Digital Activism

Digital activism refers to the use of the internet, social media, and mobile technologies to organize, mobilize, and campaign for political and social change, through petitions, hashtag campaigns, crowdfunding, livestreaming, leaking, and coordination of street protests. Manuel Castells argued in Networks of Outrage and Hope that digital networks enable autonomous communication that helped movements such as the Arab Spring, Occupy, and the indignados to form and spread. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg's theory of connective action describes how personalized content sharing can replace formal organizations as the basis of coordination, and Clay Shirky stressed the lowered costs of group formation. Zeynep Tufekci showed that rapid online mobilization can produce movements with weak organizational capacity, while Malcolm Gladwell criticized slacktivism, the substitution of low-effort online gestures for sustained commitment. Evgeny Morozov warned that authoritarian states can use the same tools for surveillance and repression, and Sarah Banet-Weiser examined the commodification of hashtag feminism. Paolo Gerbaudo analyzed the role of social media in shaping protest choreography. Digital divides and platform control shape who can participate. Digital activism remains central to research on social movements, democracy, communication, and political participation.