Politics

The fourth speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Isma Adila, whose focus is on the ethics of activism on social media. Digital activism on Twitter and other platforms has become a well-established practice, but this may also include problematic practices like doxxing and identity breaches; these are very questionable from an ethical perspective, of course.

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Benazir Bona Pratamawaty, who is presenting a long-term overview of digital activism in Indonesia. But digital activism remains a liquid, unsettled term: it describes social and political campaigning practices that draw on digital network infrastructure, often extending beyond standard representational politics.

The next session at COMNEWS 2023 that I’m attending is on social media and activism, and starts with Pierre Mauritz Sundah, whose focus is on independent women in social media. Traditionally, women in Indonesia and elsewhere have often been depicted in stereotypical roles representing household and child-rearing activities, and have therefore not been expected to have high levels of education. Many societal stigmata remain, as a result of the country’s patriarchal culture.

The next speaker in this COMNEWS 2023 session is Ivan Taufiq, whose interest is in political branding on social media. Political uses of social media involve the display of personal identity, reputation management, branding, and perception control; this creates a hyperreality in the Baudrillardian sense, and means that political social media activities are simulacra that may or may not represent the actual personalities of the politicians involved.

After a brief press conference involving us two keynote speakers, I’ve now joined the next session at COMNEWS 2023, which continues with a paper by Ika Rizki Yustisia, whose interest is in political discussion on social media in Indonesia. Her work attempts to assess the popularity of political leaders on social media – and social media here means Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, but now also TikTok and other new platforms. These require different approaches to symbolic communication, depending on platform affordances.

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides:

The second and final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Theresa Seipp, whose interest is in the notion of counterpower. Online, power has now shifted from legacy organisations to platform companies; this is exacerbated by the severe industrial concentration, with a few transnational companies dominating the industry. Current legal frameworks in a number of countries and regions appear unable to address this effectively, not least because they define size by audience metrics rather than control of technologies.

We’ve reached the final session of AoIR 2023, which I’ll moderate – and the first of its two papers is by Azza El-Masri. Her focus is especially on the experience of Lebanese women and queer journalists on WhatsApp. The background to this is the national secular protest movement against the proposal for a tax on WhatsApp – which is a platform of major importance in the country, and a key infrastructure of sociality in a country that has struggled in recent years with major political and economic challenges.

And we’ve reached the final day at AoIR 2023, and the session on networks that I’m in starts with Dmitry Kuznetsov, whose interest is in the community practices found in /r/hongkong during the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. These reacted against the gradual takeover by the People’s Republic of China, and were a transformative time for Hong Kong – but it is important to avoid a feel-good interpretation of these protests.

The final speakers in this session at AoIR 2023 are Marcel Alves dos Santos Jr. and, again, Emilie de Keulenaar (and I’m on 2% charge, so let’s see how far we get here). Marcel begins by pointing to Brazil’s unresolved relationship with its past military dictatorships: its Constitution of 1988 was accompanied by an amnesty for members of the military who were implicated in human rights abuses.