Public Facebook Groups for Political Activism

Abstract

The rise of social media has raised questions about the vitality of privacy values and concerns about threats to privacy. The convergence of politics with social media use amplifies the privacy concerns traditionally associated with political organizing, particularly when marginalized groups and minority politics are involved. Despite the importance of these issues, there has been little empirical exploration of how privacy governs political activism and organizing in online environments. This project explores how privacy concerns shape political organizing on Facebook, through detailed case studies of how groups associated with March for Science, Day Without Immigrants (“DWI”), and Women’s March govern information flows. This comparative case study employs an empirical framework that we developed in earlier work, in which we synthesized contextual integrity analysis with the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework for institutional analysis of commons governance of knowledge. These cases, addressing distinct issues, while operating in similar contexts and on the same timescales, thus allow for the exploration of privacy, as it plays out through governance of personal information flows, for both political organizing and Facebook sub-communities. Privacy practices and concerns differed between the cases, depending on factors such as the nature of the group, the political issues it confronts, and its relationships to other organizations or movements.