This article uses the case of Twitter activity under the #WikiLeaks hashtag to address issues of social movements online. The aim is to analyze the potential of elusive web spaces as sites of mobilization. Looking at linguistic and social aspects, our main questions were: What are the characteristics of the communication in terms of common discursive codes versus fragmentation? In what respects can social order be distinguished, and to what extent are connections between users simply random? Are there any prominent patterns as regards the commitment of participators over time? With the help of tools from semantic, social network and discourse analysis, we were able to show that common codes, networks of connections and mobilization do exist in this context. These patterns can be seen as part of the elaboration of a ‘cognitive praxis’. In order to organize and mobilize, any movement needs to speak a common language, agree on the definition of the situation and formulate a shared vision. Even though it is global and loosely-knit, Twitter discourse is a space where such processes of meaning-production take place.

This article analyses the challenges faced by the #MeToo campaign, during its first weeks of existence on Twitter. These included the challenges of maintaining its frame, and making a consistent impact in a complex and volatile media landscape. This mixed‐methods study draws on a data set of four million tweets accessed through Twitter's public data interface. It addresses the following research questions: To what degree did the #MeToo campaign on Twitter have a clear focus, and was it able to maintain it? How did the tone of the campaign on Twitter change over time, in terms of the positivity or negativity of expressed sentiments? To what extent were tweets simply reiterated, or instead made the subject of customization and active debate? The article finds that #MeToo quickly started to lose its momentum after the initial and explosive impact, with noise, antagonism, and sloganization increasingly weighing down and diluting the campaign. However, a cross‐platform perspective is needed to grasp a full picture of how hashtag activism functions; including the #MeToo campaign.

'Pirates'and'anti-pirates'havebecomecommonconcepts in the cultural political debate, as the file sharing phenomenon is a delicate and disputed subject. The fact that people organize in networks to share data with each other has led film and music companies from all over the world to initiate a number of anti-piracy organizations, assigned to protect the property rights to culture and information. In Sweden, the industrial organization The Swedish Bureau of Antipiracy on the one side, and the network The Bureau of Piracy together with The Pirate Party,ontheother,playimportantpartsintheprevailing conflict.Thepurposeofthispaperistoapplyasociological perspectiveonthecollectiveactoffilesharing.Byfocusing onthedistinctlyorganizedpartoffilesharingactivitiesas well as on the everyday practices of users, the goal is to describe how the collective action and the production of knowledge,takingplaceinrelationtoonlinepiracy,canbe understood.

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This article aims to shed more light on the potentials and limitations of social media as a tool for activists. It does this by focusing on the use of one particular social media platform —  Twitter — during one specific period of a certain uprising: the first 24 hours of protests in Libya during the Arab Spring in 2011. Even though this study is thus limited, it represents an important step in the direction of analyzing what actually happens when social media is put to use in relation to concrete events. The identified social network patterns, as well as the content of the posts, resonate with what Enzensberger (1970) calls “emancipatory use of media”: The architecture is decentralized, network connections are distributed, and mobilization and self-organization is going on. It must be realized however, that seeds of such emancipatory use does not necessarily preclude “repressive use of media”.