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Living Research Five: Public anger in research (and social media) At our end-of-project conference, one participant said that the event had made her think that ‘when outraged by something’ she would try to research it; ‘combine activism with academia and your sociological imagination’. Strikingly, this comment captured much of what brought us together to develop the research discussed in this book. In this section, we
paramilitaries to organise these protests through social media. 1 Public Facebook pages enabled loyalists to not only share information on upcoming protests with their supporters, but also discuss related issues such as their growing antipathy towards the PSNI and unionist political parties for their alleged complicity in Sinn Féin’s ‘war’ against unionist and loyalist culture. These pages were subject to increased scrutiny by the PSNI in January 2013 as a result of a high court injunction lodged by an unidentified Catholic man from North Belfast, who had been the subject of
From the ‘social media election’ to the ‘WhatsApp election’ In recent years, the dramatic rise of right-wing populist leaders in different parts of the world has been coeval with an unprecedented circulation of ‘fake news’ 1 and conspiracy theories in the public sphere, especially through new media platforms. Well before Trump appeared as the paradigmatic example of this double-headed phenomenon, Indian politics had come to foreshadow not only the earliest signs of ‘post
8 Marie Sundström and Hedvig Obenius (De-)legitimation of migration: a critical study of social media discourses ‘She is old and sick and will not live for many more years, you have to be humane by letting her stay and not be so damn bureaucratic (two angry smileys)’.1 The quote comes from a comment adding to a discussion on Facebook about the case of Sahar, a 106-year-old woman whom the Swedish Migration Agency denied a permit to remain in Sweden.2 The Agency argued that despite Sahar’s old age and poor health, there was no reason for her not to return to the
. 8 He argues that monarchs in the twentieth century used photographic portraits which were mass produced as souvenirs, and official and unofficial biographies gave readers behind-the-scenes glimpses at royal life. 9 The case studies in Running the Family Firm illustrate varying, expanding forms of mediation: portraits, photographs, physical and material space, newspapers, magazines, television, films and social media, amongst others. One particular point of interest
-minute election slots funded by the government in proportion to parties’ and candidates’ presence in Congress were hugely influential. But during the 2000s audience numbers on the old-fashioned channels began to dip, as the better-off started to pay for cable TV services that offered a wider variety of programming, often from international providers. In addition, younger Brazilians spent more and more time on their phones, increasingly participating in embryonic social media. Between 2000 and 2013 terrestrial television lost 28 per cent of its audience, with the pressure
In October 2017, Raya Sarkar, a law school student in California, posted a crowd-sourced list on the social media platform Facebook of Indian men in academia who had been accused of sexual harassment by students. Within a day, a group of Indian feminists posted a statement on an online forum called Kafila, asking those who had posted the list to consider due process as a way to address sexual harassment, and requested that the list be taken down ( Menon, 2017a ). What followed was not so much a conversation
seen the British extreme right reflect an international trend of online activism identified by Maura Conway, Ryan Scrivens and Logan Macnair. This started with the creation of websites, then led to the establishment of online forums, before moving to exploiting social media, and most recently has seen a turn to messaging apps. 2 These migrations demonstrate a commitment within the movement to take
alternative possibilities until, ideally, only one remains, and it requires a habitual readiness to attack one’s own convictions.” 18 Attacking one’s own convictions in order to find the truth is different from a government or a party which imposes its invented truths on citizens. In the end the truth will prevail. However, this is not an automatic process. It depends on free science, free speech, and a free press, which are the cornerstones of a free society. The “bubbles” created by social media Attacking “fake news” and “post-truth” has become difficult, however
covered criminal justice proceedings, especially in January and February 2013 when there was a significant increase in the number of cases involving loyalists charged with public order offences. Quotes from District Judges questioned the claims by the defendants that they had engaged in ‘peaceful protest’, as demonstrated by Justice McCloskey’s remarks that the “vast majority of this kind of behaviour” was “thuggish rioting”. 5 It was in this context that social media afforded loyalists opportunities to counter these narratives and focus attention on the ‘heavy