Journal Articles by Saif Shahin
Convergence, 2025
This special issue explores the complex dynamics of digital visibility negotiation in Asian conte... more This special issue explores the complex dynamics of digital visibility negotiation in Asian contexts. Emerging scholarship on this topic reveals how users strategically negotiate their visibility online. However, we still need to broaden the scope of our knowledge, especially outside Western contexts, in order to advance our theoretical understanding of such negotiations. Asian societies and communities, with their distinctive platform political economies and socio-cultural landscapes, offer rich yet underexplored contexts for advancing visibility theories beyond Western-centric frameworks. Responding to Brighenti's call to treat visibility as an interdisciplinary social scientific category, this special issue presents 19 articles organized into four thematic clusters that analyze visibility practices across Asian communities and diasporic spaces. By centering Asian case studies and perspectives, we illustrate how visibility negotiations in Asian contexts can inform broader theoretical understandings of digital visibility negotiation practices and the power dynamics that shape them.
Social Media + Society, 2025
The #StopAsianHate hashtag movement emerged as a challenge to the rising tide of racism in the Un... more The #StopAsianHate hashtag movement emerged as a challenge to the rising tide of racism in the United States during the coronavirus pandemic and contributed to the legislation of the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act. Our research brings together concepts from social movement studies as well as network science and celebrity-fandom studies to examine a corpus of tweets about the movement. We employ a mixed-methods design combining structural topic modeling with digital discourse analysis. Even though the movement rose up against White Supremacist structural racism, we find that right-wing provocateurs with large followings often hijacked its hashtags to amplify sporadic Black-on-Asian violence. But the active participation of Asian celebrities such as BTS, with their own huge followings online, bolstered the movement. Their posts and statements about anti-Asian violence were heavily reposted and dominated the digital discourse. Crucially, we show how their fans helped boost the movement’s anti-racist agenda by repeatedly posting similar messages in concert, which we compare with the offline fan practice of “chanting” as a form of collective identity performance. While theories like the logic of connective action view digital activism as individualized and decentralized, our research elucidates its hierarchical structure and the oversized role of provocateurs and celebrities in raising the visibility of competing claims and agendas by re-contextualizing hashtags. At the same time, culture industries and practices can create bottom-up solidarities that can have a political impact by raising particular agendas in the digital attention economy.
Convergence, 2025
Late modern society has been conceptualized as a spectacle, a metaphor that brings to light not o... more Late modern society has been conceptualized as a spectacle, a metaphor that brings to light not only its commodification but also the benumbing impact of mass media on the audience's political agency. This study turns attention to the spectacle in the age of social media. Building on a growing body of research on the spectacle of suffering, we compare reactions to the 2022 Itaewon Halloween stampede, which claimed more than 150 lives, across Korean-language and English-language posts on the social networking platform, X (previously Twitter). Our research draws on two computational techniques, topic modeling and network analysis, to examine the emotive and evaluative character of the discourse as well as its structural features. The analysis reveals significant differences between the two corpora. While the English-language network, in which corporate media accounts are most prominent, dehumanizes the victims and parrots the official version of events, the Korean-language network, driven by ordinary users, evinces empathy and draws attention to administrative failuresserving as a prelude to large-scale protests across South Korea that forced the government to concede its responsibility for the tragedy. We argue that even though the spectacle remains relevant as a concept to understand mediatized public life today, it is not quite as monolithic as it was originally conceptualized. Instead, the logics of social networking have rendered a fractured spectacle, with different networked publics producing different representations of and reactions to public events in the digital attention economyleading to different political consequences.
Place Branding & Public Diplomacy, 2024
We theorize network diplomacy as a form of symbolic interaction and examine Twitter as an arena f... more We theorize network diplomacy as a form of symbolic interaction and examine Twitter as an arena for such interaction by comparing the social networks of U.S. missions in Britain, India, and China. Network analysis of a year's sample of tweets, followed by manual coding of "strong ties" in each country, reveals the three networks reflect and reproduce different national identities for the United States-a friend to Britain, an ally to India, and a rival to China. Our study develops a three-dimensional framework of account-level variablesincluding Verification, Location, and Type-to evaluate the symbolic significance of diplomatic networking practices.
Policy & Internet, 2023
An emerging line of research has drawn attention to the significance of national identity in shap... more An emerging line of research has drawn attention to the significance of national identity in shaping digital diplomatic practices. In this study, we look at the reciprocal construction of national identity on Twitter by corresponding foreign missions. Specifically, we examine one year of Twitter posts from the South Korean missions in Japan and the United States as well as the reciprocal missions of Japan and the United States in South Korea. Our study indicates that tweets from the Korea–US dyad reproduce the two nations as allies, even as the United States is constructed as the “big brother” to Korea's “little brother,” while the Korea–Japan dyad enacts and reinforces an adversarial relationship. Tweets from all four embassies reflect deep‐rooted national aspirations: Japan's hope to be accepted as morally superior to Korea, the US interest in maintaining its position as a global leader, and Korea's desire for international ascendance through economic and cultural export. We find that reciprocal identity construction is most evident in the text of the tweets but not so much in the use of Twitter's visual and interactional features. Going beyond reciprocity, our analysis sheds light on to how tweeting practices reproduce asymmetries of power in the international
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American Behavioral Scientist, 2022
Protest movements around the world have become increasingly likely to incite counterprotests that... more Protest movements around the world have become increasingly likely to incite counterprotests that adopt an opposing stance. This study examines how a protest and a counterprotest interact with and shape each other as digitally networked connective action. My empirical focus is the so-called Million MAGA March—in which supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump protested the “stealing” of the November 2020 election by his rival, Joe Biden—and a counterprotest that erupted simultaneously. Drawing on a computational mixed-methods approach to examine two corpora of tweets featuring hashtags used by protesters and counterprotesters respectively, the study identifies three mutually reinforcing dimensions of protest-counterprotest interaction: affective repertoires, discursive strategies, and network structures. It argues that “affective polarization”—or negative partisanship driven by hostility toward an outgroup—offers a useful conceptual means of understanding the significance of affect and collective identity in digital social movements, especially protest-counterprotest interactions. In doing so, the study also addresses concerns that “big data” methods are insensitive to the role of identity and expressive communication in social movements. Finally, the study demonstrates how online and offline political action are mutually constitutive aspects of contemporary contentious politics.
Critical Sociology, 2022
This article adopts a poststructural approach to examine the relationship between the news media ... more This article adopts a poststructural approach to examine the relationship between the news media and international relations. It compares 15 years of international aid coverage from two donor nations, the United States and Britain, and two recipient nations, India and Pakistan, to understand the types of identities news media construct for a nation in relation to other nations. Despite their differences, the news discourse in all four nations has a neoliberal orientation. Moreover, neoliberalism underpins a hierarchical structure of relations that privileges some nations as superior and makes other nations willing participants in their own subordination. While scholars of press-state relations regard newsmaking as epiphenomenal to foreign policymaking, this article argues that newsmaking and policymaking are mutually constitutive social phenomena: both draw from and, in turn, reproduce a shared conception of national identity vis-à-vis other nations. In doing so, the article illustrates the productive power of news media in international relations.
New Media & Society, 2024
This study examines the global diffusion of Black Lives Matter as digitally networked connective ... more This study examines the global diffusion of Black Lives Matter as digitally networked connective action. Combining social network analysis with qualitative textual analysis, we show that BLM was hybridized in different ways to give voice to local struggles for social justice in Brazil, India, and Japan. However, BLM's hybridization stirred rightwing backlash within these countries that not only targeted local movements but BLM too. Theoretically, we argue that both transnational contiguities and intra-cultural tensions shape the construction of meanings-or 'action frames'-as connective action crosses cultural borders. Resonant frames, which are in harmony with the values of the movement, amplify features of the global movement that resonate with local concerns or hybridize it with a local struggle. Reactionary frames, which are hostile to movement values, may also target the global movement or its hybridization. We theorize the different roles of global and local crowd-enabled elites in transnational connective action.
User-generated nationalism: Interactions with religion, race, and partisanship in everyday talk online
Information, Communication & Society, 2021
This article examines how the nationalist imagination structures cyberspace from the bottom up, o... more This article examines how the nationalist imagination structures cyberspace from the bottom up, or what I call “user-generated nationalism.” It also looks at the interplay between nationalism and other, non-spatial modes of social identification. My analysis of a month of tweets indicates that religious, racialized, and partisan identities are quite pronounced online, but they also tend to be conflated with nationalism. I argue that nationalism is not simply banal itself: because of its fixity in place and political correctness, it is used to lend legitimacy to and “banalize” other identities. This dynamic is key to understanding the explosion of right-wing populism around the “world of nations”—especially the success of populist leaders in normalizing religious, racialized, and partisan identifications—and the central role being played by digital media in this process.
Connective action or collective inertia? Emotion, cognition, and the limits of digitally networked resistance
Social Movement Studies, 2021
Connective action, or individuals networking with each other online to form social movements, rar... more Connective action, or individuals networking with each other online to form social movements, rarely leads to lasting change. In this study, we argue that such movements are ultimately ineffective because they struggle to sustain themselves over time and identify the reasons behind their transience. Our analysis focuses on Twitter conversations about Aadhaar, a biometric ID project that has raised concerns about data privacy and civil liberty in India, the world’s largest democracy. A computational mixed-methods approach incorporating social network analysis, sentiment analysis, and structural topic modeling demonstrates that connective action against Aadhaar failed to produce a sustained discourse of resistance, with people’s feelings toward and beliefs about Aadhaar vacillating sharply. The analysis draws attention to the power of brick-and-mortar social institutions, including the state and its agencies, political parties, courts, technology companies, and ‘legacy’ news media, in shaping and reshaping seemingly bottom-up discourses on digital platforms. It also identifies three interlinked weaknesses
of connective action – the individualized nature of mobilization, excessive flexibility of social networks, and a negative emotional culture. We contend that in order to be effective, contemporary social movements need to utilize digital technologies for ‘collective’ action by forging collective identities that bind participants affectively and cognitively, empower them against structures of social control, and enable them to commit to non-personal and long-term objectives.
Peripheral elaboration model: The impact of incidental news exposure on political participation
Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 2020
This study places the “cognitive elaboration model” on news gathering and political behavior with... more This study places the “cognitive elaboration model” on news gathering and political behavior within the dual-processing “elaboration likelihood model” to derive hypotheses about the effects of incidental news exposure and tests them using two-wave panel data. Results indicate incidental news exposure predicts online participation but not offline participation – underlining the importance of differentiating between political behaviors in the two environments. The key finding, however, is that news elaboration mediates the positive relationship between incidental exposure and political participation, which is theorized as taking place through the peripheral route of elaboration – as opposed to intentional exposure, which engages the central route.
Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2020
The alt-right White Nationalist movement, which emerged in response to the election of America’s ... more The alt-right White Nationalist movement, which emerged in response to the election of America’s first Black president, adopted Twitter from the outset. Tracing its evolution over eight years in retweets, our study suggests that the movement was relatively small and factionalized until 2015—but its subgroups closed ranks following Donald Trump’s candidacy and became a blowhorn for his campaign. Integrating social network theory with the emerging view of race and politics as dynamic processes, our study advances a “technosocial” understanding of White Nationalism and its journey from the fringes to the center stage of American politics.
Big Data and the Illusion of Choice: Comparing the Evolution of India's Aadhaar and China's Social Credit System as Technosocial Discourses
Social Science Computer Review, 2020
India and China have launched enormous projects aimed at collecting vital personal information re... more India and China have launched enormous projects aimed at collecting vital personal information regarding their billion-plus populations — and building the world’s biggest datasets in the process. However, both Aadhaar in India and the Social Credit System in China are controversial and raise a plethora of political and ethical concerns. The governments claim that participation in these projects is voluntary, even as they link vital services to citizens registering with these projects. In this study, we analyze how the news media in India and China — crucial data intermediaries that shape public perceptions on data and technological practices — framed these projects since their inception. LDA topic modeling suggests news coverage in both nations disregards the public interest and focuses largely on how businesses can benefit from them. The media, institutionally and ideologically linked with governments and corporations, show little concern with violations of privacy and mass surveillance that these projects could lead to. We argue that this renders individuals structurally incapable of making a meaningful “choice” about whether or not to participate in such projects. Implications for various stakeholders are discussed.
Ideological Parallelism: Toward a Transnational Understanding of the Protest Paradigm
Social Movement Studies, 2020
This study advances the protest paradigm as a transnational theory by examining how ideological a... more This study advances the protest paradigm as a transnational theory by examining how ideological affiliations within and across national borders influence the framing of a protest movement. Our empirical focus is the coverage of the 2016-17 South Korean “candlelight” protests to oust conservative President Park Gyun-hye in Korean and U.S. newspapers. Content analysis of six months of coverage suggests that liberal publications in both nations (Kyunghyang Shinmun and New York Times) were supportive of the movement, framing the protests as large yet peaceful and relying on protesters for information. In contrast, the conservative press in the U.S. (Wall Street Journal) was closer in its coverage to Korea’s conservative publication (Chosun Ilbo), which was defensive of Park and her supporters. We argue that ideological affinities can operate beyond national boundaries — what we term “ideological parallelism” — to make news organizations sympathetic or hostile toward a social movement. But nationalist sentiments also remain significant to the extent that a foreign (Korean) social movement affects a nation’s (U.S.) foreign policy. We identify a novel framing device — Gaze — under which the coverage of both U.S. newspapers converged and considered the adverse implications of candlelight protests for America’s relations with South Korea and its containment of North Korea and China. We also show how the U.S. media’s Gaze recursively shapes South Korean press coverage, indicating that transnational protest frames impact local perceptions of social movements and can potentially influence their legitimacy and outcome.
Live Tweeting Live Debates: How Twitter Reflects and Refracts the US Political Climate in a Campaign Season
Information, Communication & Society, 2020
Political campaigns mostly run parallel to each other during an election cycle, but intersect whe... more Political campaigns mostly run parallel to each other during an election cycle, but intersect when the main candidates face off for televised debates. They offer supporters of these candidates a chance to engage with each other while being exposed to views and opinions different from their own. This study uses a combination of social network analysis and machine learning to examine how the three US presidential debates of 2016 were live tweeted (N = ∼300,000). We find that despite cross-cutting exposure across the ideological divide, people remain highly partisan in terms of who they engage with on Twitter. The issue agendas of Twitter posts during the US presidential debates is set well in advance of the debates themselves; it is highly negative and focused on personality traits of the opposition candidate rather than policy matters. We also detect a shift in the nature of online opinion leadership, with grassroots activists and internet personalities sharing the space with traditional elites such as political leaders and journalists. This shift coincides with the broader anti-establishment turn in the US political climate, as reflected in the early success of Bernie Sanders and the eventual victory of a political outsider like Donald Trump over the seasoned Hillary Clinton.
International Journal of Communication, 2019
Drawing on the constructivist tradition in international relations, we examine the influence of n... more Drawing on the constructivist tradition in international relations, we examine the influence of national identity-or how a nation views itself in relation to other nations-on the tweeting practices of its diplomatic missions. Our analysis focuses on the use of Twitter by U.S. missions in Britain, India, and China over a four-month period brimming with diplomatic activity: June-September 2018. We find that not only do the three U.S. missions use Twitter in vastly different ways, but that their tweeting practices reflect and reproduce the specific identities the United States professes vis-à-vis these nations: a friend to Britain, an ally to India, and a rival to China. We argue that (1) Twitter is an emergent "technosocial" arena that enables nations to perform their identities online and (2) different national identities-friend, ally, and rival-derive their meanings in and through such practices. In addition, we distinguish a variety of tweeting practices and their symbolic significance in terms of national identity performance.
A Tale of Two Tragedies: Culpability and Innocence in American Journalism
Journalism Practice, 2019
Two deadly explosions took place in the United States, two days apart from each other, in the mid... more Two deadly explosions took place in the United States, two days apart from each other, in the middle of April 2013. The Boston marathon bombings of April 15 killed three people and shook the nation. The blast at a fertilizer plant on the outskirts of West, Texas on April 17 claimed 15 lives but hardly left a mark on the national consciousness. In this study, I examine the contrasting coverage—or framing—of the two tragedies in national and local news media. I argue that journalists, while covering the Boston bombings, adhered to what I call the Blame Frame, focusing on identifying and punishing perpetrators for a vile “act.” The coverage of the West Fertilizer Co. blast, meanwhile, followed the Explain Frame, in which “acts” become “accidents” over which human agents have little control. Indeed, journalists go out of their way to take agency—and with it the culpability—away from perpetrators.
American Behavioral Scientist, 2019
Social networking sites can help global aid agencies converse with the communities they work with... more Social networking sites can help global aid agencies converse with the communities they work with as well as listen to public conversations on vital issues. This study develops a technosocial framework that specifies how different affordances of Twitter—from the topical content of tweets to replies, retweets, hashtags, and hyperlinks—relate to different levels of public engagement with aid agencies. We combine computational and qualitative methods to examine tweets posted by three aid agencies—USAID, SIDA, and ICRC—as well as public tweets that mention these agencies (N = ~100,000). Results indicate that when an agency (1) replies to or retweets public tweeters, (2) includes publicly-oriented hashtags and hyperlinks in its tweets, and (3) tweets about topics that the public is also interested in and tweeting about, the social network that develops around the agency is more interconnected, decentralized, and reciprocal. Our framework can help aid agencies and other development institutions build more participatory social networks, bolstering the possibility of multiple voices helping determine collective goals and strategies of collective action for sustainable social change.
Facing up to Facebook: How Digital Activism, Independent Regulation, and Mass Media Foiled a Neoliberal Threat to Net Neutrality
Information, Communication & Society, 2019
This study traces how Facebook-promoted internet.org/Free Basics, despite initial acclaim, was ev... more This study traces how Facebook-promoted internet.org/Free Basics, despite initial acclaim, was eventually rejected in India – and how net neutrality came to be codified in the process. Topic modeling of articles (N=1,752) published over two-and-a-half years in 100 media outlets pinpoints the critical junctures in time at which the public discourse changed its trajectory. Critical discourse analysis of different phases of the discourse then identifies the causal factors and contingent conditions that produced the new policy. The study advances the understanding of technologies as social constructs and technological change as a social process, shaped by the dynamic interaction of a complex array of social actors coming together at critical junctures. It also draws attention to how discourse, produced by social actors in contingent conditions, recursively shapes the dominant ideology and structures these interactions. In addition, the study demonstrates how algorithmic and interpretive research techniques can be combined for longitudinal analysis of textual data sets.
India Quarterly, 2017
The role of the media, and especially the social media, in the Arab Spring has been extensively d... more The role of the media, and especially the social media, in the Arab Spring has been extensively debated in academia. This study presents a survey of research published in scholarly journals on the subject. We find that the bulk of the literature contends social media enabled or facilitated the protests by (1) providing voice to people in societies with mostly government-controlled legacy media, (2) helping people connect, mobilize, and organize demonstrations, and (3) broadcasting protests to the world at large and helping protesters gain global support. Some scholars, however, argue that social media played only a limited or secondary role, which ought be viewed alongside other social, political, economic, and historical factors. We also identify the spatial and temporal focus of the research and preferred theoretical and methodological approaches. We conclude with a critical assessment of this stream of scholarship, drawing attention to blind spots that require further investigation.
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Journal Articles by Saif Shahin
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of connective action – the individualized nature of mobilization, excessive flexibility of social networks, and a negative emotional culture. We contend that in order to be effective, contemporary social movements need to utilize digital technologies for ‘collective’ action by forging collective identities that bind participants affectively and cognitively, empower them against structures of social control, and enable them to commit to non-personal and long-term objectives.