Activists in the dark: Social media algorithms and collective action in two social movement organizations
基于对突尼斯两个社会运动组织的民族志研究，本文揭示了社交媒体算法如何通过促进和扭曲集体可供性来影响活动家的组织过程，并指出算法带来的信息过载、不透明和虚假信息对公民参与的负面影响。
It is widely established that social media afford social movement (SM) organizations new ways of organizing. Critical studies point out, however, that social media use may also trigger negative repercussions due to the commercial interests that are designed into these technologies. Yet empirical evidence about these matters is scarce. In this article, we investigate how social media algorithms influence activists’ actualization of collective affordances. Empirically, we build on an ethnographic study of two SM organizations based in Tunisia. The contributions of this paper are twofold. Firstly, we provide a theoretical framework that specifies how algorithms condition the actualization of three collective affordances (interlinking, assembling, augmenting). Specifically, we show how these affordances are supported by algorithmic facilitation , that is, operations pertaining to the sorting of interactions and actors, the filtering of information, and the ranking and aggregation of content. Secondly, we extend the understanding of how social media platforms’ profit-orientation undermines collective action. Namely, we identify how algorithms introduce constraints for organizing processes, manifested as algorithmic distortion , that is, information overload, opacity, and disinformation. We conclude by discussing the detrimental implications of social media algorithms for organizing and civic engagement, as activists are often unaware of the interests of social media-owning corporations.