Performances of power the site of public debate

In 2009, the protests against the election result in Iran began to play out not just on the streets of the capital Tehran but online. Shortly after the protests, Lev Grossman wrote in Time magazine that Twitter (at that point the platform was only three years old) was ideal for a mass protest movement, both very easy for the average citizen to use and very hard for any central authority to control (Grossman, 2009). Over 10 years later, the latter seems to have remained true, but the idea that it is serving the average citizen is now less convincing. The potential for online social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit and others to be subject to manipulation and used for the spread of misinformation and abuse has been in the spotlight in recent years (Geeng et al., 2020). The hope (perhaps always naive) that online platforms would give a voice and a presence to millions of citizens and drive positive democratic change has not really come to pass. Although there are movements that have used the online space to provide visibility for traditionally invisible and marginalised groups in mainstream media (such as #metoo and #blacklivesmatter), there is the flip side of online spaces used to drive coordinated programs of abuse against women (#gamergate), to inflame hatred of religious minorities, and the use of bots to disseminate misinformation and offer counternarratives (Massanari, 2017; Cadwalladr, 2017). Social media has also become a public stage for the performance of power and, in extreme cases, violent acts (Irwin-Rogers and Pinkney, 2017). The prominent role of social media in the 2019 terrorist attack in Christchurch, which was livestreamed on Facebook, has added further weight to calls to regulate online space.