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Online boycott and collective action: User goals, behaviour and platform affordanceAuthor: Shantanu Prabhat Date: 2020-11-11 Report no: IIIT/TH/2020/116 Advisor:Nimmi Rangaswamy AbstractLast decade has witnessed a growing role played by online platforms in enabling socio-political movements and shaping narratives. Social networking sites have evolved into being active sites of political culture and begin to function as a “public sphere”. This has also enabled users on these platforms to conduct campaigns and coordinate acts; engaging in collective user practice of “trolling” or shutting down voices. We observed a recurring form of online collective action that played out on Indian online platforms. Users organise over Twitter to initiate a collective uninstalling/down voting of an app endorsed by a celebrity they have ideological disagreements with. The logic is simple: it is a call to boycott the product the associated celebrity is endorsing in hopes of causing economic or reputational consequences (poor review, low rating, uninstalls) to the company, forcing them to disassociate with the said celebrity. This would potentially scare public figures from taking stances on controversial issues which challenges their narrative. We pick the case of an online boycott of an e-commerce application Snapdeal, initiated by the Indian Right on Twitter for our study. This boycott campaign involved calls to collectively uninstall, give poor ratings, and leave bad app reviews on App store, over their brand ambassador Aamir Khan issuing a controversial statement on increasing intolerance in India. As this statement didn’t sit well with the Indian Right, they sought to leverage reputational harm as a way to force Aamir Khan to ”apologise” for it, and also to create precedence to scare public figures on challenging the right-wing narrative in the country. We conduct a mixed methods investigation to unpack co-ordinated user practice and behaviour in such online campaigns. We investigate how platform features get appropriated to serve the goals of the campaign, and how tweet framing strategies were effective in mobilising and calling to action. Through this thesis we make two contributions, 1) provide empirical results on user behaviour and tactics on mobilising for online collective action 2) theorise and present an argument how these campaigns are able to achieve very similar user goals as platforms designed for collective action do. We conclude with implications for design on building better online civic systems that rely on engaging large number of people and, how designers need to be cognisant of appropriation of features lest they become a moderation challenge. Full thesis: pdf Centre for Exact Humanities |
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