Making a deal with the devil? Portuguese and Finnish activists’ everyday negotiations on the value of social media

ABSTRACT

This article explores how young activists in Portugal and Finland negotiate the value of social media in their practices. Considering the near ubiquitous intertwinement of online-offline environments, and its contradictory promises for social movements, we look at these negotiations through the moral principles drawn upon to critique and justify social media practices. Based on ethnographic data from Portuguese climate activists and Finnish mental health activists, we build on pragmatist sociology as an analytical frame to investigate value and meaning-making within these social movements. Results show how activists predominantly criticize social media for its fame-valued logic, which they consider leading to the individualization and depoliticization of communication and the ‘marketization’ of messages and practices. These challenges are managed with reference to the groups’ civic values through two sets of practices: 1) grounding the online and 2) repurposing individualism. Yet these practices reveal different compromise strategies in each country to accommodate social media demands and core group values, highlighting different interpretations of civic values that materialize in competing stances in relation to ‘political’ content and ‘individual’ action. We argue that an analytical framework focusing on values as they unfold in everyday practices is particularly apt to understanding meaning construction in social movements, whose very essence is the evaluation and critique of existing justifications within certain socio-political arrangements.

KEYWORDS:

• Activism
• social media
• valuation
• critique
• resistance
• youth

Introduction

Elli:I’ve had it up to here with this fucking capitalism and oppression disguised as market economy! Blow the system into fucking pieces I say! The Basic Petes vote for the National Coalition Party because they want to make sure that the lazy unemployed next door does not get My Tax Money! Sorry, I’m pissed off.When did the society stop being acommunity?Meiju: Should we include some of that gospel of commonality into our social media presence as well? Helmi: Yes! Although I don’t know how ideological we can be in our posts.(Fieldnote 27 November 2020)

The above discussion took place in a WhatsApp group of mental health activists in Finland. It illustrates how social movements are, at their core, environments of contestation, formed as critical responses to the status quo and operating by offering alternative scenarios and imagined futures. Moreover, it illustrates how this critical role is anchored in values and evaluations that unfold in the groups’ everyday negotiations about their roles and future orientations. In the quote, Elli, Meiju and Helmi¹ put forward very different values when negotiating the group’s nature, its voice and its outlook on society.

Prior research has analysed social movements’ meaning-making mostly by examining framing and action frames (Benford & Snow, 2000; Johnston & Noakes, 2005). In this article, we argue that pragmatist sociology offers specific conceptual tools that, by investigating values and evaluations, contribute to a more thorough analysis of activist environments (Gladarev & Lonkila, 2013; Luhtakallio, 2018, 2012). We propose Boltanski and Thévenot’s justification theory (1999a, 1999b; Ylä-Anttila & Luhtakallio, 2016) – thus far rarely applied in social movement studies (Albert & Davidenko, 2018) – as a tool to analyse activists’ meaning-making through the values evoked in their everyday negotiations about the movement’s course of action. Justification theory, we argue, adds specificity and nuance to the somewhat abstract framing approach typically used in this field (Gladarev & Lonkila, 2013).

We use this theoretical framework to analyse social media practices for two main reasons: i) they are virtually transversal to every social movement, influencing and being shaped by activists’ political ethos and projects (Fenton & Barassi, 2011; Galis & Neumayer, 2016); ii) they involve paradigmatic implications for politicization, namely a self-centred architecture that challenges collective action and meaning-making (e.g., Milan, 2015). We contend that pragmatic sociology’s focus on values enables uncovering the negotiations behind the critique of existing justifications within current socio-political arrangements, which lies at the very core of social movements. To explore how these negotiations reverberate in activist practices, we investigate the accommodation of the movements’ everyday activism to the demands of social media. While social media has become a key arena and tool for activists, especially younger ones (Barassi & Zamponi, 2020; Maher & Earl, 2019; Sandoval-Almazan & Ramon Gil-Garcia, 2014; Simões & Campos, 2016), scholars have noticed the movements’ uneasiness in modifying their objectives and culture to conciliate the demands of social media (Barassi, 2015; Hill, 2013; Leistert, 2015; Morozov, 2011).

This article draws on ethnographic data from young climate activists in Portugal and mental health activists in Finland. We followed these movements online and offline, and inquired as to what value they ascribe to social media, how they critique it and how the ensuing trade-offs impact their activist practices. Using the pragmatist tools from justification theory, the article advances an anthropological analysis of the value of social media (Barassi, 2015, p. 15), investigating the evaluations underpinning the activists’ use and critiques of social media and how those values unfold through their practices.

Our analysis shows that activists’ relationships with social media embody a clash between two principles of worth: fame and civic. We argue that the prevailing critique of social media takes issue with its fame-valuing logic (Milan, 2015; Treré, 2019), characterized by a demand for constant activity, in which quantity is prioritized over content. This entails two main problems for the activists’ social media practices: 1) the individualization and depoliticization of communication and 2) the ‘marketization’ of messages and practices.

Far from being docile abiders, activists constantly test the value of social media against the values that guide and inform their groups’ purpose and identity. The accommodation of social media demands to the groups’ core (civic) values take place through two main strategies, which we name 1) grounding the online and 2) repurposing individualism. We show that these practices take different forms, reflecting different interpretations of civic values; this becomes especially visible in the groups’ attitudes towards ‘political’ content and in their stances regarding ‘individual’ activism online.

Our ethnographic data show the different ways of negotiating social media demands with respect to group values, offering a path into investigating the unfolding of compromises related to the groups’ political objectives, their current nature and future direction. The group we investigated in Portugal is part of the international climate movement and so aims to pressure governments and corporations to create a sense of urgency around this global, intensely political issue. The Finnish group, on the other hand, seeks to promote more positive connotations around a stigmatized experience. Through online and offline observation, and a focus on values and evaluative practices, our findings on social media practices provide a nuanced understanding of the makings of these groups’ activism beyond social media environments.

Values and critiques of social media in social movements

According to Veronica Barassi,

It is only by looking at the human value that activists actively produce on corporate web 2.0 platforms that we can start to appreciate the meaning these technologies have for political participation and to look at the many margins of freedom from online corporate surveillance that activists actively construct. (2015, p. 15)

Several authors argue that social media have controversial consequences for social movements (Fenton & Barassi, 2011; Galis & Neumayer, 2016; Leistert, 2015), namely the instigation of self-centred forms of participation, the weakening of political collectivity, the reinforcement of neoliberalist values and the commodification of users’ engagement. At the same time, Treré (2019) has recently suggested that the individualism propelled by social media’s mode of operation can cohabit with social movements’ attempts to appropriate social media for political change. Indeed, faced with the counterproductive option of ruling out social media (Galis & Neumayer, 2016) and the contradictions inherent in exposing their messages to corporate logics of regulation (Leistert, 2015), activists’ practices often incorporate paradoxical values while striving for their conception of the common good.

Research reveals that activists deal with these underlying ambiguities in ways that are both tensional and strategic (Barassi, 2015). Drawing on Marxist anthropology, Barassi (2015) suggests looking at the concept of human value not grounded in rationalist orientations (e.g., reductive economist paradigms) nor as an ‘end product’ (e.g., social capital), but rather as a social process. Such conceptualization led her to appreciate that activists negotiate with digital capitalism because they believe they produce a different type of value, drawn from social relationships built online: a value that is both material and representational, encompassing the capacity for mobilization and the representation of collective strength. This article follows the scholarly pleas for further analysis of activists’ understandings of their social media practices and management of potential contradictions between these platforms’ commercial values and the value systems that root their own struggle (Barassi, 2015; Galis & Neumayer, 2016; Milan, 2015).

While building on this body of literature, we propose a more structured approach for the analysis of these value conflicts that allows for exploring how these frictions shape the nitty-gritty of activism anchored in specific moral and political orientations. In other words, we place Barassi’s (2015) empirical focus on value within a broader sociological inquiry on value and evaluation: more than exploring the kind of value that activists produce within a capitalist self-centred architecture, we ask which moral tensions are at stake, how they emerge and shape the activists’ political action and what kind of compromises and solutions the activists forge between conflicting values.

This article examines the activists’ nuanced strategies of accommodating and contesting the different values associated with social media. The analysis rests on pragmatic sociology tools for identifying how valuations and critiques are justified in everyday situations and how these translate into practices. This approach considers value as a situated and active phenomenon, exploring how people solve conflicts and discuss what counts as valuable (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999b; Lamont, 2012). The cornerstone of this approach is Boltanski and Thévenot’s (1999a) ‘justification theory’, which argues that, in solving disputes, people draw on different ‘orders of worth’ – that is, on different value bases – to justify their actions and to evaluate those of others (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999a; Ylä-Anttila & Luhtakallio, 2016). These orders include: ‘civic worth’, with equality, mutual respect and collective welfare as the highest values; ‘the worth of fame’, valuing popularity and celebrity; ‘market worth’, prioritizing monetary gain and competitiveness; ‘industrial worth’, valuing efficiency and productivity; ‘domestic worth’, valuing tradition and heritage; ‘inspired worth’, valuing novelty and creativity; and ‘ecological worth,’ prioritizing nature and its protection. The orders of worth provide criteria against which actions, items and people can be evaluated.

In our analysis, civic worth and the worth of fame are particularly relevant. Civic worth is a value-base that Boltanski and Thévenot (1991a, pp. 231–233, 237) spell out with a close reading of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) In this value-base, the will of the people, collective wellbeing, solidarity and collectives over individuals are to be valued above all else. In today’s social movements, civic worth is visible in the efforts towards equality and social justice but also in everyday practices that value joint decision-making, collective claims and the respect for plural viewpoints. The worth of fame, in turn, is spelled out from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651). Here, the most valuable arguments are those that gain public recognition, popularity and renown (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1991, pp. 223–225). The quantification of likes, shares and comments makes social media a fundamentally fame-based environment of valuation. For social movements, however, seeking visibility, media coverage and public recognition is by no means a novelty brought on by social media, but rather a foundational logic of modus operandi. Yet, while social movements have always strived to make their claims visible (e.g., Baiocchi et al., 2014), in the age of social media they have to deal with platforms on which visibility is determined by a consumer culture (Leistert, 2015) and ‘results in a spiral process that originates and ends within the individual’ (Milan, 2015, p. 7).

Just as orders of worth are mobilized to justify arguments, they are also used to assemble critiques. Pragmatist sociology highlights the plurality of evaluative criteria, and how conflicts often emerge when these orders clash in meta-level arguments regarding which order of worth is most applicable to the situation at hand (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999a; Lamont, 2012). As Centemeri (2017, p. 100) explains, there are different modes of valuation that people can resort to in order to share a judgment concerning what matters, what is worthy or worthwhile, what is valuable, and what counts as important in a given situation, in order to be able to convene on a shared understanding about the proper way to ‘engage with’ the situation at hand.

Empirically, then, negotiations over what should be done, why and what the situation is actually ‘about’ should be seen as moral debates and analysed by looking at the values, evaluations and justifications at play (e.g., Albert & Davidenko, 2018; Centemeri, 2017; Luhtakallio, 2018).

We join these analyses by broadening their scope from public claims into the groups’ internal negotiations on the value of social media, explored ethnographically and inquired about as moments where the nature of the group, its voice and future orientation are shaped. Like Barassi (2015), we argue that everyday online practices often relate to specific political projects, grounded in activists’ claims and how they imagine society (see also, Baiocchi et al., 2014; Luhtakallio, 2018). By looking at activists’ negotiations on the value of social media, we illuminate the contradictory meanings of social media, exploring i.e. ‘how actors create compromises between orders of worth in the unfolding of everyday life so as to coordinate their actions’ (Lamont, 2012, p. 208).

Context and data

The ethnographic data for this article were collected within the project Imagi(ni)ng Democracy: European youth becoming citizens by visual participation, which studies visual political participation among young people in Finland, France, Germany and Portugal. Methodologically, we developed the method of snap-along ethnography (Luhtakallio & Meriluoto, 2021) to observe groups and individual activists simultaneously on-and-offline.

The groups that participated in this research were contacted because they were particularly active around topical issues in their respective countries and employed visual tools in activism. In Finland, we observed a group of young mental health activists, organized in the auspice of a civil society-run project. Despite a dramatic increase in mental health diagnoses in Finland, with 25% suffering from mental ill-health during their lives (Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare, THL), diagnoses continue to carry significant stigma, enticing the group to come together to ‘break the stigma associated with mental health problems’. The group consists of about thirty active people (the vast majority of whom are women), aged between 20 and 35, sharing experiences of mental health problems. As described in their Guide for Activists, most group members are ‘white, Finnish-speaking and have an upper-level education, making the group rather homogenous in this regard’. The group relies on creative and artistic forms of activism: they organize events where people share their experiences of mental health in the form of performances, have published a book, a board game, and new, mental-health-themed lyrics for Christmas carols that they then performed on the stairs of the Finnish parliament. The group emphasizes the empowerment of its members and provides them with regular activism training. They have a blog, a Facebook page and an active Instagram account. The participants are self-defined ‘digital natives’, using their smartphones and social media habitually. We have followed the group, and its consenting individual members, since early 2020.

In Portugal, the ethnography began in October 2019. It was conducted in one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country and closely followed approximately 25 young climate activists from different groups (e.g., Student Climate Strike, Extinction Rebellion): most are middle-class, between 18 and 35 years old. The fluid and quickly expanding nature of the climate movement means that different participation profiles co-exist: some activists belong exclusively to one group while others circulate across different groups. The actions range from weekly strikes to organizing public talks, demonstrations and acts of civil disobedience, designed mainly to demand government and corporate action to reverse the climate crisis. This ethnography was developed in the context of wider political events, such as the alignment with the COP25 counter-summit in Madrid in December 2019 and the organization of the ‘World Economic Failure’ protests, which took place in parallel with the Davos World Economic Forum in January 2020. Nationally, the closing of thermoelectric power stations, the halting of airport constructions, the end of gas and lithium exploration and the political compromise with carbon neutrality are among the main activist aims.

For an extended period, we participated in the groups’ meetings and events (including virtual ones during the pandemic), while simultaneously following their social media activities and online communications (including Slack, Riot, WhatsApp and email). Having followed them for a few months, we conducted seventeen interviews with activists (ten in Portugal and seven in Finland), based on a guide to exploring their views on societal participation. The guide included several questions on social media – their pros and cons and the interviewees’ habits of image-taking, posting etc.) – seeking to deepen the ethnographic fieldnotes, in which social media practices and collective discussions about them spontaneously emerged.

We took special care in explaining the research to the participants prior to starting the fieldwork, as the online observation in particular is not readily transparent to them. All participants signed informed consent forms prior to the observations and interviews, and we reminded them regularly of our ongoing observations. The research in this article is part of an ERC-funded project whose compliance to the required ethical standards has been pre-approved.

This study, then, investigated the social media practices and valuations of two very different groups from distinct cultural contexts. The Finnish group is professionally led and organizes around the personal experiences and labels institutionally assigned to the activists. The Portuguese group comprises young volunteers whose practices are grounded in bottom-up, grassroots forms of activism inspired by international peers. We ventured into analysing these groups concomitantly not because we deem them easily comparable, but precisely because we were taken by surprise by how similar negotiations and questions emerged in these very different groups and contexts. Rather than pursuing a traditional comparative study of the two countries, then, the analysis highlights similarities between the groups despite their differing backgrounds and contexts. While we identified some strong similarities, especially in terms of how the groups assembled social media critique, some key differences emerged in relation to how different groups navigated between social media demands and their own values, which we linked to the groups’ respective political objectives.

Analysis

We began the analysis of the empirical material by inquiring into activists’ critiques of social media and the moral values that ground those critiques with justification theory as our lens. In other words, what problems do social media pose for activists, and why are they seen as problems?

Key tension: the worth of social media and the cost of fame

Activists in both Portugal and Finland regard social media as integral to their participation, and appreciate its potential for ‘scaling up’ the groups’ actions and for bolstering marginalized voices. They also appreciated its utility for everyday group management as already explored in earlier literature (for an overview, see, Sandoval-Almazan & Ramon Gil-Garcia, 2014); however, they also frequently voice their critiques of the value of social media. Most critiques contested the underlying ‘fame-based valuation logic’ of social media (see, Gerlitz & Helmond, 2013). As detailed below, they targeted the predominance of the worth of renown, where the number of views, likes, shares, followers and comments are understood as signs of visibility and public esteem. Our data indicate that this fame-based valuation driven by social media is associated with a demand for constant activity in order to be noticed, prioritizing quantity over content. Consequently, the spotlight tends to fall upon activities that are ‘fake’, ‘inauthentic’, ‘void of meaning’ or even ‘toxically positive’.

According to activists in both countries, these features have two unwelcome consequences: 1) the individualization and depoliticization of communication and 2) the ‘marketization’ of messages and practices. As will be fleshed out, our findings are in dialogue with previous discussions on the political effects of social media, intervening in the actors’ meaning work (Milan, 2015; Treré, 2019) and dramatically aligning political participation with individualistic logics (Fenton & Barassi, 2011). Yet, despite the opacity of criteria through which social media regulate activism (Treré, 2019), our analysis will shed light on social media as value-laden practices that entail sense-making over the kinds of moral values that the self-centred architecture is advancing on activism, laying ground for the possibility of disputes. We will present these controversies in detail next, followed by the groups’ means of accommodating them into their ‘core values’.

First, the fame-based logic is seen to devalue collective entries; posts that receive ‘likes’ typically present an argument from a personal perspective, prioritizing individual performance over collective action and customizing participation by means of individual self-expression (Fenton & Barassi, 2011; Milan, 2015). This became visible, for instance, in the mental health group’s trainings for Instagram activism:

The speaker—self-defined as an ‘anarchist-communist feminist activist’—talks under the heading ‘Personal branding’:

The most successful kind of Instagram-activism is pop-activism. It needs to be clear, entertaining and easy to follow. The most important thing is how you express yourself: be innovative, be authentic, be funny. Most of all, be you. Being authentically you means that you are approachable.

(Fieldnote 20 October 2020)

While the mental health activists also repurpose this focus on personal stories, as we will explore later, they also shun this deeply individualistic logic. Personal stories are seen to easily divert attention from structural issues and collective demands towards individual traits and appearances, as Loviisa, a mental health activist, discusses below in connection to a recent citizen’s initiative proposing guaranteed quick access to universal mental health care:

Loviisa: I think it would be important to get some more mass behind our outputs. […] I think it would somehow make our posts more real … like more really political. Like now with the therapy guarantee initiative, we could be more systematically involved, we could join our experiences behind that issue. Now it’s just how I’ve had this experience and how I received help. (Interview, 4 September 2020)

Second, as aforementioned, the fame-based logic is seen to value content that is light, unpolarizing and ‘not too political’. In the following fieldnote excerpt from Portugal, Marta, a climate activist, complains about how the content prioritized by Instagram’s logic deeply contradicts what she believes is meaningful to publish:

- You haven’t posted a lot on Instagram lately, have you? (I asked Marta)- You know, sometimes I get tired of Instagram […]. What bothers me is that it is a lot of bloggers, influencers … it’s for ‘cool kids’ […]. If I post pictures of my hair [Marta recently dyed her hair white], I get a lot of ‘likes’, but if I post something on political and social stuff, nobody cares – zero likes. It’s very twisted. (Fieldnote, 20 January 2020)

For activists, this prioritizing of ‘likeable’ content encourages people to post ‘meaningless nonsense’, resulting in the painful mismatch between the group’s social media participation and their raison d’être. Within activist groups, debates about striking a balance between posting likeable content and putting across political messages often led to activists realizing the risk of their social media actions being ‘done for the sake of doing something’ as expressed by Saana, a Finnish mental health activist:

The word ‘activism’ would imply that things are said directly. But I think what we say is now motivated by fear of what others think of us—that others might think that we only complain. But what is our group, then? Now, I think our posts are invented for the sake of inventing them. Our voice is that of a polite, shy girl, who would like to have an impact but lacks the courage. (Interview, 28 April 2020)

Among Portuguese climate activists, the critique of the fame-based valuation logic of social media was often coupled with a contestation of market worth. In the following excerpt, Marta elaborates on the supremacy of the values associated with feeding social media, anchored in a ‘capitalist facet’ that promotes the visibility of unproblematized and market-oriented logics over claim-making and politicization:

[…] there is [a] capitalist facet that convinces you that ‘cool kids’ will show you the best product. And what happens is that these ‘cool kids’ don’t use their media power to talk about certain types of causes because they want to remain politically neutral in order to continue to attract sponsorships. […] I started posting a lot of things about male chauvinism and anti-racism […] it’s too much problematization, so sponsors move away […]. It’s the content I post that I care about—I don’t care about the likes. (Interview, 6 February 2020)

Climate activists also described how the pressure to prioritize quantity over content can lead to subversion of the group’s ethos in favour of an industrial-oriented logic ruled by the worth of technical efficiency, requiring activists to be skilful in managing social media activity, as Raquel illustrated:

[…] many people see the movement almost as if it were a ‘start-up’. […] Communication through social media has to be a vehicle, a platform, a tool—not the reason for the movement’s existence. […] Sometimes, the most important questions […] are not ‘Why do we organize?’ or ‘ What is our action plan?’ but questions like ‘What is the design team doing?’ or ‘What is our brandbook?’ […]. And that completely eliminates the mobilization potential, which is the political conscience of the people—knowing that ‘we are taking to the street because we have to react in the face of an urgent issue’ […] and not ‘because the poster on Facebook is very good’. (Interview, 31 January 2020)

Raquel criticizes activists’ tendency to focus on how things are seen and ‘liked’ on social media, and therefore on how technicalities should be handled for efficient communication (fame-industrial coupling). The questions raised by Raquel go to the heart of the material impacts of social media on the movements’ dynamics (Galis & Neumayer, 2016; Milan, 2015), challenged by ‘individualism [which] denigrates the collective creativity of politics’ (Fenton & Barassi, 2011, p. 190). Informants from both countries overtly criticized this pressure to remain constantly active and visible, resulting in meaningless posts at the expense of the group’s core values.

This raises a question prompted by the pragmatist approach: What are the core group values against which the downsides of social media are measured, and how are compromises struck between social media demands and those core values? By looking at the moments of negotiation, we will now show how the groups’ core values are civic values, but with different emphasis in the two countries.

Practices: how tensions between civic values and social media demands are negotiated

We now address how activists seek to solve the tension between social media demands and what is ‘actually meaningful’ for their group. Both groups perceive themselves as ‘part of the left alternative’ – as ‘anti-capitalist’, ‘radical leftist’ or ‘positive anarchist’ – making it particularly challenging to abide by ‘capitalist social media demands’. We found that activists adopt different practices when navigating between these demands and their own sense of what is meaningful. We name these two strategies for accommodating social media demands to the groups’ values as 1) grounding the online and 2) repurposing individualism.

Grounding the online

The pressure to ‘post void content for the sake of posting’ threatens to reduce activism to the online sphere, with no concrete link to people’s lives or to social movements’ offline existence and material struggles. This has prompted activists to ground the online. The Portuguese climate activists did this by connecting publications to street actions, by linking global and local problems and by highlighting offline interactions with ordinary people. For the Finnish mental health activists, ‘grounded’ primarily meant authentic posts that represent their unpolished reality and true experiences. This resulted in two distinct approaches to counteracting meaningless social media feeds.

The young Portuguese climate activists felt that online publications about Fridays For Future actions should portray not only the protest itself, but also address topical climate events (such as the bushfires in Australia) through the voices of people walking by the protest, grounding their online posts in real-life encounters and actions. Similarly, they sought to link global issues to local concerns in order to root online action in problems that the general public can relate to. This emerged during the ethnography in different circumstances: either when doing a post on social media to oppose lithium exploration in a nearby region (exposing the Secretary of State for Energy for greenwashing), or when collectively discussing the re-politicization of climate issues in the face of the new challenges brought by the COVID-19 pandemic (which is deepening social injustice problems). The following excerpt illustrates how discussion of the problems caused by climate change (and the pandemic) might be framed to reflect the everyday reality of the Portuguese public:

Francisca felt that, along with the digital strikes, the group could gain more from Instagram posts about how people can become more conscious of individual behaviours during the lockdown.

- We could do a post about ‘5 things you can do at home during quarantine’[…] ‘But I don’t think that should be our focus’, Raquel said, and then proceeded, ‘We are already talking about an economic recession, which means that when this is over, there is likely to be a production boom and a spike in emissions because everyone will be trying to accelerate the economy again to recover all the millions in profits that companies are currently losing. As activists, we should be campaigning right now […] saying that this is an opportunity to make the energy transition to reverse the situation we are in’.

Company bankruptcies and the rise in unemployment as a result of the COVID crisis were extensively debated. (Fieldnote, 19 March 2020)

Raquel carves out the group’s key message by forging it as a response to concrete debates going on. Instead of jumping at Francisca’s suggestion of creating posts more appealing to individuals, she grounds the group’s action with a powerful reminder of their role (‘as activists’), contrasting their core civic values and political role with the market logic of the profit-making corporations.

In Finland, the mental health activists regularly expressed concern and even disdain regarding posts portraying an embellished version of life. They likened social media’s appreciation of all things happy and pretty to their experiences of stigmatization and lack of recognition in the physical world. Along with experiences of being devalued because of their illness, they often felt that social media was, yet again, an environment where they are not appreciated and do not fit in. Subsequently, as part of their activism, they valued posts that present ‘the sides of life that do not usually count as displayable’ in the words of Suvi, echoing the civic values of equality and mutual respect.

In an attempt to ground the group’s social media presence – that is, to ensure authenticity – the mental health activists launched a series of posts entitled ‘mental health images’ during the pandemic and lockdown. Helmi described these as images that show how real life can be at this moment:

It is rare to see dirty homes and mess on social media—you only see these all-white Instagram homes. I moved in September, and my hallway is still filled with black plastic bags; I just can’t get around to emptying them. But mess is a part of life—you don’t have to hide it. We don’t want to present an image where everyone has a tidy home, a fancy life and impeccable skin. Someone might even say ‘Wow! Others leave their dishes on the floor too!’. (Interview, 30 April 2020)

The ethos that Helmi describes is about repurposing the fame-based logic of social media. Ideally, Helmi explains, that fame-based valuation could be transformed into a subversive tool that serves the group’s purposes; instead of conforming to the need to post pretty and pleasant things, social media should provide a platform for contesting precisely these sorts of valuations. Images of dirty dishes and homes could prompt us to question and redefine who is worthy of being looked at and followed, rooting posts in the group’s goal of tackling stigma.

This debate about what constitutes a meaningful post reveals core group values in action. The baseline against which social media demands are weighed reveals their self-understanding as an activist group and, as we have shown, draws largely from the civic order of worth as described by Boltanski and Thévenot (1999b). However, while climate activists prioritized collective claim-making for systemic transformation based on social and climate justice, mental health activists highlighted the equality of all voices and authenticity of representation.

Different civic justifications, then, lead to distinct social media practices, especially in terms of group attitudes to ‘political’ content and ‘individual’ voices. The Portuguese activists tend to act on the basis of collective interests, placing common good above individual issues. The following excerpt (regarding the use of memes when Greta Thunberg came to Portugal) is an example of how debate emerged around what is meaningful to post:

I checked Twitter to look for the memes, as they were a hot topic of discussion in the WhatsApp group. According to one girl from a northern regional group, ‘The thing about these memes is that some are pretty ridiculous […]. They [other groups] think these memes will make the movement more visible’. As one boy argued, ‘These are very strong memes in terms of communication, but they were meaningless because they did not mention the theme that binds us together.’ […]. Someone from the group that created the memes ended up jumping into the WhatsApp conversation: ‘[…] this is all an attempt to highlight the topic. We have had exposure on the account!’ (Fieldnote, 22 November 2019)

Ultimately, these memes were not shared or re-tweeted by members of the regional groups, who did not consider them a meaningful way of communicating Greta’s arrival in Portugal. In practice, posts that prioritize the group’s political messages and ‘speak of the theme that binds us together’ reflect what is considered meaningful and valuable for activists. Similarly, the excerpt in the previous section, which criticized social media as a breeding ground for politically neutral ‘cool kids’, ends with the ‘do not care about likes’ statement as a corollary of standing up proudly for the (political) content of the posts.

Conversely, in Finland, ‘political content’ was seen as something to be avoided, as it may clash with a group’s efforts to foster dialogue and build understanding. One example of how the primacy of seeking to please can override political argumentation was a discussion within the mental health group about which hashtags to use in their campaign. Launched in June 2020, amid a pandemic deepening what experts call a mental health crisis, the campaign sought to highlight how common, and yet how persistently stigmatized, mental health concerns are.

Elli:The hashtag would need to convey that mental health concerns are really common, that regular people go through them and that we are not some creeps. It needs to bring people together, to be approachable, not stigmatizing. I could go wild, but somehow I think provocation is not necessary in this situation.Meiju:Yes, in this context, approachability and being sympathetic are great pluses. I also like humour as an effective device here.Why is provocation not the best fit here? Why is humour better? I ask.Elli:The [campaign] stickers are themselves already a powerful statement. They don’t need any more underlining. If we were provocative here, it certainly would not make it easier to find common ground or make us approachable, however much I’d like to be an angry anarchist even just for a little bit. (Fieldnote 1 June 2020)

The above discussion illustrates the polite social media presence that Finnish activists often end up fostering. Although they might like to be ‘angry anarchists’, the social media logic – in combination with the group’s objective of fostering positive emotions towards a stigmatized group and the consensual Finnish style of political action (Luhtakallio, 2012) – makes them lean towards an unpolarizing style. Helmi captured this when describing the group’s social media policy as ‘creating posts that are warm-hearted, funny, humouristic and not too serious’. In practice, then, the mental health activists constantly perform a delicate balancing act between provocative authenticity and consensual likeability, typically veering towards the latter. The group regarded a post as successful especially when it was liked or shared by specific other (feminist, queer and anti-capitalist) activists they admired. They sought to be liked, but for the right reasons and by the right people.

Importantly, for both groups, keeping the online meaningful and grounded in reality is a contentious issue. Within the groups, every post is extensively discussed and openly criticized as they explore the value basis of what is meaningful. Simultaneously, we begin to see differences in the groups’ interpretations over their core civic values. The Portuguese climate activists believe that fame value (‘exposure on the account’) should not supplant their civic purpose of communicating political causes in meaningful and grounded ways. In the Finnish group, debate centred on whether a provocative hashtag was ‘too political’ and therefore contrary to the group’s main objective of enabling dialogue and fostering understanding – which, as we will see next, individual activists sometimes had a hard time consolidating.

Repurposing individualism

Prior research warns of the risks of protest dynamics operated by social media (Fenton & Barassi, 2011), creating ‘individuals-in-the-group’ (Milan, 2015). Yet, amid ‘the complex and intertwined agentic role of technology and activists’ (Galis & Neumayer, 2016, p. 12), our findings contribute to complexifying notions of collectivity, as civic values are differently framed in everyday practices, with individualism being repurposed precisely to preserve the movement’s sustainability – often jeopardized by social media (Milan, 2015).

In both countries, activists met social media demands through skilful use of their individual accounts. The climate activists invested a lot in creative delivery formats and, most importantly, highlighting political messages. This approach encompassed careful management of visuality, language, gifs, stories and posts. Importantly, individual activists commonly felt that their online content needed to be ‘in tune’ with the group’s political stance. As Luísa explained,

Although activism is eminently political, I believe it has to be completely nonpartisan. I have my convictions, but I believe that by sharing these convictions I would be doing the movement more harm than good. My page as an activist has to be completely non-partisan, related to animal rights or climate action, and nothing more. In other words, [I have to] be me as an activist; as a person, it is a different conversation. (Interview, 13 February 2020)

For Portuguese activists, their individual accounts provided a platform for echoing the group’s political message in a personal but highly curated way. Individually, the activists took time to make careful decisions about which visual language and formats should be employed to better engage the viewer’s attention. Conversely, for the Finnish activists, the aforementioned constraints imposed by the group’s unpolarizing social media policy found fertile ground in individual accounts, where activists can adopt more subversive stances. Describing what her mental health activist group meant to her, Loviisa explained her position as ‘an independent activist’:

[The group] provides me with background support to act as an independent activist, but this also means that I don’t have to tie myself to one political agenda. In a way, it’s more my own, and it allows me to be singular while also having the group’s support. […] As an individual, I get to speak about my experiences in whatever way I choose, without having to link them to a specific movement or cause. (Interview, 9 April 2020)

Individual accounts offer Finnish activists a means of being ‘freely’ political in ways that they consider impossible in collective posts that are composed, first and foremost, to ‘build understanding’ in order to engender positive emotions. The Portuguese group, in turn, sought to problematize climate issues and hardly made concessions in that regard (even when it might lead to discomfort between regional groups, as in the memes example). For them, ‘being political online’ means not giving in to the temptations of social media’s empty posting logic. However, it also means coordinating online voices to shield the movement (and the messages) from anything – such as individualized or partisan-related posts – that might divert public attention from an urgent struggle.

This difference between Portuguese and Finnish activists’ interpretation of civic values relates to the groups’ differing logics and objectives. The Portuguese activists are anchored in a national and international movement and coordinate their actions to ensure that the collective goal of reversing the planetary climate crisis is not clouded by individualized standpoints, which would be potentially detrimental to a strong collective voice. The Finnish activists see the group as a background platform for individual activism, as challenges linked to mental health issues can be better legitimized and conveyed through the shared accounts of real individuals taking ownership of their experiences on their own terms.

Concluding discussion

Both Portuguese and Finnish activists are fully aware of the inescapable importance of social media for social movements. However, conflict and unease permeate the groups’ everyday social media practices, turning social media into recurrent objects of critique. This led us to examine the different conceptions of value that inform the activists’ choices and negotiations when using social media.

Our empirical analysis reveals striking similarities between the participating activist groups. Particularly, most critiques of social media centred on the predominance of ‘fame-based valuation’ – a world in which ‘worth is based on nothing other than the number of individuals who grant their recognition’ (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999b, p. 371). While the activists generally felt that they could not afford to simply abandon social media, they acknowledged that these platforms are ruled by a logic of seeking visibility and public esteem in the form of followers, likes, shares and so on, leading to the individualization and depoliticization of communication and the ‘marketization’ of messages and practices.

While activists in both countries assembled similar critiques towards social media, these critiques translated into different negotiations on what is ‘meaningful’ or ‘worthy’ of posting. These negotiations, we argue, reveal the values against which the groups measure the demands of social media, and consider whether the requirements of social media’s logic are worth accommodating: while the Finnish activists measured the value of social media against their goals of ‘building understanding’ and highlighting individual experiences, the Portuguese group based such assessments on the group’s integrity as a collective entity oriented by a civic generality. These differences emerged in the two strategies for consolidating the groups’ social media activism: 1) grounding the online and 2) repurposing individualism.

The different ways of balancing social media demands with group values are especially visible in the groups’ respective stances on ‘political content’ and in the activists’ use of their individual accounts. In Portugal, grounding social media activity in real-life events and concrete, relatable problems that can be linked to consequential demands is an intentional strategy to address charges of ‘withdrawal from the reality of the streets’ (Simões & Campos, 2016, p. 143). The Portuguese group ultimately chooses to make posts that may prove divisive or controversial, choosing to ground the online in the physical reality even if that reality is unsettling. In Finland, grounding the online means remaining authentic, but there is collective pressure to adopt a not ‘too political’ online approach as a result of the groups’ objectives of ‘increasing understanding between people’. In many ways, the social media presence fostered by the Finnish group abides by the logic of likeability that they simultaneously criticize.

Interestingly, fieldwork data revealed how activists skilfully ‘repurpose individualism’. Remaining loyal to the collective voice, the Portuguese activists invest heavily in multiplying political entries on social media. This is done through a skilful use of social media affordances, producing thoughtful approaches for different audiences and shielding the movement by highlighting concerted narratives, while also investing in curating their individual (and more intersectional) identities as activists on social media platforms. For their part, the Finnish activists use their individual profiles to fill the gap left by their collective account. By also posting controversial content on mental health issues – such as crying selfies or images from the psychiatric ward – they intentionally critique the ‘likeability’ dictatorship of social media, making an uncomfortable reality more visible as a necessary starting point for politicizing the conversation. In this way, the contradictions discussed by Barassi (2015, p. 65) regarding ‘the encounter between the self-centered architecture of social media and activist collective cultures’ are balanced by making room for subversive expressions (among mental health activists) and coherent, polished messages (among climate activists).

We show that the negotiations between activism and social media values often operate in between the collective and individual online spheres. To explore these, we suggest that a value-oriented approach is warranted to shed light on ‘the moral principles that guide different political actors and projects’ throughout their participation (Ylä-Anttila & Luhtakallio, 2016, p. 4). This article contributes on two fronts. First, it reiterates the importance of ‘opening the back door’ and looking at the practices involved in what becomes public online – for example, how and under what conditions content is negotiated, and how the boundaries between individuals and collectives are defined. Second, it illustrates how pragmatist sociology’s tools can be used to explore how the different valuations and critiques that shape activist practices are negotiated. This ethnographic approach to value enables us to analyse what people actually do as well as what they say they do or should do, providing a more nuanced understanding of activist groups’ broader goals, meaning-makings and self-understanding beyond social media environments.

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to express their gratitude to their colleagues at the Imagi(ni)ng Democracy project and the Seminar of the Center for Sociology of Democracy (CSD – University of Helsinki) for their thoughtful inputs and contributions in an earlier version of this article. The authors would also like to acknowledge the valuable insights and recommendations from the two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 804024).

Notes on contributors

Carla Malafaia

Carla Malafaia is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Project ‘Imagi(ni)ng Democracy: European youth becoming citizens by visual participation (ImagiDem)’. She works at the Centre for Research and Intervention in Education (CIIE) at the Faculty of Psychology and Education Sciences (University of Porto), and is an affiliate member of the Center for Sociology of Democracy (CSD) at the University of Helsinki. Her research interests include youth political participation, social and educational inequalities and democracy. ORCiD ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5490-1187/@CarlaMalafaia

Taina Meriluoto is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Project ‘Imagi(ni)ng Democracy: European youth becoming citizens by visual participation (ImagiDem)’, and in the Center for Sociology of Democracy (CSD), Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Helsinki). She specializes in experience-based political action, is intrigued by selfies as tools of politicization and fascinated with empirical applications of agonistic and radical democratic theories. ORCiD ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1793-1031/@MeriTaina

Notes

1. In order to preserve participants’ anonymity, all names are pseudonyms.