Social Media, Politics and the State

This book is the essential guide for understanding how state power and politics are contested and exercised on social media. It brings together contributions by social media scholars who explore the connection of social media with revolutions, uprising, protests, power and counter-power, hacktivism, the state, policing and surveillance. It shows how collective action and state power are related and conflict as two dialectical sides of social media power, and how power and counter-power are distributed in this dialectic. Theoretically focused and empirically rigorous research considers the two-sided contradictory nature of power in relation to social media and politics. Chapters cover social media in the context of phenomena such as contemporary revolutions in Egypt and other countries, populism 2.0, anti-austerity protests, the fascist movement in Greece's crisis, Anonymous and police surveillance.

" Combining theoretical and practical perspectives, this collective volume discusses the social aspect of social media, analyses the nature of social media activity in relation to modern society, and highlights key issues and concerns in contemporary forms of social media use (social movements, state power and corporate power, crime and policing, distinction between protests, revolutions and riots) from both a top-down and a bottom-up perspective, trying to critically discuss reality as such, beyond a number of optimistic and pessimistic stereotypes."Evika Karamagioli, International Journal of Electronic Governance, 2017, Vol. 9, No. 1/2

Daniel Trottier is a postdoctoral fellow in social and digital media at the Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) at the University of Westminster.Christian Fuchs is a professor of social media at the University of Westminster.