This thesis investigates if Distributed Denial-of-Service attacks constitute a valid form ofcivil disobedience online. For this purpose a multi-dimensional framework is established,drawing on Brownlee’s paradigm case and classical theory of civil disobedience. Threedifferent examples of DDoS attacks are then examined using this framework - the attacksfrom the Electronic Disturbance Theater in support of the Zapatista movement;Anonymous’ Operation Payback; Electrohippies’ attack against the World TradeOrganization. Following the framework, none of these DDoS attacks are able to constitute acivilly disobedient act online. The thesis then goes on and identifies four key issues, drawingon the results from the examples: The loss of 'individual presence', no inimitable feature ofDDoS attacks, impeding free speech and the danger of western imperialism. It concludes thatDDoS attacks cannot and should not be seen as a form of civil disobedience online. Thethesis further proposes that online actions, in order to be seen as civilly disobedient actsonline, need two additional features: An 'individual presence' of the protesters online tocompensate for the remoteness of cyberspace and an inimitable feature in order to berecognizable by society. Further research should investigate with this extended framework ifthere are valid forms of civil disobedience online.

Instagram, as one of today’s largest social media platforms, plays a significant part in the maintaining and reproducing of existing stereotypes and role expectations for women. The purpose of the thesis is to study how Instagram interprets violations against its guidelines, and whether decisions to remove certain pictures from the platform are in line with terms of use, or part of human subjectivity. The noticeable pattern among the removed pictures is that they are often norm-breaking. The thesis discusses communication within Instagram to reveal how and why some pictures are removed while others are not, which limits women’s possibilities to express themselves in non-conventional settings. The study applies semiotics to analyse 12 pictures that were banned from the platform without directly violating its guidelines. Role theory and norms are used to supplement semiotics and shed light on the underlying societal structures of female disadvantage. Two major conclusions are presented: 1) Instagram has unclearly communicated its guidelines to women’s disadvantage, and 2) Instagram has therefore been subjective in the decisions to have the pictures removed from the platform, also to women’s disadvantage. Further, the discussion focuses on how Instagram handles issues related to (1) female sexuality, (2) women stereotyping, and (3) female self-representation.

The rise of social media platforms have not only allowed new opportunities for more citizen-driven initiatives, but also social change promotion in a potentially more participatory-oriented way that offers engagement with the general public and the people the change is aimed at. This has led to an increased scholarly interest in the role of these technologies in strategically promoted social change activist initiatives. However, while the focus has been lying on their use by local groups and social movements for mobilisation, there has been little focus on their use for awareness raising and through participatory communication. Therefore, through a case study of an on-going, digitally-based When He Pays/Me campaign that raises awareness about the Israeli prostitution industry as part of a human rights context by an activist, this thesis investigates the potential role of social media platforms to enable participation, specifically Facebook, in Israeli human rights awareness campaigns. The data used to investigate this included one semi-structured, in-depth interview with the activist and 22 online media texts about the campaign. The analysis revealed that there has been an innovative use of tactics in the campaign through the extensive use of PC’s principles that are based on two-way (dialogic) communication in the form of free, open, transparent, inclusive dialogues with various groups of people, creativity, flexibility, learning, reflexivity, and critical thinking. Dialogues take place on Facebook’s various spaces, and additional communication mediums and channels are used. Moreover, a new kind of story-telling that reveals the complexities and nuances of the industry was used. It was then concluded that the potential of social media platforms, namely Facebook, as a tool to enable participation in Israeli awareness-raising human rights campaigns is the combination of the platform’s popularity and its unique combination of affordances in the form of cause-Pages provided to social campaigns that include a space for dialogue, complex messaging, and anonymity. However, to fulfil this potential, the use of PC’s principles must be applied.

On March 25th 2020 George Floyd, a black man, was killed on the streets of Minneapolis,Minnesota by Derek Chauvin, a white police officer. This sparked new life into the BlackLives Matter movement (BLM), which had been around since 2013. This new found interestin the movement had a remarkable spread on social media, permeating the discoursethroughout most parts of society. The purpose of the essay is to study how the use ofInstagram has contributed to the spread of the BLM movement as well as the socialconsequences the movement had on society. To study this the essay uses Faircloughsperspective on critical discourse analysis to analyze three dimensions of the empiricalmaterial, these being: text, discursive practice and social practice. Interaction, intertextuality,interdiscourse and themes are going to be used as tools to provide the necessary frameworkfor analysis. This in combination with postcolonialism, structural racism and mediatizationfor the theoretical framework. The analysis proved that educational and informative textswere important in conveying messages linked to racism, antiblackness, racial profiling andstructural racism. Aswell as reoccuring themes, such as police violence, antiblackness,slavery, racism, demonstrations. The platform was used to highlight social injustices andsocietal problems. Instagram proved an important medium for spreading the movement'smessage, having voices that are typically repressed in society forming and controlling thediscourse. Due to an increasingly mediated society, the use of Instagram made it possible foreveryone to take part of the discourse.

This work investigates internet censorship in Nigeria, describing experiences and citizens’ led circumvention practices following the ban of Twitter by the Nigerian government. Based on a quantitative survey and qualitative interview of active Twitter users in Lagos and Abuja Nigeria, the research realizes and categorizes circumvention practices embraced within the period of effecting the ban into technology, self-censorship, and platform jumping. This study further investigates how circumvention culture has become a form of digital activism and how the social media environment in democracies has experienced censorship within the last few decades.  Citizenry experiences and the complexities of the fight against platform lockdown and the role of digital activism prior to censorship are also analyzed. Internet censorship is new in Nigeria and has bred uncertainties among user practices and government censorship perseverance. This study contributes to a broader understanding of how circumvention practices have become cultural practices and experiences that emerge as embodied internet war against censorship and the preemptive and predictive conditions of the inefficiency of internet censorship policies in established democracies.

Participatory democracy depends on formations of community and social relations, places and spaces for critical discourse, and the organizational and technical capacity for collective action. This study seeks to better understand how these processes are at work in the virtual realm, and more broadly examine the changing nature of political information and discourse in the online context. Toward this end, I examine two sites that embody different yet highly successful models of user participation, collective content production, and increasingly, political action: the political blogging community of Daily Kos and the social news site Reddit. This study is based on three broad theoretical frameworks of community, discourse, and action. I use work by Michele Willson (2006) to explore how community exists in the virtual realm. Drawing upon the scholarship of Jurgen Habermas (1991) and more recent adaptations and extensions of Habermasian public sphere theory from Aaron Barlow (2006), I ask can online communities set the foundation for a public spheres, and if so, how do they function as virtual public spheres? Building upon understandings of online community and virtual public sphere(s), I utilize work by Manuel Castells (1997) and Jeffrey Juris (2005) to understand how community and discourse can enable collective action. These lines of analysis provide the structure through which I examine Daily Kos and Reddit. Using ethnographic methods, I place the voices and perspectives of users within this theoretical structure to produce a comprehensive look at the function of collaborative online political information communities.

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Black Lives Matter protests and rallies erupted in the summer of 2020 following several cases of police brutality in the US, including the death of George Floyd after video of him being killed by a police officer were shared in the media. These protests quickly spread internationally and pushed countries to face their own histories and structurally embedded racism, including Sweden. The aim of this thesis was to examine how the global spread of #BlackLivesMatter in 2020 helped mobilize a nationally relevant movement in Sweden via Facebook, despite its cultural history of disregarding the concept of race and the implications that has had on today. This is achieved through the exploration of interpreting information on social media and the construction of reality in media spheres, with the help of digitally networked action and transnationalism. This framework is accompanied by an inductive thematic analysis of the Black Lives Matter Facebook page in their first 30 days on the platform (June 3-July 3), which is where the organization based itself upon creation, ultimately leading to a sample of 52 posts. The main results of the study yielded three themes: US References, Nationally Relevant Issues (which produced three subthemes), and Action & Organizing. In conclusion, with regard to the research focus, the thesis reveals that this is achieved by a few choices. The organization's ability to use elements that greatly influence the US movement is balanced with factors that are more culturally specific to Sweden and the Black and brown communities here using a connective action frame in which users were able to seamlessly support and participate online and spread the message further. The conclusions implicate that the avoidance of discussing race/racism in Sweden clearly hasn’t helped or prevented Black and brown communities from being negatively impacted and that further research could potentially help guide future policies to solidify Sweden’s image of inclusion and equality.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-22T22:17:23Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Maurilia Gomes.pdf: 2483101 bytes, checksum: 5cf672777db5f1b2b854a04941179e4a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-05-23 / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Amazonas / This work aims at discussing the insertion of the digital technologies in the present times, with focus on the social mobilization strategies in the virtual scenery. It also encompasses discussion on the possible political, economic and cultural changes stemming from this process of insertion. Firstly, the notion of democracy and its basis for the building up of a democratic society are discussed. Next, some fundamental aspects relating to the concept of social movements are highlighted in order to allow comprehension about social movements in Brazil at present. Narrowing down the work, the way the social movements have used online social networks in Manaus are scrutinized. Based on exploratory research, two social organizations were chosen to be analyzed as for their use of the Internet: SINTEAM, the syndicate of the workers in education in the Amazonas State and Associação Difusão Amazonas, a collective action social organization. The results show that the two sampled organizations think the use of social networks differently. While the former is clearly representative of the traditional social movements, which have struggling to adapt to the new online reality, the latter is part of a new model of social organization , which have the Internet as a starting point around which all the actions are planned and put into practice. The analysis leads to a broader conclusion that the social subjects of our time have to rethink their working model, namely the communicative model, due to the changes in the scenery from an offline to an online society / Este trabalho discute a inserção das tecnologias digitais na sociedade contemporânea, problematizando sobre as táticas de mobilização a partir do ambiente virtual e, sobretudo, as possíveis transformações políticas, econômicas e culturais decorrentes deste processo. Discute a noção de democracia e as bases para construção de uma sociedade democrática. Destaca alguns aspectos relevantes para a compreensão do conceito de movimentos sociais e apresenta um panorama atual dos movimentos sociais no Brasil. Este estudo teve como o objetivo principal analisar a forma como os movimentos sociais de Manaus estão utilizando as redes sociais on-line em suas estratégias de comunicação. Baseando-se na pesquisa exploratória, foram selecionadas, como objeto de estudo, duas organizações sociais que utilizam essas redes: o Sindicato dos Trabalhadores em Educação do Estado do Amazonas e a Associação Difusão Amazonas. Os resultados revelaram duas realidades distintas: a primeira representa os movimentos sociais tradicionais que têm enfrentado inúmeras dificuldades de atuar na sociedade contemporânea, que exige, cada vez mais, a reformulação de suas práticas de atuação, sobretudo no que diz respeito aos processos comunicativos; a segunda faz parte de um novo modelo de movimento que tem o uso das Tecnologias da Informação e da Comunicação como marca principal de sua atuação, seja nos processos comunicativos ou organizacionais