Social Media, Politics and the State

Social Media, Politics and the State

Trottier, Daniel and Christian Fuchs, eds. 2014 [hbk]/2015 [pbk], Social media, politics and the state. Protests, revolutions, riots, crime and policing in the age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. New York: Routledge. ISBN (hbk) 978-0-415-74909-1. ISBN (pbk) 978-1-13-879824-3.

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.

Publisher’s page

Download/Read the introduction:
Trottier, Daniel and Christian Fuchs. 2014. Theorising social media, politics and the state: An introduction. In Social media, politics and the state: Protests, revolutions, riots, crime and policing in the age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, ed. Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs, 3-38. New York: Routledge.

Section One: Introductions

1. Theorising Social Media, Politics and the State: An Introduction
Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs

2. Social Networking Sites in Pro-democracy and Anti-austerity Protests: Some Thoughts from a Social Movement Perspective
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 Plebiscitary Digital Democracy
Paolo Gerbaudo

4. Anonymous: Hacktivism and Contemporary Politics
Christian Fuchs

Section Three: Civil Counter-Power Against Austerity

5. Web 2.0 Nazi Propaganda: Golden Dawn’s Affect, Spectacle and Identity Constructions in Social Media
Panos Kompatsiaris and Yiannis Mylonas

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
Jonathan Cable

7. Assemblages: Live Streaming Dissent in the ‘Quebec Spring’
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
Sara Salem

9. Social Media Activism and State Censorship
Thomas Poell

Section Five: State Power as Policing and Intelligence

10. Vigilantism and Power Users: Police and User-Led Investigations on Social Media
Daniel Trottier

11. Police ‘Image Work’ in an Era of Social Media: YouTube and the 2007 Montebello Summit Protest
Christopher J. Schneider

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