Serial activists: Political Twitter beyond influentials and the twittertariat

Abstract

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All click, no action? Online action, efficacy perceptions, and prior experience combine to affect future collective action

“…Online participation for one cause could affect future engagement with other issues for several reasons: collective action participation can increase political knowledge, influence efficacy perceptions and build a generalised activist identity (Kinder, 1998;Louis et al, 2016). Accordingly, Bastos and Mercea (2016) identified a small number of prolific Twitter users who were highly engaged in multiple social issues, online as well as offline. However, serial activists are believed to be atypical.…”

Being a Serial Transnational Activist

“…On the other, continuity may reside in the fact that protests commanding transnational support on social media may add to a notion of cosmopolitan citizenship predicated on a deterritorialized democratic culture of political participation (Dahlgren, ). Having already empirically verified the cross‐national scope of serial activism (Bastos & Mercea, ), at this juncture we propose a reappraisal of transnational activism and its cosmopolitan foundations.…”

“…An outcome we have discussed previously (Bastos & Mercea, 2015) was that serial activists' networks were larger in size than those of average users at the time of data collection but were significantly smaller than those of influential and active Twitter users. The double-sided role of serial activists as content and relational brokers should help to extend the understanding of high-functioning networked communication beyond activists' network location (Gonzalez-Bailon et al, 2013) or social status (Tufekci, 2013).…”

“…With this article, we expand the conceptualization of serial activism to capture and extricate present‐day transnational movement entrepreneurship. Previously, we undertook an examination of cross‐national protest communication via Twitter aimed at repurposing the term serial activism so as to highlight the prolific, sustained and boundary‐spanning activity of individuals who would otherwise remain ordinary due to their relatively modest followings (Bastos & Mercea, ). In what follows, we advance the analysis of serial activism by theorizing the transnational dimension of the observed activity, querying the practices and self‐perceptions of serial activists relative to their prodigious cross‐hashtag activity, reviewing potential problems to arise from it and, finally, evaluating its sustainability over time.…”

Representing environmental harm and resistance on Twitter: The case of the TAP pipeline in Italy

“…In spite of the set limits on the number of characters publishable in a post (140 characters, recently increased to 280), Twitter was selected over other social media predominantly because of the technical accessibility (at least in the real-time index, see below) of its textual and visual content to all users (as opposed to, e.g., Facebook, whose privacy settings often impede access to content). Twitter also has an established reputation for protest and activism within pre-existing literature, particularly in relation to the development of small grassroots movements; the openness of the platform, in addition, facilitates access to journalists, the development of publicised counter-narratives, and the strategic co-ordination of protests (see Bruns, et al 2013;Ems, 2014;Bastos & Mercea, 2016;Penney & Dadas, 2014), particularly in the Italian context (Vicari, 2013). The content analysis of posts, however, also included material published on Facebook, which allows users to be more articulate, and other digital platforms like YouTube (for more see below under Data Analysis).…”