From clicktivism to hacktivism: Understanding digital activism

Highlights

• Examines how IT impacts social movement activities, processes, and outcomes

• Identifies three hierarchies of digital activism, which are comprised of ten activities: clicktivism, metavoicing, assertion; digital transitional activities: e-funding, political consumerism, digital petitions, and botivism; and digital gladiatorial activities: data activism, exposure, and hacktivism

• Offers four meta-conjectures on the mechanisms of digital activism and resulting impact

• Introduces a new construct, connective emotion, where participants digitally organize yet lack an identifying cause.

Abstract

Digital activism provides new opportunities for social movement participants and social movement organizations (SMOs). Recent IS research has begun to touch on digital activism, defining it, exploring it, and building new theory to help understand it. This paper seeks to unpack digital activism through an exploratory literature review that provides descriptions, definitions, and categorizations. We provide a framework for digital activism by extending Milbrath's (1965) hierarchy of political participation that divides activism into spectator, transitional, and gladiatorial activities. Using this framework, we identify ten activities of digital activism that are represented in the literature. These include digital spectator activities: clicktivism, metavoicing, assertion; digital transitional activities: e-funding, political consumerism, digital petitions, and botivism; and digital gladiatorial activities: data activism, exposure, and hacktivism. Last, we analyze the activities in terms of participants, SMOs, individuals who are targeted by the activity, and organizations that are targeted by the activity. We highlight four major implications and offer four meta-conjectures on the mechanisms of digital activism and their resulting impacts, and reveal a new construct where participants digitally organize yet lack an identifying cause, which we label connective emotion.

Introduction

Not long ago, activism to promote social movements was relegated to demonstrations and marches, chaining oneself to a fence, or writing to a government representative. Recruiting, organizing, and retaining participants was difficult enough to ensure that often only largest, best supported movements thrived and creating an impact often took years. Today's world of digital activism is broad reaching, impactful, and immediate compared to traditional activism. For example:

• Saudi women fight for their right to drive cars on social media (Bager, 2015)

• Black Americans make a stand against police racism with Black Lives Matter (BLM) by posting on social media with live videotapes of police brutality (Garza, 2017)

• Native American communities exert subtle political influence through cultural websites (Young & Miranda, 2014; Young, 2018)

• National Security Agency secrets are exposed through Wikileaks (Shane, Rosenberg, & Lehren, 2017)

• Presidents trade insults with other world leaders on Twitter (Nakamura & Morello, 2017)

• The hacker group Anonymous shuts down white supremacist websites (McGoogan & Molloy, 2017)

This paper unpacks the relatively new phenomenon of digital activism. It is important to understand because most people in countries with any sort of ICT either participate in or are impacted by digital activism in their daily lives, businesses, or governments (Rainie, Smith, Schlozman, Brady, & Verba, 2012; Wattal, Schuff, Mandviwalla, & Williams, 2010). While scholars have begun to research digital activism in recent years, there is still a dearth of empirical research available (Kane, Alavi, Labianca, & Borgatti, 2013; Majchrzak, Faraj, Kane, & Azad, 2013; Selander & Jarvenpaa, 2016). We provide an exploratory literature review to aid scholars in understanding digital activism. Webster and Watson (2002) suggest that literature reviews are not only valuable for mature topics but can aid new topics through increasing visibility and theoretical discussions. We review 84 papers that include empirical, conceptual, and representative works from a variety of fields and sources in an attempt to provide an extensive, multi-disciplinary view. As a particular aid to future research, we provide tables in the Appendix (Table 13, Table 14) that detail each paper.

From the literature we identify ten representative digital activism activities: clicktivism, metavoicing, assertion, e-funding, political consumerism, digital petitions, botivism, data activism, exposure, and hacktivism. These are not all encompassing, but do represent the breadth of digital activities seen in digital activism. We organize these activities by extending a classic framework from the political science literature, Milbrath (1965), which divides social action into spectator, transitional, and gladiatorial activities. Our analysis then moves to the activities themselves and how they change depending on context. With this in mind, we expand the activities into the functions that each activity provides within the context of the specific paper. The functions are then abstracted into mechanisms and we are able to propose relationships between mechanisms and outcomes.

Our primary findings include how varied the mechanisms and impacts of digital activities are depending on whether one looks at the participant, the SMO, an individual targeted by the action, or an organization targeted by the action. To our knowledge, we are the first to explicitly call out digital targets in terms of social participation, although the cybersecurity literature readily identifies targets as such. These differences should encourage SMOs to evaluate the consequences of their actions and the actions of their participants in greater depth so that they encourage digital activities that support the cause and avoid those that don't. We provide propositions that may be used to build SMO strategy or conversely, for targets to develop strategies to protect themselves. This paper is structured as follows. First, we present our method, then we provide background information and the theoretical underpinnings of our topic. We then delve into digital activism with categorizations and analysis, and provide propositions. Last, we present implications of this research, limitations, suggestions for future research and our conclusion.