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.

Drawing on insights from linguistics, multimodality and media studies, this book explores the ideological dimensions of media representation and its function in discursively constructing public understandings of, and attitudes toward, civil disorder.

In what ways have social movements attracted the attention of the mass media since the sixties? How have activists influenced public attention via visual symbols, images, and protest performances in that period? And how do mass media cover and frame specific protest issues? Drawing on contributions from media scholars, historians, and sociologists, this volume explores the dynamic interplay between social movements, activists, and mass media from the 1960s to the present. It introduces the most relevant theoretical approaches to such issues and offers a variety of case studies ranging from print media, film, and television to Internet and social media.

Commercial social media platforms have become integral to contemporary forms of protests. They are intensely used by advocacy groups, non-governmental organisations, social movements and other political actors who increasingly integrate social media platforms into broader practices of organizing and campaigning. But, aside from the many advantages of extensive mobilization opportunities at low cost, what are the implications of social media corporations being involved in these grassroots movements? This book takes a much-needed critical approach to the relationship between social media and protest. Highlighting key issues and concerns in contemporary forms of social media activism, including questions of censorship, surveillance, individualism, and temporality, the book combines contributions from some of the most active scholars in the field today. Advancing both conceptual and empirical work on social media and protest, and with a range of different angles, the book provides a fresh and challenging outlook on a very topical debate.

This insightful volume critically explores activist events in their scale and their capacity to attract media attention through a critical event studies lens, offering new perspectives on protests and social movement. This book conceives events of dissent as the public manifestation of counter-narratives that articulate advocacy for policy change. It focuses on the material and virtual manifestation of protest events and the media response to them, associated with three active social movements – Reclaim These Streets, Extinction Rebellion, and Black Lives Matter. In doing so, the text sheds light on how different political orientations within the media articulate the representation of events of dissent manifest by these groups, and how this results in significantly different opinion-forming statements on the issues behind those movements, as well as how this reflects mediated assessment of the responses of politicians, the public, and emergency service responses to protest events. Furthermore, it will explore the role of the Internet in the organisation of protest events and their part in the formation of networks of resistance, enabling the roll out of events with a global reach – demonstrated, more recently, by protests across many European cities against the war in Ukraine. This timely and significant book will appeal to scholars of and those interested in events tourism, protest, political communication, and media, amongst others.

Explores protest groups, their aims and protest tactics, and investigates the affect their decisions have on press coverage and political debate.

This is an open access book. The start of the 21st century has seen the world shaken by protests, from the Arab Spring to the Yellow Vests, from the Occupy movement to the social uprisings in Latin America. There are periods in history when large numbers of people have rebelled against the way things are, demanding change, such as in 1848, 1917, and 1968. Today we are living in another time of outrage and discontent, a time that has already produced some of the largest protests in world history. This book analyzes almost three thousand protests that occurred between 2006 and 2020 in 101 countries covering over 93 per cent of the world population. The study focuses on the major demands driving world protests, such as those for real democracy, jobs, public services, social protection, civil rights, global justice, and those against austerity and corruption. It also analyzes who was demonstrating in each protest; what protest methods they used; who the protestors opposed; what was achieved; whether protests were repressed; and trends such as inequality and the rise of women’s and radical right protests. The book concludes that the demands of protestors in most of the protests surveyed are in full accordance with human rights and internationally agreed-upon UN development goals. The book calls for policy-makers to listen and act on these demands.