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Demonstrations organised by neo-Nazis and the New Right, accompanied by large counter protests by anti-fascist groups, civil society networks, and citizens, have become important political events in Germany. Digital media technologies play an increasingly important role in the confrontation between the two ends of the political spectrum framed by historically rooted ideology. This study explores how different media technologies are appropriated by activists, who consider themselves marginalised and oppositional to the mainstream, on both sides of the conflict. The study aims to examine how digital media permeate counterpublics' (Negt and Kluge 1972; Fraser 1992; Brouwer 2006; Warner 2002) strategies, tactics, and media practices in their struggles for visibility in these protest events. The counterpublics on both ends of the political spectrum take place and are analysed across three dimensions: [1] technical affordances and media environments; [2] strategies, tactics, and media practices; and [3] political positions and ideologies. The results are based on a data set of online communication, representation, and media coverage on different online media platforms related to marches planned by nationalist groups in the former East Germany, which were accompanied by counter protests by anti-fascist groups, NGOs, and civil society. The data is analysed across these dimensions by using the methodological frameworks of discourse theory (Carpentier 2007; Dahlberg and Phelan 2011; Laclau and Mouffe 1985) and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 2010; van Dijk 2001; van Dijk 1998a). Due to the historical significance of the events and taking into account the continuity of the role of media technologies in articulating counter publicity, the case is contextualised through a discussion of the radical right and radical left in present-day Germany as well as an analysis of archived publications from the anti-fascist counter movements to the National Socialist regime in World War II Germany. An empirical and theoretical exploration contributes to the discussion of counterpublics framed by conflictual ideologies in the digital age and to the ongoing discussion concerning the role of digital media technologies in political protest. The author concludes by suggesting a protean and relational perspective on counterpublics in the digital age and the role of radical politics in the mediated environments of contemporary democracy.

Memes work as rhetorical weapons and discursive arguments in political conflicts. Across digital platforms, they confirm, contest and challenge political power and hierarchies. They simultaneously create social distortion, hostility, and a sense of community. Memes thus not only reflect norms but also work as a tool for negotiating them. At the same time, memes meld symbolic and cultural elements with technological functionalities, allowing for replicability and remixing.This book studies how memes disrupt and reimagine politics in humorous ways. Memes create a playful activity that follows a shared set of rules and gives a (shared) voice, which may generate togetherness and political identities but also increase polarization. As their template travels, memes continue to appropriate new political contexts and to (re)negotiate frontiers in the political. The chapters in this book allow us to chart the playful politics of memes and how they establish or push frontiers in various political, cultural, and platform-specific contexts. Taken together, memes can challenge and regenerate populism, carve out spaces for new identity formations, and create togetherness in situations of crises. They can also, however, lead to the normalization of racist discourses.This book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of Media and Communication Studies, Information Studies, Politics, Sociology, and Cultural Studies. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Information, Communication & Society

This research investigates the strategic use of protest imagery on social media by movement parties, bridging the gap between protest and institutional politics. We apply a mixed-methods analysis of 9584 Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram image posts by seven movement parties between 2015 and 2021. We find that protest images frequently serve to amplify movement grievances. Yet, parties' involvement with contentious protest forms undergoes temporal shifts, influenced mainly by their evolving positions within the polity. Moreover, parties' engagement with protest images differs by country and ideological leaning. Movement parties on the Right express a conflictual position between supporting and delegitimizing different protests. Conversely, Left-leaning counterparts tend to support protest, yet veer toward deradicalization and emphasizing symbolism over disruptive tactics, once they become more institutionalized. This research highlights the intricate relationship between movement parties, protest, and visual narratives on social media, in light of the interplay between movements and institutional politics.

This research explores mediated ritual interactions in the form of pictures taken using a mobile device in tandem with two critical designs: Probably Not and World to GIF. We take our point of departure in Rich Ling's understanding of mobile interaction as a ritual of social cohesion and social bonding to explore sociotechnical interactions with mobile technology. By means of playful critical interaction design methods, we explore how deviance from the ritual of mediated interaction through taking pictures on the mobile phone may enhance our understanding of artificial agents. Building upon Ling's work, we mobilize the ritual aspect of mobile communication to open possibilities for imagining alternatives of seeing the world through artificial intelligence. We conclude by arguing that playful designs in mobile communication research may allow us to disassemble and reassemble mobile apps which enables critical reflection on the role of artificial agents in mobile rituals.

While political protest is essentially a visual expression of dissent, both social movement research and media studies have thus far been hesitant to focus on visual social media data from protest events. This research explores the visual dimension (photos and videos) of Twitter communication in the Blockupy protests against the opening of the European Central Bank (ECB) headquarters in Frankfurt am Main on 18 March 2015. It does so through a novel combination of quantitative analysis, content analysis of images, and identification of narratives. The article concludes by arguing that the visual in political protest in social media reproduces existing visualities and hierarchies rather than challenges them. This research enhances our conceptual understanding of how activists' struggles play out in the visual and contributes to developing methods for empirical inquiry into visual social media content.

Disguised propaganda and political deception in digital media have been studied since the early days of the World Wide Web. At the intersection of internet research and propaganda studies, this chapter explores disguised propaganda on websites and social media platforms. Based on a discussion of key concepts and terminology, this chapter outlines how new modes of deception and source obfuscation emerge in digital and social media environments, and how this development complicates existing conceptual and epistemological frameworks in propaganda studies. The chapter concludes by arguing that contemporary challenges of detecting and countering disguised propaganda can only be resolved, if social media companies are held accountable and provide the necessary support for user contestation.

While political protest is essentially a visual expression of dissent, both social movement research and media studies have thus far been hesitant to focus on visual social media data from protest events. This research explores the visual dimension (photos and videos) of Twitter communication in the Blockupy protests against the opening of the European Central Bank headquarters in Frankfurt am Main on 18 March 2015. It does so through a novel combination of quantitative analysis, content analysis of images, and identification of narratives. The article concludes by arguing that the visual in political protest in social media reproduces existing visualities and hierarchies rather than challenges them. This research enhances our conceptual understanding of how activists' struggles play out in the visual and contributes to developing methods for empirical inquiry into visual social media content.

Disguised propaganda and political deception in digital media have been studied since the early days of the World Wide Web. At the intersection of internet research and propaganda studies, this chapter explores disguised propaganda on websites and social media platforms. Based on a discussion of key concepts and terminology, the chapter outlines how new modes of deception and source obfuscation emerge in digital and social media environments, and how this development complicates existing conceptual and epistemological frameworks in propaganda studies. The chapter concludes by arguing that contemporary challenges of detecting and countering disguised propaganda can only be resolved, if social media companies are held accountable and provide the necessary support for user contestation.

This research examines how activists mobilise against fake hate profiles on Facebook. Based on six months of participant observation, this paper demonstrates how Danish Facebook users organised to combat fictitious Muslim profiles that spurred hatred against ethnic minorities. Crowdsourced action by Facebook users is insufficient as a form of sustainable resistance against fake hate profiles. A viable solution would require social media companies, such as Facebook, to take responsibility in the struggle against fake content used for political manipulation.

This article aims to develop a typology for evaluating different types of activism in the digital age, based on the ideal of radical democracy. Departing from this ideal, activism is approached in terms of processes of identification by establishing conflictual frontiers to outside Others as either adversaries or enemies. On the basis of these discussions, we outline a typology of four kinds of activists: the salon activist, the contentious activist, the law-abiding activist, and the Gandhian activist. The typology's first axis, between antagonism and agonism, is derived from normative discussions in radical democracy concerning developing frontiers. The second axis, about readiness to engage in civil disobedience, is derived from a review of studies of different forms of online activism. The article concludes by suggesting that the different forms of political engagement online have to be taken into account when studying how online activism can contribute to social change.

This article investigates the relationship between the invention of new media technologies and scholarship concerning protest and political engagement. Building on an innovative approach that moves beyond a systematic literature review, this article contributes to our understanding of scholarship concerning digital communication technologies and how they may have been adopted and shaped protest movements and political engagement. Based on visualisations, we draw a sociotechnical timeline of protest and media technology scholarship within three dimensions: Technological development, methods and techniques, and the social phenomena under investigation. The article concludes by identifying major trends in protest and media technologies scholarship over the past 15 years. The sociotechnical timeline enhances our understanding of academic discourse at the intersection of protest and media technologies by highlighting shortcomings and potential for future research.

This article examines current appropriations of social media by activists of the radical left in Greece and Sweden. Previous research has shown that the discourse concerning social media's empowering potential is embedded in commercial values that contradict the value systems of many activists who engage in struggles against the current economic system. We employ the notion of détournement, which describes how social movements turn something aside from its normal course or purpose. Based on interviews and online ethnographic observations, we seek to understand how and with what consequences social media facilitate and limit collective action. The article enhances our understanding of activists' social media use by turning our attention to the sociotechnical impact of social media on collective action initiated by leftist groups as well as the relationship between ideological loyalties and the political economy of corporate social media.

This paper examines the role of information provision through mobile communication in mass street protest. The argument is based on two case studies: (a) the civic outrage of young people concerning the destruction of a youth centre in Copenhagen, Denmark in 2006 and (b) the use of mobile phones in antifascist protests in Dresden, Germany in 2011. The cases are analysed across three dimensions that are relevant to mobile communication tactics for providing information in protest: Actors, power relations between the actors, and goals. By identifying the affordances of the mobile phone for providing information across these dimensions, we argue that mobile communication can be appropriated to increase activists' repertoire of actions, foster resistance, and shut down opportunities. The ways in which the affordances of mobile phones limit and empower resistance are located at the intersection of coordination, mobilisation, and the creation of counter narratives as well as of the surveillance and maintenance of existing power relations.

In this article we address the question of power in networked publics on Twitter in anti-fascist protests. The study is based on the results of an analysis of tweets, that are part of a data-set of three qualitative case studies about nationalist demonstrations in Germany, accompanied by counter-protests of anti-fascist groups, NGOs, and civil society. The question asked within this framework is how Twitter is used in the power struggles of the anti-fascist counter protests. The article concludes with the identification of tactics, practices, and strategies by activists for contesting power but also the reproduction of power on Twitter in interplay between functionalities of the technology and the political, i.e. socio-cultural, context. This leads us to a discussion about power in and between networked publics as part of a communication spiral in a larger media environment.