TY - GEN
T1 - Screenshots, Symbols, and Personal Thoughts: The Role of Instagram for Social Activism
AU - Haq, Ehsan Ul
AU - Braud, Tristan
AU - Yau, Yui Pan
AU - Lee, Lik Hang
AU - Keller, Franziska B.
AU - Hui, Pan
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 ACM.
PY - 2022/4/25
Y1 - 2022/4/25
N2 - In this paper, we highlight the use of Instagram for social activism, taking 2019 Hong Kong protests as a case study. Instagram focuses on image content and provides users with few features to share or repost, limiting information propagation. Nevertheless, users who are politically active offline also share their activism on Instagram. We first evaluate the effect of protests on social media activity for protesters and non-protesters over two significant protests. Protesters' exposure to protest-related posts is much higher than non-protesters, and their network activity follows the protest schedule. They are also much more active on posts related to the protest that they participate in than the other protest. We then analyze the images posted by the users. Users predominantly use symbols related to protests and share personal thoughts on its primary actors. Users primarily share content to raise their network's awareness, and the content choice is directly affected by Instagram's intrinsic interaction modalities.
AB - In this paper, we highlight the use of Instagram for social activism, taking 2019 Hong Kong protests as a case study. Instagram focuses on image content and provides users with few features to share or repost, limiting information propagation. Nevertheless, users who are politically active offline also share their activism on Instagram. We first evaluate the effect of protests on social media activity for protesters and non-protesters over two significant protests. Protesters' exposure to protest-related posts is much higher than non-protesters, and their network activity follows the protest schedule. They are also much more active on posts related to the protest that they participate in than the other protest. We then analyze the images posted by the users. Users predominantly use symbols related to protests and share personal thoughts on its primary actors. Users primarily share content to raise their network's awareness, and the content choice is directly affected by Instagram's intrinsic interaction modalities.
KW - Instagram
KW - Online Social Network
KW - Protest
KW - Social Activism
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85129825709&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3485447.3512268
DO - 10.1145/3485447.3512268
M3 - Conference article published in proceeding or book
AN - SCOPUS:85129825709
T3 - WWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
SP - 3728
EP - 3739
BT - WWW 2022 - Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
T2 - 31st ACM World Wide Web Conference, WWW 2022
Y2 - 25 April 2022 through 29 April 2022
ER -