Search results for "Fifth Estate"
showing 3 items of 3 documents
The Role of Social Media in Societal Change : Cases in Finland of Fifth Estate Activity on Facebook
2015
The Internet can be used to reconfigure access to information and people in ways that can support networked individuals and enhance their relative communicative power vis-à-vis other individuals and institutions, such as by supporting collective action, sourcing of information, and whistle blowing. The societal and political significance of the Internet is a matter of academic debate, with some studies suggesting a powerful role in creating a “Fifth Estate,” and other studies challenging such claims. Research on this issue has not yet comprehensively focused on social network sites and those operating in a very liberal-democratic context. Based on an embedded case study of Facebook use in …
Facebook’s ad hoc groups: a potential source of communicative power of networked citizens
2017
Ad hoc groups (sporadically formed on social network sites for achieving particular common objectives) have been seen as a public space for citizen participation and debate. This study focuses on Facebook’s ad hoc groups in Finland. The aim is to detect the potential of these groups to enhance networked citizens’ communicative power for raising societally important issues to public agenda and initiate changes in society. We suggest a categorization of the groups according to their missions, and present their members’ specific motivations and objectives through an online survey. Despite the general entertainment-orientation and self-referential nature of social media, the results show that a…
Soziale Medien als fünfte Gewalt: Strategische Organisation deutscher und finnischer Gegenredekampagnen auf Facebook
2023
Social media, as the fifth estate, increasingly influence public discourses and play a major role in shaping public opinion. Undoubtedly, they have the potential to promote participation and democracy. On the other side, they also constitute a risk for democratic societies, as the spread of hate speech and fake news has shown. As a response, forms of counterspeech organised by civil society have emerged in social media to counter the normalisation of hate speech and democracy-threatening discourses. In order to influence discourse in social media in terms of the fifth estate, counterspeech campaigns must be visible also quantitatively. In this ethnographic contrastive study, I analysed…