Paper Info
Title
Screenshots, Symbols, and Personal Thoughts: The Role of Instagram for Social Activism
Abstract
ABSTRACTIn 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.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3485447.3512268
International World Wide Web Conference
Keywords
DocType
Citations 
Social Activism, Online Social Network, Instagram, Protest
Conference
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ehsan ul Haq101.69
Tristan Braud22712.84
Yui-Pan Yau341.73
Lik Hang Lee4117.54
Franziska B. Keller500.34
Pan Hui64577309.30