Social Media, Politics and the State by Trottier, Daniel; Fuchs, Christian;

Short description:

This book is the essential guide for understanding how state power and politics are contested and exercised on social media. It brings together contributions by social media scholars who explore the connection of social media with revolutions, uprising, protests, power and counter-power, hacktivism, the state, policing and surveillance.

Long description:

This book is the essential guide for understanding how state power and politics are contested and exercised on social media. It brings together contributions by social media scholars who explore the connection of social media with revolutions, uprising, protests, power and counter-power, hacktivism, the state, policing and surveillance. It shows how collective action and state power are related and conflict as two dialectical sides of social media power, and how power and counter-power are distributed in this dialectic. Theoretically focused and empirically rigorous research considers the two-sided contradictory nature of power in relation to social media and politics. Chapters cover social media in the context of phenomena such as contemporary revolutions in Egypt and other countries, populism 2.0, anti-austerity protests, the fascist movement in Greece's crisis, Anonymous and police surveillance.

" Combining theoretical and practical perspectives, this collective volume discusses the social aspect of social media, analyses the nature of social media activity in relation to modern society, and highlights key issues and concerns in contemporary forms of social media use (social movements, state power and corporate power, crime and policing, distinction between protests, revolutions and riots) from both a top-down and a bottom-up perspective, trying to critically discuss reality as such, beyond a number of optimistic and pessimistic stereotypes."

Evika Karamagioli, International Journal of Electronic Governance, 2017, Vol. 9, No. 1/2

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction  Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs  2. Thank You, Facebook: A Critical Discussion on Democratic and Communicative Practices in the Global Uprisings  Donatella Della Porta and Alice Mattoni  3. The Role of Social Media and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution: Creating Spaces for Dissent  Sarah Salem  4. Social Media Activism and Authoritarian Regimes  Thomas Poell  5. Anti-Social Networking: Toward a Critical Political Economic Critique of Anonymous and the “New Hacktivism”  Ashley Fogle  6. The Ruse of Neo-Nazism and the Web: Social Media as Platforms for Racist Discourses in the Context of Greek Economic Crisis  Panos Kompatsiaris and Yannis Mlylonas  7. More Than an Electronic Soapbox: Activist Web Presence as a Collective Action Frame, Newspaper Source and Police Surveillance Tool During the London G20 Protests in 2009  Jonathan Cable  8. Counter-Hegemonic Surveillance Assemblages: Live Streaming Critiques of Capital and the State in the Quebec Spring  Elise Thorburn  9. Police "Image Work" in an Era of Social Media  Christopher J. Schneider  10. Policing Social Media: Crowd-Sourced and Consolidated Efforts  Daniel Trottier  11. Populism(s) 2.0: Social Media and the Symbolic Battle for the “People”  Paolo Gerbaudo