Practicum 6 - Kyle Woolwich

So I noticed one more interesting thing about the Voter ID activists: they don't have any sort of hashtag or phrase representing their movement. Every other group I've looked at uses this, at least on Twitter and also sometimes in other online areas. Maybe the Voter ID movement just isn't big enough to warrant its use. The group I looked at is students looking to add student IDs to the bill as a valid form of identification, and it seems that they haven't been interacting online very much with other groups that would oppose the bill, such as the elderly. So it could be that the movement fighting the bill is just too diffuse to adopt a common slogan or symbol.

Regarding the Libyan opposition activists, I have noticed some characteristics that make them drastically different from the activists in Egypt. The Libyan Youth Movement (@ShababLibya) seems to be the most popular group - it's constantly featured in "top tweets" when you search "Libya" on Twitter and its Facebook page has a ton of likes compared to others. While this does appear to be a group of youths much like the Egyptian activists, there is a major difference: it appears that they are not actually located only in Libya. The person who runs the account is rotated on a shift, and I have seen a few tweets and Facebook posts about rallies in other countries. Although the group never answered me when I tweeted them asking where they are, and although I have seen a few real time updates that seem to be coming from inside of Libya, their focus on activism in other countries leads me to believe that some of the people who rotate onto the account are Libyans living in other countries throughout the world, and the group is trying to build support for the rebels/opposition in those countries. This is a huge difference because I found that most of the Egyptian activists were actually located inside Egypt.

Additionally, I found a difference in the content of the Libyan activists' online activity. The Egyptians were focused mostly on organizing rallies and protests. However, the situation in Libya is much different than what it was like in Egypt (Libya is almost now in civil war), and I think this led to the different content. The Libyans are now focused less on protests and rallies (although, as mentioned above, there is the occasional mention of a protest in a different country), and more on raising awareness regarding the conditions in Libyan cities, crimes committed by Gaddafi's troops, and also raising donations and supplies for the opposition inside Libya. They do this by linking to news articles and blogs, posting pictures, giving real time accounts of the conflict, and also even linking to actual lists of supplies and places to send them.