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

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. CCS CONCEPTS• Networks → Social media networks; • Human-centered computing → User studies; Web-based interaction; Social content sharing; Social media.

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“…Meme pages and celebrities, for instance, have been recently characterized to spark instances of political participation in Morocco [34], maintain partisan identity in Canada [35], promote public health behavior [36], or facilitate misinformation [37]. Recent work has focused on the growing role of visuals in protests directly, such as the case of the Hong Kong Protests in 2019 [38]. Amid the virality of the #BlackOutTuesday hashtag on Instagram we decided to study the visual platform, finally, in a political context.…”

Aktivisme Media Sosial di Instagram: Studi Literatur

“…Tidak seperti platform media sosial lain, fitur-fitur di Instagram sebenarnya tidak mudah digunakan untuk kegiatan aktivisme politik dan sosial (Haq et al, 2022). Diantara kekurangan tersebut yaitu tidak tersedianya fitur trending topics, second degree interactions, konten yang sangat berbasis visual, fitur re-sharing, virality measurement, serta exposure time Instagram story yang terbatas, tidak tersedianya fitur-fitur ini dapat mengekang eksposure suatu informasi ke pengguna yang pada gilirannya juga berdampak kepada ketercapaian dari suatu aktivisme sosial itu sendiri (Haq et al, 2022).…”

“…Tidak seperti platform media sosial lain, fitur-fitur di Instagram sebenarnya tidak mudah digunakan untuk kegiatan aktivisme politik dan sosial (Haq et al, 2022). Diantara kekurangan tersebut yaitu tidak tersedianya fitur trending topics, second degree interactions, konten yang sangat berbasis visual, fitur re-sharing, virality measurement, serta exposure time Instagram story yang terbatas, tidak tersedianya fitur-fitur ini dapat mengekang eksposure suatu informasi ke pengguna yang pada gilirannya juga berdampak kepada ketercapaian dari suatu aktivisme sosial itu sendiri (Haq et al, 2022). Namun, terlepas dari semua keterbatasan tersebut, para aktivis mengemukakan bahwa Instagram tetap memberikan dinamika penting dalam suatu gerakan sosial yakni besarnya audiens muda yang dapat menerima isu/masalah ketidakadilan sosial melalui medium yang cukup fleksibel (Ho & McCausland, 2020).…”