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.
Section One: Introductions 1. Theorising Social Media, Politics and the State: An Introduction Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs 2. Social Networking Sites in Pro-democracy and Anti-austerity Protests: Some Thoughts from a Social Movement Perspective Donatella della Porta and Alice Mattoni Section Two: Global and Civil Counter-Power 3. Populism 2.0: Social Media Activism, the Generic Internet User and Plebiscitary Digital Democracy Paolo Gerbaudo 4. Anonymous: Hacktivism and Contemporary Politics Christian Fuchs Section Three: Civil Counter-Power Against Austerity 5. Web 2.0 Nazi Propaganda: Golden Dawn's Affect, Spectacle and Identity Constructions in Social Media Panos Kompatsiaris and Yiannis Mylonas 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 Jonathan Cable 7. Assemblages: Live Streaming Dissent in the 'Quebec Spring' Elise Danielle Thorburn Section Four: Contested and Toppled State Power 8. Creating Spaces for Dissent: The Role of Social Media in the 2011 Egyptian Revolution Sara Salem 9. Social Media Activism and State Censorship Thomas Poell Section Five: State Power as Policing and Intelligence 10. Vigilantism and Power Users: Police and User-Led Investigations on Social Media Daniel Trottier 11. Police 'Image Work' in an Era of Social Media: YouTube and the 2007 Montebello Summit Protest Christopher J. Schneider
