TY - JOUR AU - Milan, Stefania AU - Barbosa, Sérgio PY - 2020/01/05 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - Enter the WhatsApper: Reinventing digital activism at the time of chat apps JF - First Monday JA - FM VL - 25 IS - 12 SE - DO - 10.5210/fm.v25i12.10414 UR - https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/10414 SP - AB - <p>This paper investigates how the appropriation of chat apps by social actors is redesigning digital activism and political participation today. To this end, we look at the case of <em>#Unidos Contra o Golpe</em> (United Against the Coup), a WhatsApp “private group” which emerged in 2016 in Florianópolis, Brazil, to oppose the controversial impeachment of the then-president Dilma Rousseff. We argue that a new type of political activist is emerging within and alongside with contemporary movements: the WhatsApper, an individual who uses the chat app intensely to serve her political agenda, leveraging its affordances for political participation. We explore WhatsApp as a discursive opportunity structure and investigate the emergence of a repertoire specific to chat apps. We show how recurrent interaction in the app results into an all-purpose, identity-like sense of connectedness binding social actors together. Diffuse leadership and experimental pluralism emerge as the bare organizing principles of these groups. The paper is based on a qualitative analysis of group interactions and conversations, complemented by semi-structured interviews with group members. It shows how WhatsApp is more than a messaging app for “hanging out” with like-minded people and has come to constitute a key platform for digital activism, in particular in the Global South.</p> ER -