality strengthens the uncovering of ableism at different levels, why studies of ableism should be extended to fields beyond Disability Studies but remain closely connected to disability activism and how feminist disability theory has thus far shaped debates on the dis/ability binary in relation to the gendered body.

Does Digital Campaigning Make a Difference for Individual Candidates in an Open List Proportional Representation System? The Case of the 2019 Election in Belgium

This article looks at the equalization/normalization problem through the lens of campaign spending and investigates the effect of expenses for digital tools on the electoral result of individual candidates in an open list proportional representation system. A multilevel analysis of the campaign expenses of 1253 serious contenders in the Belgian 2019 concurrent federal, regional, and European elections shows that the investment in both owned Web 1.0 media and paid Web 2.0 media does not have an effect on electoral performance. Investing in traditional tools, by contrast, does have a significant positive effect. While most candidates use digital tools, they invest only a small part of their budget in these, which may explain the absence of a digital expense effect. These findings put the use of digital campaigning in perspective, showing that the effect of paid online tools should not be overestimated, and that the role of traditional campaigning is still dominant.

A history of digital environmental journalism at the BBC and the Guardian

Environmental and climate journalism is complex, data-heavy, and amenable to visualisation. The environmental beat was therefore well placed to take advantage of the affordances of emerging digital platforms for news from the late 1990s. This article presents a history of digital environmental journalism at two international and digitally innovative media organisations (the BBC and the Guardian), taking an affordances approach. It argues that the beat can be understood as having four distinct but overlapping phases: an initial phase in which journalists availed of the limitless carrying capacity of digital media; a second phase which maximised the use of blogs and user comments; a third, experimental phase involving digital video and online campaigns; and a fourth, mature phase in which both organisations became more strategic in their digital offerings.

#metoo activism without the #MeToo hashtag: online debates over entertainment celebrities’ sex scandals in China

ABSTRACT Hashtag activism is a common practice of digital feminism to challenge patriarchal orders. As the Chinese government has intensified its control over social media, a notable feature of the ongoing #MeToo movement is the absence of the hashtag itself. Within tightened state control online, how does hashtag activism build upon network connections to continue its impact without the hashtag? In this research, we compare the two largest sex scandals of 2021 involving prestigious male celebrities. We argue that online debates surrounding A-list celebrities’ sex scandals have facilitated virtual spaces for public discussion on structural gender inequalities in both public and private domains, even without the obvious #MeToo hashtag. Consequently, public discussion has popularized feminist concepts to help articulate these events. However, besides online discourse using male celebrity misconduct as a conduit to disentangle the inner workings of patriarchal institutions, misogynistic media practices and decoupling media strategies, like emphasizing the cases’ non-Chineseness, have been equally rampant to divert public attention. This article delineates the latest endeavors of Chinese digital feminism and reveals its promises and pitfalls when rallying online activism without a hashtag.

Foreign experience in researching social and political activity online

Over the past decades, depending on the development of information and communication technologies, the understanding of social and political online activity, its meaning, and research methods have been constantly changing. Therefore, the article analyzes new theoretical and methodological approaches and the results of foreign research on public and political online activity. It is worth noting that today the research interest is sharpened by the involvement of more and more citizens and the continuous expansion of online political participation methods in democratic countries. After all, to the huge list of forms of political participation, it is worth adding those that have become available with the development of information and communication technologies, in particular social media — the distribution of political content and the use of social networks to mobilize other people to solve certain political goals. Many research questions have already been raised in the foreign scientific discourse: conceptualization of socio-political online activity, its determinants, predictors, and socio-demographic presentation. In my research, online social and political activism is conceptualized as a form of political participation, meaning citizen activism whose goal or outcome is to influence political and governmental outcomes. The study examines the activity itself because so far this type of activity cannot be called a practice, its normalization and habituation in everyday life have not yet been proven. At the same time, the question of the future of the digital public sphere and its role in democracy is extremely relevant, because it can develop according to at least two opposite scenarios, which directly affects online activism, especially in transition countries. That is why it is so important to study and apply foreign experience in the study of Ukrainian social and political online activism. In general, the article demonstrates that a large gap in Ukrainian research on political participation on the Internet has yet to be filled.

Expansion of testing, isolation, quarantine, e-health and telemonitoring strategies in socioeconomically vulnerable neighbourhoods at primary healthcare in the fight against COVID-19 in Brazil: a study protocol of a multisite testing intervention using a mixed method approach

IntroductionThe key tools for mitigating the impact of COVID-19 and reducing its transmission include testing, quarantine and isolation, as well as telemonitoring. Primary healthcare (PHC) can be essential in increasing...

I don’t think it ought to be blasphemy: Transing God(s) and post-life gender

A growing body of research has begun to explore the religious and spiritual lives of transgender and nonbinary individuals. Missing from prior sociological research on this topic is how individuals outside the gender binary conceptualize the gender of god(s) and their own genders in the afterlife. Using data from a targeted survey of members of transgender listservs and online activist groups, this study explores two specific religious/spiritual beliefs of transgender and nonbinary individuals in comparison to cisgender individuals: (1) their conception of God’s/gods’ gender(s) and (2) their conception of their own gender in the afterlife. Many trans and nonbinary participants report both their future gender and the gender of any god(s) in which they believe as nonbinary, but not exclusively.

Invest My Idea: A Case Study of Crowdfunding for Startups and Entrepreneurs in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

Purpose: This qualitative study explores the effectiveness of crowdfunding as a financing alternative for startups and entrepreneurs in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), compared to traditional funding sources such as bank loans and grants. Specifically, the study examines the Invest My Idea initiative by Rwanga Foundation, which supports small businesses and startups throughout Iraq. The research aims to evaluate entrepreneurs' knowledge and experience with crowdfunding, identify barriers to promoting campaigns in KRI, and provide recommendations for future efforts.
 Design/methodology/approach: Data were gathered through online interviews with four experts and ten entrepreneurs, analysed using thematic analysis.
 Findings: Findings indicate that crowdfunding holds potential as an effective fundraising strategy for KRI entrepreneurs, contributing to the growth and development of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
 Research limitations/implications: However, various obstacles were identified, including lack of trust, cultural barriers, limited knowledge about crowdfunding, legislative issues, and insufficient government support for online campaigns.
 Practical implications: To address these challenges, the study recommends raising awareness among stakeholders, implementing policy support, and promoting crowdfunding as a widely recognized fundraising method. This research offers valuable insights into the potential advantages and challenges of crowdfunding for KRI startups and entrepreneurs, presenting practical recommendations to enhance campaigns and foster entrepreneurial ecosystem growth.
 Paper type: Research paper