Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (Routledge Research in Information Technology and Society)

"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"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Title 6 Copyright 7 Contents 8 Figures 10 Tables 12 SECTION ONE Introductions 14 1 Theorising Social Media, Politics and the State: An Introduction 16 2 Social Networking Sites in Pro-democracy and Anti-austerity Protests: Some Thoughts from a Social Movement Perspective 52 SECTION TWO Global and Civil Counter-Power 78 3 Populism 2.0: Social Media Activism, the Generic Internet User and Interactive Direct Democracy 80 4 Anonymous: Hacktivism and Contemporary Politics 101 SECTION THREE Civil Counter-Power Against Austerity 120 5 The Rise of Nazism and the Web: Social Media as Platforms of Racist Discourses in the Context of the Greek Economic Crisis 122 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 144 7 Assemblages: Live Streaming Dissent in the ‘Quebec Spring’ 162 SECTION FOUR Contested and Toppled State Power 182 8 Creating Spaces for Dissent: The Role of Social Media in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution 184 9 Social Media Activism and State Censorship 202 SECTION FIVE State Power as Policing and Intelligence 220 10 Vigilantism and Power Users: Police and User-Led Investigations on Social Media 222 11 Police ‘Image Work’ in an Era of Social Media: YouTube and the 2007 Montebello Summit Protest 240 Contributors 260