Cyber activism  

Cyber activism is the process of using Internet-based socializing and communication techniques to create, operate and manage activism of any type. It allows any individual or organization to utilize social networks and other online technologies to reach and gather followers, broadcast messages and progress a cause or movement.

Cyber activism is also known as Internet activism, online activism, digital activism, online organizing, electronic advocacy, e-campaigning and e-activism.

Cyber activism’s basic working principle is similar to standard physical activism: to initiate a citizen-based movement toward a specific goal, cause or objective. cyber activism uses social networking tools and platforms to share and broadcast mottos and messages, and to interact with netizens. These platforms include Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and other popular and niche social networks, along with email, instant messaging (IM) and other online collaboration tools.
Depending on the cause or need of the e-activist, cyber activism can be used for various purposes, such as awareness creation, gathering and organizing followers and initiating reactions. For example, e-activists use e-petitions digitally signed by a number of followers before they are sent to government and legislative authorities. The results were integrated in a four-year longitudinal process model that explains how online activism started, generated societal outcomes, and changed over time. The model suggests that online activism helped organize collective actions and amplify the conditions for revolutionary movements to form. Yet, it provoked elites’ reactions such as Internet filtering and surveillance, which do not only promote self-censorship and generate digital divide, but contribute to the ultimate decline of activism over time. The process model suggests a complex interplay among stakeholders’ interests, opportunities for activism, costs and outcomes that are neither foreseen nor entirely predictable. The authors challenge universal access to the Internet as a convenient and cost-free forum for practicing social activism by organizational stakeholders (customers, employees, outside parties). In fact, the technology enablers of social activism also enable its filtering and repression and thus more extreme states of information asymmetry may result in which powerful elites preserve their status and impose a greater digital divide.

In one study, a discussion of a developmental model of political mobilization is discussed. By citizens joining groups and creating discussion, they are beginning their first stage of involvement. Progressively, it is hoped that they will begin signing petitions online and graduating to offline contact as long as the organization provides the citizen with escalating steps of involvement. Corporations are also using Internet activist techniques to increase support for their causes. According to Christopher Palmieri with BusinessWeek Online, companies launch sites with the intent to positively influence their own public image, to provide negative pressure on competitors, to influence opinion within select groups, and to push for policy changes.

BY MWAKINYUKE JEREMIA