(ITD3b) Internet, Technology, & Social Movements II

The session offers an insightful exploration into the complex relationship between digital media and social movements, examining how digital platforms influence activism, identity formation, and the radicalization processes within varied social and political contexts. Together, these abstracts weave a narrative that underscores the dual role of digital media as both a facilitator of social movements and a catalyst for radicalization. They shed light on the nuanced ways in which digital platforms shape collective identities, enable the global dissemination of activist movements, and impact the dynamics of radicalization and resistance within organizations. This session promises to provide a rich discussion on the challenges and opportunities presented by the digital age for activism, identity formation, and the fight against extremism. Tags: Digital Studies, Equality and Inequality, Technology

Organizer: Andrey Kasimov, McMaster University; Chair: Andrey Kasimov, McMaster University

Presentations

Alexander Painter, University of Windsor; Mariah Brooks, University of Windsor

Reappropriating the "ecoterrorist": How green activists contend with terroristic framing

Scholarship in Critical Terror Studies (CTS) contends with established essentialist views on terrorism that permeate the formal sociological forum, as well as doublespeak and statecraft agendas that underpin terrorist framing. CTS deals with how the state’s usage of rhetoric and lawmaking in defining what is terroristic and what is not underpins the colonial imaginaries that facilitate the widespread usage of the phrase ‘terrorist,’ which compartmentalizes groups and identities as unlawful spectacles, and the tendency of scholarship to treat terrorism research purely as a way to recommend counterterror policy (Jarvis 2009; Loadenthal 2013; Gandio and Nocella 2014; Ganor 2017; Loadenthal and Rekow 2020). Social Movement Scholarship (SMS) has become entangled with CTS as governments have mobilized the term ‘terrorist’ to refer to several nonviolent dissent groups; and, the marriage of these two disciplines has produced literature regarding the terrorization of activist identities, and the harsh criminalization of protest-radical typologies that have been synthesized and proliferated in the media and within policy discussion. This ‘terrorization’ of activism is perhaps best illustrated by the treatment of green movements and the increasing prevalence of ‘ecoterrorism’ as a term used to frame green dissent (Loadenthal 2013; Sumner and Weidman 2016). While CTS/SMS literature offers a critical theoretical lens to view ecoterrorist framing as a kind of structural violence that highlights state and media capacities to employ put-down rhetoric, a surprising dearth of attention is paid to green activists’ employment and framing of the terminology. Social media/informal slacktivism strategies have been studied in the past; Previous SMS literature has pointed to the value of online activism in developing communicative autonomy (Carlson and Berglund 2021), the facilitation of collective action (Castells 2018), and the mobilizing of geographically distant groups that otherwise would be incapable of organizing dissent (Sageman 2008). However, as ecoterrorist sympathetic slacktivism is rarely a point of interest in scholarship, radical activism is often cold-shouldered academically, thereby perpetuating an abstraction between scholarship and direct-action movements. This paper applies a discursive approach to critical discourse analysis (Gale 2010:8) that analyzes how activists reappropriate counter-hegemonic definitions of political phrases such as ‘eco-terrorism’ through their unique articulations within an extant discourse system. This approach serves as a means for giving voice to green movements that are often not provided nuance in scholarship and aims to build an inquiry into the complexities and barriers that green activism faces in academia. Analyzing grassroots social media helped find a pulse on activism discussion without agitating a delicate ecosystem as formal researchers. Major social media platforms – Twitter (X), Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr – each possess unique modes of ‘sharing,’ and public discussion. Some are more focused on image-sharing and others focused on conversation. Each offers different avenues for articulating opinions and sharing values. Thus, the analysis highlights the thematic nature of online interaction as a key mechanism for sharing values.

William Hollingshead, Western University

Honking 'round the world: Cross-national framing of collective identity within the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests on TikTok

The advent of social media technologies in the 21st century has had transformative consequences on political communication and civic engagement, brokering new possibilities for the dissemination of grievances, and community formation. This has culminated in various digitally mediated social movements, spanning disparate national terrains, and across the political spectrum. Theoretical accounts from sociologists and media scholars alike attempt to account for this new modality of protest as diffusive, networked, episodic, and personalized. Here, individual experience is a key form of social capital that one can share, ultimately modulating participation, as personal testimonies are collaboratively weaved vis-á-vis the associative affordances of social media, like hashtags, that index communications. Recent accounts indicate that this appears to be formulative of an alternative ontology of collective identity, rendered through avatars, filters, emojis, and the hashtag, all of which operate as signifiers of an “insider” status. Importantly, these “soft resources” – as Stefania Milan refers calls them – enable a democratization of access, given the low costs associated with their usage, as well as narrative customizability that allows anyone to become a potential participant by contributing to the plot. Furthermore, the accessibility and customizability of these “soft resources” engender pathways in which social movements can “spillover” beyond their initial social context. This was the case for the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests that initialized in Canada in response to federal legislation mandating COVID-19 vaccination for cross-border commercial truck drivers. The Freedom Convoy – as an ideological hodgepodge of far-right extremists, White nationalists, libertarians, and anti-vaccine proponents – spawned further protests across the globe, most notably New Zealand, which endured a similar multi-week occupation of parliamentary grounds, likewise organized, and intensified through the social media ether. I draw upon the Freedom Convoy to explore the discursive and aesthetic transplantation of collective identity between national boundaries, through two cases: Canada and New Zealand. This work-in-progress aims to fill several gaps within the literature. First, existing research on the digital formation of collective identity has been hampered by analyses of singular contexts, failing to grasp how collective identity – a continuously negotiated product of social interaction – can be transported to amenable situations that are foreign to their initial location. Second, and relatedly, there is theoretical fuzziness regarding how this process is actualized in practice through social media. To address these gaps, I pair collective identity and collective action frames to explore how Freedom Convoy supporters’ articulations are constitutive of a shared reality comprised of social actors – notably, the collective “We” – with ascribed attributes that impute the group’s ideological consciousness. This is observed through framing processes that elaborate upon the current situation, asserting what the “problem” is, why corrective action is necessary, and which action is suitable to undertake. I further use the concept of platform vernacular to explore how collective identity is texturized through the communicative conventions of a social media platform, TikTok. I contend that this framework will be useful to, first, revealing how a social movement’s collective identity can function as a malleable ideological template, and second, how the communicative conventions of TikTok foster replicability through what Diana and David J. Zulli term “imitation publics” that ease the degree in which collective identity can be translated in the form of pre-packaged “sounds,” “hashtags,” and narrative “styles.” This works draws upon publicly accessible digital trace data from TikTok, using a corpus of popular hashtags related to the Canadian and New Zealand-based Freedom Convoy protests. The Canadian and New Zealand dataset(s) are composed of 813 and 516 TikTok videos, respectively. Canadian data is limited to the period of the Ottawa occupation: 29 January 2022 to 21 February 2022. Comparatively, New Zealand data corresponds to the duration of the Wellington occupation: 6 February 2022 to 2 March 2022. A theory-driven thematic analysis is used to discern over-arching patterns in the deployment of collective action frames to impute how collective identity is practiced between two distinctive national contexts.

Adam Burston, University of California, Santa Barbara

Digitally Mediated Spillover, Radicalization, and Resistance

What distinguishes social movement organizations (SMOs) that radicalize from those that do not? Social scientists have not addressed this question due to a dearth of comparative studies containing radicalized and non-radicalized organizations. I intervene with a multi-site ethnography of College Conservatives for Freedom and Liberty, a university-based youth organization with chapters throughout the U.S. One of my field sites underwent a process of radicalization, transitioning from moderate to extremist, whereas my other two sites underwent a process that I term resistance in which they rejected internal efforts to radicalize and recommitted to moderate ideology and tactics. My research makes three contributions. First, on university campuses, radicalization and resistance processes are preceded by “digitally mediated spillover,” or an influx of recruits who participated in extreme digital movements like the Manosphere and the Alt-Right. Second, although radicalization and resistance/recommitment produce different outcomes, their initial phases are characterized by environmental and organizational incentives to radicalize, contestations over leadership, collective identity formation, and organizational reform. Third, I find that leadership plays a determinative role in radicalization and resistance/recommitment. My research contributes to important theoretical debates in the study of radicalization and offers an empirical framework for policymakers to reduce the spread of extremism.