research-article

Screenshots, Symbols, and Personal Thoughts: The Role of Instagram for Social Activism

Authors:

Franziska B. Keller,

Pan HuiAuthors Info & Claims

WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

Pages 3728 - 3739

https://doi.org/10.1145/3485447.3512268

Published: 25 April 2022 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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Index Terms

Screenshots, Symbols, and Personal Thoughts: The Role of Instagram for Social Activism
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Collaborative and social computing
  2. Human computer interaction (HCI)
2. Information systems
  1. World Wide Web

Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

WWW '22: Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2022

April 2022

3764 pages

ISBN:9781450390965

DOI:10.1145/3485447

Editors:
Frédérique Laforest
INSA Lyon, France
,
Raphaël Troncy
EURECOM, France
,
Elena Simperl
King’s College London, UK
,
Deepak Agarwal
Pinterest, USA
,
Aristides Gionis
KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
,
Ivan Herman
W3C / retired
,
Lionel Médini
Université Lyon 1, France

Copyright © 2022 ACM.

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Published: 25 April 2022

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April 25 - 29, 2022

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Cited By

Shen HMa Y(2024)Characterizing the Developer Groups for Metaverse Services in Roblox2024 IEEE International Conference on Software Services Engineering (SSE)10.1109/SSE62657.2024.00039(214-220)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/SSE62657.2024.00039
Narayanan MMcCluskey M(2023)#BlackatCMO: Challenging charter schools through youth Instagram counterstoriesEducation, Citizenship and Social Justice10.1177/17461979231206941Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.1177/17461979231206941
Chang HRichardson AFerrara E(2022)#JusticeforGeorgeFloyd: How Instagram facilitated the 2020 Black Lives Matter protestsPLOS ONE10.1371/journal.pone.027786417:12(e0277864)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2022
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277864
Haq ELee LTyson GMogavi RBraud THui PAlhajj RAgarwal NMa ZRokne JAn JCharalampos CMagdy W(2022)Exploring Mental Health Communications among Instagram CoachesProceedings of the 2022 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining10.1109/ASONAM55673.2022.10068611(218-225)Online publication date: 10-Nov-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ASONAM55673.2022.10068611

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