Social Media, Politics and the State Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube

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 rigorousresearch 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.

1. Introduction Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs 2. Thank You, Facebook: A Critical Discussion on Democratic and Communicative Practices in the Global Uprisings Donatella Della Porta and Alice Mattoni 3. The Role of Social Media and the 2011 Egyptian Revolution: Creating Spaces for Dissent Sarah Salem 4. Social Media Activism and Authoritarian Regimes Thomas Poell 5. Anti-Social Networking: Toward a Critical Political Economic Critique of Anonymous and the “New Hacktivism” Ashley Fogle 6. The Ruse of Neo-Nazism and the Web: Social Media as Platforms for Racist Discourses in the Context of Greek Economic Crisis Panos Kompatsiaris and Yannis Mlylonas 7. 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 8. Counter-Hegemonic Surveillance Assemblages: Live Streaming Critiques of Capital and the State in the Quebec Spring Elise Thorburn 9. Police "Image Work" in an Era of Social Media Christopher J. Schneider 10. Policing Social Media: Crowd-Sourced and Consolidated Efforts Daniel Trottier 11. Populism(s) 2.0: Social Media and the Symbolic Battle for the “People” Paolo Gerbaudo

Daniel Trottier is a Postdoctoral Fellow in Social and Digital Media at the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at University of Westminster. Christian Fuchs is Professor of Social Media at the University of Westminster.