Social Media, Politics and the State This book is the essential guide for understanding how state power and politics are contested and exercised on social media. It brings together con- tributions by social media scholars who explore the connection of social media with revolutions, uprising, protests, power and counter-power, hack- tivism, 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. Daniel Trottier is a postdoctoral fellow in social and digital media at the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at the University of Westminster. Christian Fuchs is a professor of social media at the University of Westminster. Routledge Research in Information Technology and Society 1 Reinventing Government 8 Internet and Society in the Information Age Social Theory in the International Practice in Information Age IT-Enabled Public Sector Reform Christian Fuchs Edited by Richard Heeks 9 Hacking Capitalism 2 Information Technology The Free and Open Source in Government Software Movement Britain and America Johan Söderberg Helen Margetts 10 Urban Youth in China: 3 Information Society Studies Modernity, the Internet and Alistair S. Duff the Self Fengshu Liu 4 National Electronic Government Building an Institutional 11 Network Governance Framework for Joined Up of Global Religions Government—A Comparative Jerusalem, Rome, and Mecca Study Michel S. Laguerre Edited by Martin Eifert and Jan Ole Püschel 12 Migration, Diaspora and Information Technology 5 Local Electronic Government in Global Societies A Comparative Study Edited by Leopoldina Fortunati, Edited by Helmut Drüke Raul Pertierra and Jane Vincent 6 National Governments 13 A Normative Theory of the and Control of the Internet Information Society A Digital Challenge Alistair S. Duff Giampiero Giacomello 14 Is There a Home in Cyberspace? 7 The Politics of Cyberconflict The Internet in Migrants’ Security, Ethnoreligious and Everyday Life and the Emergence Sociopolitical Conflicts of Global Communities Athina Karatzogianni Heike Mónika Greschke 15 Frontiers in New Media 16 Social Media, Politics Research and the State Edited by Francis L. F. Lee, Louis Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Leung, Jack Linchuan Qiu, and Crime and Policing in the Age of Donna S. C. Chu Facebook, Twitter and YouTube Edited by Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs This page intentionally left blank Social Media, Politics and the State Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube Edited by Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs First published 2015 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2015 Taylor & Francis The right of the editors to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Social media, politics and the state : protests, revolutions, riots, crime and policing in the age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube / edited by Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs. pages cm. — (Routledge research in information technology and society ; 16) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Internet—Political aspects. 2. Political participation. 3. Social media—Political aspects. 4. Political psychology. I. Trottier, Daniel. II. Fuchs, Christian, 1976– HM851.S645 2014 302.23ʹ1—dc23 2014008525 ISBN: 978-0-415-74909-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-138-79824-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-76483-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC Contents Figures ix Tables xi SECTION ONE Introductions 1 Theorising Social Media, Politics and the State: An Introduction 3 DANIEL TROTTIER AND CHRISTIAN FUCHS 2 Social Networking Sites in Pro-democracy and Anti-austerity Protests: Some Thoughts from a Social Movement Perspective 39 DONATELLA DELLA PORTA AND ALICE MATTONI SECTION TWO Global and Civil Counter-Power 3 Populism 2.0: Social Media Activism, the Generic Internet User and Interactive Direct Democracy 67 PAOLO GERBAUDO 4 Anonymous: Hacktivism and Contemporary Politics 88 CHRISTIAN FUCHS SECTION THREE Civil Counter-Power Against Austerity 5 The Rise of Nazism and the Web: Social Media as Platforms of Racist Discourses in the Context of the Greek Economic Crisis 109 PANOS KOMPATSIARIS AND YIANNIS MYLONAS viii Contents 6 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 131 JONATHAN CABLE 7 Assemblages: Live Streaming Dissent in the ‘Quebec Spring’ 149 ELISE DANIELLE THORBURN SECTION FOUR Contested and Toppled State Power 8 Creating Spaces for Dissent: The Role of Social Media in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution 171 SARA SALEM 9 Social Media Activism and State Censorship 189 THOMAS POELL SECTION FIVE State Power as Policing and Intelligence 10 Vigilantism and Power Users: Police and User-Led Investigations on Social Media 209 DANIEL TROTTIER 11 Police ‘Image Work’ in an Era of Social Media: YouTube and the 2007 Montebello Summit Protest 227 CHRISTOPHER J. SCHNEIDER Contributors 247 Figures 1.1 A visualisation of modern society 13 1.2 The process of social media communication 16 This page intentionally left blank Tables 1.1 A typology of different forms of non-institutional action (adapted from Offe 1985) 11 1.2 A typology of roles in modern society 14 3.1 Equivalence between traditional populist logics and populism 2.0 69 6.1 The overall categories of newspaper stories 139 6.2 The top subcategories in newspaper articles 140 This page intentionally left blank Section One Introductions This page intentionally left blank 1 Theorising Social Media, Politics and the State An Introduction Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs 1. INTRODUCTION The purpose of this chapter is to provide a basic framework for the analy- sis of social media, politics and the state. This topic—which the authors in this collected volume study—can be situated in the broader field of Internet and social media studies (see Dutton 2013, as well as the con- tributions in Ess and Dutton 2013 for an overview). Internet and social media research can be conducted in different ways. More administrative approaches analyse how digital media are used by whom, for what pur- pose, addressed to which audience, bearing which content, and having which effects. In contrast, critical Internet studies go beyond the digital version of the Lasswell formula. They do not exclude studying empiri- cally the cornerstones of digital media use, but always situate such analy- ses in theorising and analysing larger contexts, such as power structures, the state, capitalism, gender relations, social struggles, and ideologies, which shape and are shaped by the digital media landscape in dialecti- cal processes (Fuchs 2008, 2014d). This collected volume, in studying social media in the context of politics and the state, suggests the approach of critical Internet and social media studies. (See also Fuchs and Dyer- Witheford 2013; Fuchs and Sandoval 2014.) This chapter is structured the following way: section two considers what is social media, with a specific emphasis on what makes social media ‘social.’ Section three considers a theoretical framework to understand modern soci- ety. Following this, section four considers the nature of social media activity in relation to modern society. Section five proposes a theoretically grounded understanding of the state, while section six considers the various branches that make up the state. Section seven focuses on politics, as well as the relation between the state and politics. Section eight addresses power, spe- cifically state power and corporate power. Section nine considers crime and policing, with an emphasis on the relation of police to the state. Section ten considers the distinctions between protests, revolutions and riots. Finally, section eleven offers some concluding remarks. 4 Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs 2. WHAT IS SOCIAL MEDIA? It is possible to trace the emergence of social media to when Tim O’Reilly (2005) introduced the term ‘Web 2.0’ in 2005. While O’Reilly claims that ‘Web 2.0’ denotes actual changes whereby users’ collective intelligence co-create the value of platforms like Google, Amazon, Wikipedia or Craigslist in a “community of connected users,” (O’Reilly and Battelle 2009, 1) he