Online Dissent Research Articles

Understanding social issues in a new approach: The role of social media in displacement and resettlement

Resettlement provides both challenges and opportunities to people affected. However, mainstream resettlement studies are typically retrospective case-studies. Such studies can provide insights by assessing outcomes and impacts of resettlement but tell little about how resettlees bargain with resettlers. This article explores resettlees timely experiences and diverse behaviours during displacement and resettlement based on the collection and analysis of 287,921 posts on Sina Weibo from 2009 to 2021. Resettlement in Shanghai attracted the greatest attention on Weibo and it consisted of 47% of total extracted posts and the word ‘Shanghai’ is the top-1 high frequency word. By focusing on resettlement in Shanghai, we found ‘resettlement compensation’, and ‘malpractices and violence’ in displacement are the two most popular themes discussed on Weibo. It is hard for resettlees to bargain with developers and local governments due to applied soft and hard coercion strategies. However, unhappiness and dissatisfaction of resettlees are always suppressed and hard to be heard by higher authorities by following formal petitioning process. Cyberspace, especially decentralized social media platforms, becomes a place for resettlees to share their stories, wove collective memories and initiate collective actions through correlating and retweeting posts with similar content, and mentioning web influencers and super topics to attract attention. Future studies of Chinese political dissent would benefit from greater engagement with online dissent on decentralized social media, especially the comments below a post.

How Exile Shapes Online Opposition: Evidence from Venezuela

How does exile affect online dissent? By internationalizing activists’ networks and removing them from day-to-day life under the regime, we argue that exile fundamentally alters activists’ political opportunities and strategic behavior. We test the effect of exile on activists’ public discourse in the case of Venezuela, through an analysis of over 5 million tweets by 357 activists spanning seven years. Our results suggest that after going into exile activists increasingly emphasize foreign-led interventions to shape their home country politics, focus less on local grievances, and become more harshly critical of the regime. This is partly due to the changes in exiles’ networks: after leaving, activists increase their interactions with foreign actors and tweet more in English. This work contributes to our understanding of the relationship between exile—one of the most ubiquitous yet understudied forms of repression—and dissent in the digital age.

Democratic backsliding disrupted: The role of digitalized resistance in Myanmar

More than one year since its coup, the Myanmar military has neither established effective control of the territory nor crushed online dissent. What factors have enabled the resistance forces to deny the consolidation of military rule? We address this question by building a novel theoretical framework that incorporates the role of long-standing digitalized pro-democracy activism and by conducting a mixed methods analysis that includes an original, largely representative sample of public Facebook posts in post-coup Myanmar. We find that the development of online and hybrid pro-democracy activism against digital abuse and other illiberal policies under previous quasi-civilian governments enabled anti-coup resistance forces to thwart the military's attempt at authoritarian revival in 2021. Our research findings deepen understanding of Myanmar's post-coup contestation dynamics as well as other cases of unpopular autocratization in the digital age.

Dissent as cybercrime: social media, security and development in Tanzania

ABSTRACT In the context of increasing interest in the relationship between digital communications and authoritarian politics, this paper considers the criminalisation of online dissent in Tanzania. Based on interviews with police officers, local government officials and mobile phone users, the paper explores contested framings and understandings of “cybercrime”. It argues that contemporary repression of online freedoms can be understood within longer histories of social and political ordering, whereby understandings and experiences of “security” and “development”, and the relationships they imply between government and citizens, are implicated in the delegitimisation of dissent. However, it also finds that social media use enables and amplifies articulation of opposition to repressive measures and may destabilise the politics of security and development that inform the policing of online spaces and politics more broadly. The paper thus contributes, firstly, to understanding the ambiguous and contingent relationships between information and communications technologies and politics in particular places. Secondly, by analysing debates about internet freedom it offers insights into broader negotiations over politics, security and development, which are in turn rendered more urgent by the disruptive impact of new modes of communication.

Social Media and the Dynamics of Protests

We study the Gilets jaunes movement, which blocked most of France off in November 2018. We first analyze the complementarity/substitutability between the different forms of mobilization and find that blockades were planned online and later reinforced online activism. Second, we do textual analysis and show that online discussions evolved from local concerns to widespread critique. Finally, while the Gilets jaunes refused to designate candidates for the subsequent European elections, we ask whether the movement had electoral consequences nonetheless. We show that blockades boosted the performance of the government's party in its bastions, except when they nurtured further online dissent.

How Saudi Crackdowns Fail to Silence Online Dissent

Saudi Arabia has imprisoned and tortured activists, religious leaders, and journalists for voicing dissent online. This reflects a growing worldwide trend in the use of physical repression to censor online speech. In this paper, we systematically examine the consequences of imprisoning well-known Saudis for online dissent by analyzing over 300 million tweets as well as detailed Google search data from 2010 to 2017 using automated text analysis and crowd-sourced human evaluation of content. We find that repression deterred imprisoned Saudis from continuing to dissent online. However, it did not suppress dissent overall. Twitter followers of the imprisoned Saudis engaged in more online dissent, including criticizing the ruling family and calling for regime change. Repression drew public attention to arrested Saudis and their causes, and other prominent figures in Saudi Arabia were not deterred by the repression of their peers and continued to dissent online.

A chorus of dissent: exploring the aims and audiences of online dissent

In this study, we examined online dissent as expressed by members and former members of a U.S. based megachurch. Our interpretive analysis of the data illuminated three audiences of dissent (i.e., self, others, the pastor) and uncovered three clear aims (i.e., individual sensemaking, community defense, providing corrective direction) of dissent processes in this non-secular organization as enacted online. Taken together, these audiences and aims complicate several taken-for-granted assumptions embedded in current models of dissent processes and extend scholarly insight into dissent in religious organizations.

Employee dissent on social media and organizational discipline

What kind of surveillance of employees is evident today? The rights of employers to police and act punitively with regard to workplace dissent and misbehaviour have become contentious legal, policy and ethical issues. Drawing on survey responses from employees in the UK and Australia, this study investigates the scope and scale of employee dissent in relation to critical online comments and the private use of social media during work time. The findings reveal a sufficient pool of misbehaviours, albeit that they are emergent and uneven. Also evident were some apparently contradictory responses with respect to employer rights to profile and discipline, at the same time as asserting employee rights to voice and private online identities. The findings contribute to knowledge of how much and what kinds of online dissent exist in the ambiguous space between the public sphere of work and the private lives of individual employees and what employers do about it.

Authoritarianism and the Internet

This article argues that Internet censorship is more fragile than is generally supposed and is, in fact, vulnerable to abrupt collapse. The volume and rapidity of online communication renders perfect policing of the Internet technologically impossible. Authoritarian governments are thus forced to rely on Internet users to police themselves in the form of self-censorship. This strategy has proven largely successful—legal ambiguity regarding what constitutes impermissible speech fosters norms of self-censorship. This reliance on self-censorship, however, renders these censorial systems susceptible to shocks. We set out a model that explains sudden breakdowns in Internet censorship that we term “cyberspeech cascades.” A cyberspeech cascade occurs when small expressions of online dissent produce large shifts in public perception regarding the acceptable limits of online expression that are, in fact, inaccurate. Online bandwagons of progressively more brazen speech proliferate into large-scale torrents of uncensored expression, triggering the temporary collapse of self-censorship norms online.

Employee Anonymous Online Dissent: Dynamics and Ethical Challenges for Employees, Targeted Organisations, Online Outlets, and Audiences

ABSTRACT:This article aims to enhance understanding of employee anonymous online dissent (EAOD), a controversial phenomenon in contemporary digital environments. We conceptualise and scrutinise EAOD as a communicative and interactional process among four key actors: dissenting employees, online outlet administrators, audiences, and targeted organisations. This multi-actor, dialectical process encompasses actor-related tensions that may generate unethical consequences if single voices are not brought out and confronted. Appropriating a Habermasian ethical and discursive lens, we examine and disentangle three particular challenges emerging from the EAOD process: lack of accountability and potential opportunism; equal participation and resolution of actor-related tensions; and organisational participation and internalisation of dissent. We show that EAOD can initiate plural dialogue that helps co-construct and balance different voices within an informal and noninstitutionalised context for interaction and public deliberation. We conclude our inquiry by offering reflections on practical implications and a research agenda for further investigation.

Emerging Dialogic Structures in Education Reform: An analysis of Urban Teachers’ Online Compositions

This paper contextualizes contemporary urban teachers’ online dissent in public discussions of education reform in relation to past educational crisis narratives to interpret recent shifts in the structure of education reform dialogue in the United States. It does so by examining the form and content of compositions in which teachers respond to education reform. The analysis is intended to describe the digitally mediated roles teachers are asserting in a complex public debate over the future of education in the United States. The structure and content of education reform discourse has often cast teachers in static roles, which inhibits their active participation in discussions of educational policy. Using Mikhail Bakhtin’s position that language choices serve to stifle and/or reinvigorate dialogue, we examine contributions to online discussions and debate composed ostensibly by urban teachers in response to dominant discourses. The data were analyzed with respect to discursive choices and grouped subsequently as themed arguments and rhetorical moves. We argue that teachers’ strategic responses to education reform challenge stifling truisms that seek to suspend discussion of all other factors besides teacher quality. Teachers’ critical digital compositions thus re-create critical, multi-voiced conversations in place of monologues about school improvement. The online, public compositions point to the dynamic structure of reform discourse that has the potential to benefit those currently faulted for a variety of social problems. Nurturing and even exploiting the dynamic potential of educational reform discourse can create opportunities for teachers, policymakers, and educational researchers to mutually inform one another’s shared interest in educational improvement.

#Ferguson is everywhere: initiators in emerging counterpublic networks

ABSTRACTOn the afternoon of 9 August 2014, 18-year-old Michael ‘Mike’ Brown was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri. Brown's body lay in the street for four and a half hours, and during that time, his neighbors and friends took to social media to express fear, confusion, and outrage. We locate early tweets about Ferguson and the use of the hashtag #Ferguson at the center of a counterpublic network that provoked and shaped public debates about race, policing, governance, and justice. Extending theory on networked publics, we examine how everyday citizens, followed by activists and journalists, influenced the #Ferguson Twitter network with a focus on emergent counterpublic structure and discursive strategy. We stress the importance of combining quantitative and qualitative methods to identify early initiators of online dissent and story framing. We argue that initiators and their discursive contributions are often missed by methods that collapse longitudinal network data into a single snapshot rather than investigating the dynamic emergence of crowdsourced elites over time.

Internet activism and the Egyptian uprisings: transforming online dissent into the offline world

Tim Eaton currently works for BBC Media Action on media development projects in the Middle East. He previously completed his postgraduate degree at the University of Exeter, majoring in Middle East Studies. He is also a former researcher for Chatham House, the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Tim has a long-standing interest in the politics of Egypt, where he worked as a political researcher at the Ibn Khaldun Center throughout the 2005 elections.<br />This article aims to investigate the role of internet activism in the 2011 Egyptian uprisings. It suggests that the significance of internet activism in Egypt in this period was twofold: first, in its utility as a tool for activists to mobilize, organize and inspire Egyptians to take to the streets on 25 January 2011; and, second, in its use as a medium to document events in Egypt beyond the reach of the authorities. Particular attention is paid to the growth of the ‘We Are All Khaled Said’ (WAAKS) campaign on Facebook and its capacity to translate online dissent into the offline world. The transformation of protesters into citizen journalists through information and communication technologies, and Twitter in particular, is examined for its success in challenging the narrative set by Egyptian state media and in providing a window into events for the outside world.

Multiple transcripts as political strategy: social media and conflicting identities of the Moro liberation movement in the Philippines

This article explores the engagement of online new media for political mobilization by movements of dissent from the margins based on a case study of a Muslim minority revolutionary organization in the Philippines. We find that, enabled by hybrid features of online media outlets, minorities use multiple transcripts that target diverse audiences and oscillate across multiple, fleeting representations, narratives and articulations. Our article supports the view that ‘infrapolitics’ (the politics of disguise and concealment that lies between public and hidden transcripts of subordinate groups) is crucial in understanding online dissent. The article argues that new strategies of political discourse foregrounding infrapolitics help minority groups to circumvent traditional barriers of political communication and alter the quality of debate between minorities, state and the international community, and challenge national limits and boundaries.

Three constituencies of online dissent in China

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeKeywords: InternetChinacensorshipdissidentsocial groups

The arts of indigenous online dissent: Negotiating technology, indigeneity, and activism in the Cordillera

The online communicative environment is expected to revolutionize political discourse as it expands to cover underrepresented groups and ideas. In this platform, marginalized groups such as indigenous communities from the developing world can articulate claims, strategically mobilize and participate in the forms of meaning-making that constitute them. However, there is skepticism on the actual value of online spaces in effecting agency in an internet-mediated environment. Using James Scott’s notion of ’hidden transcripts’ and Andrew Feenberg’s ’democratic rationalization of technology’, the paper explores strategic approaches and historical, social, and political conditions embedded in the construction, negotiation, and transformation of indigenous online activist media. In-depth interviews and textual analysis of online spaces were conducted to understand the experiences and online articulations of two indigenous groups based in the Philippines, Tebtebba and Cordillera People’s Alliance with specific attention to the: (a) forms and characteristics of online struggles, (b) dynamics and strategies behind the production and distribution of online dissent, (c) process of negotiation of technological use, and (d) perceived implications of online mediations on group identity, culture and struggle. Problematizing the complex interaction of technology and indigenous identity, the paper finds that indigenous activists’ online media engagement constitutes a sustained balancing act between accommodation and resistance and online spaces are used creatively with reflection on the dangers and benefits of online spaces to the organization and the struggle.

An exploratory study of culture and cyber harassment

It has long been recognised that there are national and cultural differences in propensities to write negative information about others and institutions using the internet. With the Arab Spring, some changes are unfolding with regard to long-held traditions about expressions of dissent. While Western cultures have enjoyed fairly unrestricted online dissent, this phenomenon is quite new in some Asian, Arab and Mid-East countries. An important question that follows is how will an emerging tolerance for online expression reflect in online self-governance? Guided by the GLOBE socio-cultural model, we studied two groups of Eastern and Mid-Eastern college students by having an ‘actor’ invite them to post on a fictitious blog comments about a fictitious organisation that was ‘purportedly’ lobbying to gain prohibitions against ‘foreign students’ from attending universities in the USA, UK, and Northern Europe. We compared these Eastern and Mid-Eastern groups to Western and European groups of students using the reverse scenario. We analysed the data and blog postings and found a significant difference between groups and their propensities to make negative postings on the fictitious blog as well as the intensity of those blog postings. As a result, we propose several suggestions for researchers and professionals to facilitate decision-action.

The internet's political impact and the penetration/participation paradox in Malaysia and Singapore

How intensively a communication technology is used depends on factors other than its level of diffusion. Accordingly, a country with lower penetration levels for a medium may, paradoxically, exhibit more and better utilization of that medium than a country with higher penetration. This penetration/participation paradox is seen in the case of Malaysia and Singapore. Singapore is significantly ahead in terms of network availability, but it is Malaysia that has the more developed political activism online. The paradox cannot be explained by the two countries’ regulatory regimes, which are more similar than different. Instead, the differences can be accounted for by traditional social networks that help to organize online dissent, and the motivation to use available technology in creatively political ways - both of which are stronger in Malaysia than in Singapore. This case study highlights the importance of social and political context in the shaping the impact of new communication technologies.