Challenging digital authoritarianism

From Bad Student to Transnational Activist: Netiwit Chotiphatphaisal and Transnational Activism in Northeast and Southeast Asia

“…Despite their diverse origins and organising bodies, these youth-led protests have served as a mutual source of inspiration, featuring several similar protest symbols and strategies (Janjira Sombatpoonsiri 2021;Ladia 2022). Moreover, the youth who engaged with these movements identified themselves as part of the Milk Tea Alliance, a loose transnational coalition, by supporting and advocating for each other's movements, as well as fighting against the expansion of authoritarianism in the region (Dedman and Lai 2021;Huang and Chavalin Svetanant 2022).…”

“…Recent years have witnessed a series of youth-led protests in Northeast and Southeast Asia, resulting in the exchange of knowledge among these movements and the emergence of a loosely connected transnational youth solidarity network, namely, the Milk Tea Alliance. While many studies attribute these phenomena primarily to the influence of social media (Huang and Chavalin Svetanant 2022;Ladia 2022;Schaffar and Praphakorn Wongratanawin 2021), available evidence suggests that youth activists in this particular geographical region have been in contact with each other for an extended period, hinting at a human dimension to the alliance. For instance, connections between youth activists from Hong Kong and Taiwan have been documented (Ho 2019), as well as the existence of the Network of Young Democratic Asians (NOYDA).…”

Fishing for Politics?

“…Furthermore, complementary to the mechanism whereas pragmatic sense of food pushes political actions, this study advanced that food politics can also trigger insurgent actions (as defined above) through food's symbolic connections to cultural and political phenomena. While not fully comparable, a recent example bearing certain similarity to my theoretical proposition here is the Milk Tea Alliance movement in 2020 (Huang and Svetanant, 2022). #milkteaalliance was first coined in a tweet by a Hong Kong-based…”

“…These arguments touch on the ambiguity of (in)formality (Vu, 2017), political neutrality versus sensitivity (Gleiss, 2014), spatial/geographical settings of social movements and activism (Miraftab, 2009;Uitermark et al, 2012;Nicholls and Uitermark, 2017), and the rising importance of social media and alternative forms of communicative technology in political communication (Matulis and Moyer, 2018;Dumitrica and Felt, 2020;Huang and Svetanant, 2022).…”

“…Future research can pay attention to comparative analysis of these processes across contexts, taking into consideration the changes in society and social media environment. As social media does not only benefit civil society, researchers might be curious about how civil society respond to digital authoritarianism (Huang and Svetanant, 2022).…”