“The future of the internet hangs in the balance”: the perception and framing of political opportunity and threat in the contentious politics of data

ABSTRACT

Opportunities are often conceptualized as ‘openings’ in a social movement’s external environment which can reduce the cost of collective action, while threat is a force which increases the cost of inaction. These concepts were originally formulated to describe the political contexts of traditional offline movements, therefore how are they perceived and framed by activists in the digital environment of data? This study utilizes qualitative thematic coding to examine the collective action frames in four years of archival texts from 2009 to 2012 of two highly adept data activist mobilizations: The Digital Rights movement and the Anonymous hacktivist collective. Analyses show that frames of opportunity appear with far less frequency than threat. For both cases, volatile opportunity frames regarding their online actions are very rare, especially in the Anonymous texts. It concludes by suggesting that highly leveraging the affordances of digital technology and data may lead to political opportunities losing some of their perceived salience as a mobilizing force, while cultural factors around data activism may simultaneously result in an increased perception of threats. This study shows the importance of understanding how data mediate contemporary collective action and calls for further development and synthesis of the structural and cultural aspects of both opportunity and threat in social movement theory.

KEYWORDS:

• data activism
• digital rights
• anonymous
• political opportunity
• threat
• social movements

Acknowledgement

Special thanks to Rachel L. Einwohner, S. Laurel Weldon, Bert Useem, Stuart A. Wright, Andrew Raridon, Soon Seok Park, and Gulcin Con Wright.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. This is a play-on-words referring to Scott’s (1985) concept of “weapons of the weak” which described how poor rural peasants converted their farming tools into weapons to rebel against much more powerful authorities. Coleman uses a similar line of reasoning to explain how the hacker and coder community, an otherwise apolitical and privileged group, has become politically influential in recent years.

2. The full archive at the time of my sampling contained 412 statements; however, approximately half of them turned out to be duplicates. For example, a single statement would often appear multiple times translated into different languages.

3. My initial sample of AnonNews statements was taken in 2012. Soon afterwards, the archive was taken permanently offline. For this reason, I was unable to subsequently expand upon the existing sample.

4. The sampled texts were combined into a single text document for each corpus. The quotations presented in the Findings section are cited by the line number in which they appeared in their respective corpus.

Additional information

Funding

This project was funded in part by the Purdue University Walter Hirsch Graduate Student Dissertation Research Award and the Purdue Research Foundation Dissertation Grant.

Notes on contributors

Jared M. Wright

Jared M. Wright is an Assistant Professor at TED University in Ankara, Turkey, and the director of the Center for Digital Social Science (CDSS). He earned his PhD in sociology from Purdue University in 2020. His areas of research include digital sociology, social movements, and new media.