Paolo Gerbaudo
Biographic Data
| ID | 277137 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Paolo Gerbaudo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Paolo |
| FAMILY NAME | Gerbaudo |
| SIGNATURE | GERBAUDO P |
| AFFILIATIONS | King's College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5319-7279 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 349 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
TikTok and the algorithmic transformation of social media publics: From social networks to social interest clusters
The rise of TikTok has sparked a debate on the consequences of algorithmic content curation for social experience. My thesis is that TikTok represents a second generation of social media, which differs from first-generation social media in the way users are exposed to content. While first-generation social media revolved around ‘networked publics’ formed by explicit interpersonal connections, second-generation social media introduces ‘clustered p…
Towards a psychological theory of populist mobilization: Reflecting on Laclau’s engagement with social psychology and the theory of crowds
An overlooked aspect of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism is his discussion of social psychology. In the opening chapters of On Populist Reason, Laclau engages with classic contributions to social psychology, such as Gustave Le Bon’s and William McDougall’s work on crowds and Freud’s reflections on group psychology. Reconstructing this engagement is essential for a deeper understanding of Laclau’s “mature” conception of populism and for address…
Transition without transformation? The strategic limits of NextGenerationEU green-digital transition plans
This article critically examines the strategic vision underpinning NextGenerationEU (NGEU) and its ambition of promoting a green-digital transition. Through a discourse and policy analysis of EU-level documents, alongside national plans from Italy, Spain, and France, the article identifies a central tension between two competing narratives: (1) recovery, which prioritizes short-term responses to the Covid-19 crisis and bolstering resilience to fu…
Real News About the News: Media and British Politics by Kenneth Newton
Populismo de extrema derecha y redes sociales: El Futuro De La Democracia en Juego
Este informe forma parte del proyecto “DATAPOP: Polarización, duplicación de audiencias activas y populismo en Twitter. Análisis de la influencia de los discursos populistas en los debates políticos en España (2016-2020)” PGC2018-097352-A-I00 https://www.upf.edu/web/datapop
Angry Posts Mobilize: Emotional Communication and Online Mobilization in the Facebook Pages of Western European Right-Wing Populist Leaders
The rise of right-wing populists in Western Europe has often been linked to their ability to exploit social media affordances to fuel anger. While scholarship has already examined the emotional dimension of the populist right’s online communication, with some researchers studying specifically the fuelling of anger among social media users, we still lack empirical proof of the mobilizational effectiveness of what we describe as “anger-triggering c…
From Occupy Wall Street to the Gilets Jaunes: On the populist turn in the protest movements of the 2010s
Many recent protest movements, from the 2011 square occupation movements to the Gilets Jaunes display typical populist features, starting from an appeal to the people vs the elites. Drawing on my work on social movements in the 2010s in this article, I discuss the different components and implications of this 'populist turn' and its differences vis-à-vis other forms of populism, and in particular right-wing populism. I claim that social movements…
Le parti plateforme: La transformation des organisations politiques à l’heure du Big Data
Ce texte propose un nouveau type de parti, celui du parti plateforme ou parti digital, pour rendre compte de l'émergence d'organisations politiques nées ces dernières années et plus globalement des transformations des partis politiques à l'heure du numérique. Comme le parti de masse incarnait l'organisation politique à l'ère industrielle, le parti plateforme reflète le mode de production des sociétés numériques. Il repose sur trois éléments essen…
Theorizing Reactive Democracy: The Social Media Public Sphere, Online Crowds and the Plebiscitary Logic of Online Reactions
The diffusion of social media has profoundly transformed the nature and form of the contemporary public sphere, facilitating the rise of new political tactics and movements. In this article, I develop a theory of the social media public sphere as a “plebeian public sphere” whose functioning is markedly different from the traditional public sphere, described by Jürgen Habermas. Differently from Habermas’ critical-rational publics, this social medi…
From individual affectedness to collective identity: Personal testimony campaigns on social media and the logic of collection
In recent years, there has been much debate about the consequences of the internet and social media for activism and social movements. According to Lance W Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, digital activism involves a logic of ‘connective action’, in which collective action and collective identity lose importance. To assess the validity of this theory, I focus on personal testimony campaigns that have by now become a familiar digital tactic, espec…
Mobilised yet unaffiliated: Italian youth and the uneven return to political participation
Young people have long been considered the most politically apathetic section of the population. Yet, recent elections in the United States and Europe seem to point to a reversal of this trend. To explore this issue, we analyse a survey on youth and political participation in Italy conducted in 2018. Comparing the results with a similar 2004 survey, we find strong evidence of a growth of political participation by young people. Following our mode…
Unite against Trumpism
Memes and the Moroccan Far-Right
Facebook meme pages in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have flared-up in the past decade. Since 2017, some Moroccan pages have started sharing exclusively patriarchal, ultra- and ethnonationalist, misogynist, and racist content shaped to look in line with “alt-right” online aesthetics. Self-identifying as right-wing, these pages have memetized an entire ecosystem of scapegoats as enemies of the nation. Furthermore, they have rescued symbo…
Are digital parties more democratic than traditional parties? Evaluating Podemos and Movimento 5 Stelle’s online decision-making platforms
A number of Western European countries have recently seen the emergence of ‘digital parties’. This term refers to a new wave of political organisations committed to transforming intra-party democracy (IPD) through the adoption of online ‘participatory platforms’, sections of their official websites where registered members can debate and decide on various issues. In this article, I assess the democratic quality of online participatory platforms i…
Momentum vs. Labour's Bureaucracy
The creation of Corbynist organization Momentum was the way in which the wave of socialist revival in the UK tried to take an organizational form and work toward the transformation of the Labour party. The first-past-the-post system meant that the only realistic option for socialists was working within the existing mainstream left party, while at the same time developing a parallel structure to mobilize youth supporters suspicious of bureaucratic…
Is populism democracy’s worst friend
Are digital parties the future of party organization? A symposium on The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
The indignant citizen: Anti-austerity movements in southern Europe and the anti-oligarchic reclaiming of citizenship
This article discusses the change in political vision of anti-austerity movements in southern Europe in comparison with previous protest movements. It focuses on the emergence of a discourse of citizenship at the core of the new protest wave, as seen in frequent references to 'citizens', 'citizenry' and 'citizenship' in movement manifestos, and the resolutions and declarations of popular assemblies. I investigate the meaning and motivations of th…
The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
When 'Positive Posting' Attracts Voters: User Engagement and Emotions in the 2017 UK Election Campaign on Facebook
Social media are widely held to have played an important role in the 2017 UK general elections. But it is not altogether clear how exactly they contributed to the communication battle between Labour and the Conservatives. This article analyses the posts and comments on the official Facebook pages of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party and their respective leaders, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. We look at the relationship between topics, …
The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
Social media and populism: An Elective Affinity
Since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, an intense debate has developed around the connection between social media and populist movements. In this article, I put forward some theses about the reasons for the apparent 'elective affinity' between social media and populism. I argue that the match between social media and populist politics derives from the way in which the mass networking capabilities of social media, at…
From Cyber-Autonomism to Cyber-Populism: An Ideological Analysis of the Evolution of Digital Activism
The analysis of digital activism has so far been dominated by a techno-determinist approach which interprets the logic of activism and its transformation as directly reflecting the properties of the technologies utilised by activists. This line of interpretatoin has been manifested in the popularity acquired by notions as “Twitter protest” or “revolution 2.0” in the news media and in academic discourse. Moving beyond this reductionist trend, this…
From Global Justice to Occupy and Podemos: Mapping Three Stages of Contemporary Activism
Special Section of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique (http://www.triple-c.at) Edited by Todd Wolfson, Emiliano Treré, Paolo Gerbaudo, Peter FunketripleC 15 (2), 2017, pp. 390-542 Please note that the editors appear in reversed alphabetical order, not in order of importance. This special issue represents a collective effort, and all the four editors contributed equally to it
Social media teams as digital vanguards: The question of leadership in the management of key Facebook and Twitter accounts of Occupy Wall Street, Indignados and UK Uncut
Recent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the US, the indignados/15M movement in Spain, and UK Uncut have witnessed the rise of social media teams, small activist groups responsible for managing high-visibility and collective activist social media accounts. Going against dominant assertions about the leaderless character of contemporary digital movements, the article conceptualises social media teams as ‘digital vanguards’, collectiv…
Social media and populism: An Elective Affinity
Since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, an intense debate has developed around the connection between social media and populist movements. In this article, I put forward some theses about the reasons for the apparent 'elective affinity' between social media and populism. I argue that the match between social media and populist politics derives from the way in which the mass networking capabilities of social media, at…
Are digital parties more democratic than traditional parties? Evaluating Podemos and Movimento 5 Stelle’s online decision-making platforms
A number of Western European countries have recently seen the emergence of ‘digital parties’. This term refers to a new wave of political organisations committed to transforming intra-party democracy (IPD) through the adoption of online ‘participatory platforms’, sections of their official websites where registered members can debate and decide on various issues. In this article, I assess the democratic quality of online participatory platforms i…
The indignant citizen: Anti-austerity movements in southern Europe and the anti-oligarchic reclaiming of citizenship
This article discusses the change in political vision of anti-austerity movements in southern Europe in comparison with previous protest movements. It focuses on the emergence of a discourse of citizenship at the core of the new protest wave, as seen in frequent references to ‘citizens’, ‘citizenry’ and ‘citizenship’ in movement manifestos, and the resolutions and declarations of popular assemblies. I investigate the meaning and motivations of th…
TikTok and the algorithmic transformation of social media publics: From social networks to social interest clusters
The rise of TikTok has sparked a debate on the consequences of algorithmic content curation for social experience. My thesis is that TikTok represents a second generation of social media, which differs from first-generation social media in the way users are exposed to content. While first-generation social media revolved around ‘networked publics’ formed by explicit interpersonal connections, second-generation social media introduces ‘clustered p…
Angry Posts Mobilize: Emotional Communication and Online Mobilization in the Facebook Pages of Western European Right-Wing Populist Leaders
The rise of right-wing populists in Western Europe has often been linked to their ability to exploit social media affordances to fuel anger. While scholarship has already examined the emotional dimension of the populist right’s online communication, with some researchers studying specifically the fuelling of anger among social media users, we still lack empirical proof of the mobilizational effectiveness of what we describe as “anger-triggering c…
When 'Positive Posting' Attracts Voters: User Engagement and Emotions in the 2017 UK Election Campaign on Facebook
Social media are widely held to have played an important role in the 2017 UK general elections. But it is not altogether clear how exactly they contributed to the communication battle between Labour and the Conservatives. This article analyses the posts and comments on the official Facebook pages of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party and their respective leaders, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. We look at the relationship between topics, …
From individual affectedness to collective identity: Personal testimony campaigns on social media and the logic of collection
In recent years, there has been much debate about the consequences of the internet and social media for activism and social movements. According to Lance W Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, digital activism involves a logic of ‘connective action’, in which collective action and collective identity lose importance. To assess the validity of this theory, I focus on personal testimony campaigns that have by now become a familiar digital tactic, espec…
Theorizing Reactive Democracy: The Social Media Public Sphere, Online Crowds and the Plebiscitary Logic of Online Reactions
The diffusion of social media has profoundly transformed the nature and form of the contemporary public sphere, facilitating the rise of new political tactics and movements. In this article, I develop a theory of the social media public sphere as a “plebeian public sphere” whose functioning is markedly different from the traditional public sphere, described by Jürgen Habermas. Differently from Habermas’ critical-rational publics, this social medi…
Memes and the Moroccan Far-Right
Facebook meme pages in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have flared-up in the past decade. Since 2017, some Moroccan pages have started sharing exclusively patriarchal, ultra- and ethnonationalist, misogynist, and racist content shaped to look in line with “alt-right” online aesthetics. Self-identifying as right-wing, these pages have memetized an entire ecosystem of scapegoats as enemies of the nation. Furthermore, they have rescued symbo…
From Occupy Wall Street to the Gilets Jaunes: On the populist turn in the protest movements of the 2010s
Many recent protest movements, from the 2011 square occupation movements to the Gilets Jaunes display typical populist features, starting from an appeal to the people vs the elites. Drawing on my work on social movements in the 2010s in this article, I discuss the different components and implications of this 'populist turn' and its differences vis-à-vis other forms of populism, and in particular right-wing populism. I claim that social movements…
Spikey Posters: Street Media and Territoriality in Urban Activist Scenes
This article discusses fly-posting practices performed by radical urban activists in Rome and Berlin. It suggests that political posters cannot be understood simply as channels of information about events and activities of political and subcultural “autonomous scenes” encompassing squats, occupied social centers, political bars, bookshops, cafes, and similar activist hangouts. Rather, these “street media” are crucially involved in processes of sp…
Are digital parties the future of party organization? A symposium on The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Le parti plateforme: La transformation des organisations politiques à l’heure du Big Data
Ce texte propose un nouveau type de parti, celui du parti plateforme ou parti digital, pour rendre compte de l'émergence d'organisations politiques nées ces dernières années et plus globalement des transformations des partis politiques à l'heure du numérique. Comme le parti de masse incarnait l'organisation politique à l'ère industrielle, le parti plateforme reflète le mode de production des sociétés numériques. Il repose sur trois éléments essen…
Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism
Tweets and the Streets analyses the culture of the new protest movements of the 21st century. From the Arab Spring to the 'indignados' protests in Spain and the Occupy movement, Paolo Gerbaudo examines the relationship between the rise of social media and the emergence of new forms of protest. Gerbaudo argues that activists' use of Twitter and Facebook does not fit with the image of a 'cyberspace' detached from physical reality. Instead, social m…
A round-table on the international dimensions of News Corp in the light of the UK phone hacking scandal
Spikey Posters: Street Media and Territoriality in Urban Activist Scenes
This article discusses fly-posting practices performed by radical urban activists in Rome and Berlin. It suggests that political posters cannot be understood simply as channels of information about events and activities of political and subcultural “autonomous scenes” encompassing squats, occupied social centers, political bars, bookshops, cafes, and similar activist hangouts. Rather, these “street media” are crucially involved in processes of sp…
The persistence of collectivity in digital protest
In search of the ‘we’ of social media activism: Introduction to the special issue on social media and protest identities
An internet meme using the Anonymous’ Guy Fawkes mask ‘going viral’ on Facebook; the hashtag #wearethe99percent launched by the Occupy Wall Street movement being adopted by thousands of internet us
Protest avatars as memetic signifiers: Political profile pictures and the construction of collective identity on social media in the 2011 protest wave
Protest avatars, digital images that act as collective symbols for protest movements, have been widely used by supporters of the 2011 protest wave, from Egypt to Spain and the United States. From photos of Egyptian martyr Khaled Said, to protest posters and multiple variations of Anonymous' mask, a great variety of images have been adopted as profile pictures by Internet users to express their support for various causes and protest movements and …
From Cyber-Autonomism to Cyber-Populism: An Ideological Analysis of the Evolution of Digital Activism
The analysis of digital activism has so far been dominated by a techno-determinist approach which interprets the logic of activism and its transformation as directly reflecting the properties of the technologies utilised by activists. This line of interpretatoin has been manifested in the popularity acquired by notions as “Twitter protest” or “revolution 2.0” in the news media and in academic discourse. Moving beyond this reductionist trend, this…
From Global Justice to Occupy and Podemos: Mapping Three Stages of Contemporary Activism
Special Section of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique (http://www.triple-c.at) Edited by Todd Wolfson, Emiliano Treré, Paolo Gerbaudo, Peter FunketripleC 15 (2), 2017, pp. 390-542 Please note that the editors appear in reversed alphabetical order, not in order of importance. This special issue represents a collective effort, and all the four editors contributed equally to it
Social media teams as digital vanguards: The question of leadership in the management of key Facebook and Twitter accounts of Occupy Wall Street, Indignados and UK Uncut
Recent protest movements such as Occupy Wall Street in the US, the indignados/15M movement in Spain, and UK Uncut have witnessed the rise of social media teams, small activist groups responsible for managing high-visibility and collective activist social media accounts. Going against dominant assertions about the leaderless character of contemporary digital movements, the article conceptualises social media teams as ‘digital vanguards’, collectiv…
The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism, and Global Protest
The indignant citizen: Anti-austerity movements in southern Europe and the anti-oligarchic reclaiming of citizenship
This article discusses the change in political vision of anti-austerity movements in southern Europe in comparison with previous protest movements. It focuses on the emergence of a discourse of citizenship at the core of the new protest wave, as seen in frequent references to ‘citizens’, ‘citizenry’ and ‘citizenship’ in movement manifestos, and the resolutions and declarations of popular assemblies. I investigate the meaning and motivations of th…
The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
Social media and populism: An Elective Affinity
Since the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States, an intense debate has developed around the connection between social media and populist movements. In this article, I put forward some theses about the reasons for the apparent 'elective affinity' between social media and populism. I argue that the match between social media and populist politics derives from the way in which the mass networking capabilities of social media, at…
The indignant citizen: Anti-austerity movements in southern Europe and the anti-oligarchic reclaiming of citizenship
This article discusses the change in political vision of anti-austerity movements in southern Europe in comparison with previous protest movements. It focuses on the emergence of a discourse of citizenship at the core of the new protest wave, as seen in frequent references to 'citizens', 'citizenry' and 'citizenship' in movement manifestos, and the resolutions and declarations of popular assemblies. I investigate the meaning and motivations of th…
The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy
When 'Positive Posting' Attracts Voters: User Engagement and Emotions in the 2017 UK Election Campaign on Facebook
Social media are widely held to have played an important role in the 2017 UK general elections. But it is not altogether clear how exactly they contributed to the communication battle between Labour and the Conservatives. This article analyses the posts and comments on the official Facebook pages of the Labour Party and the Conservative Party and their respective leaders, Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. We look at the relationship between topics, …
Is populism democracy’s worst friend
Are digital parties the future of party organization? A symposium on The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Memes and the Moroccan Far-Right
Facebook meme pages in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have flared-up in the past decade. Since 2017, some Moroccan pages have started sharing exclusively patriarchal, ultra- and ethnonationalist, misogynist, and racist content shaped to look in line with “alt-right” online aesthetics. Self-identifying as right-wing, these pages have memetized an entire ecosystem of scapegoats as enemies of the nation. Furthermore, they have rescued symbo…
Are digital parties more democratic than traditional parties? Evaluating Podemos and Movimento 5 Stelle’s online decision-making platforms
A number of Western European countries have recently seen the emergence of ‘digital parties’. This term refers to a new wave of political organisations committed to transforming intra-party democracy (IPD) through the adoption of online ‘participatory platforms’, sections of their official websites where registered members can debate and decide on various issues. In this article, I assess the democratic quality of online participatory platforms i…
Momentum vs. Labour's Bureaucracy
The creation of Corbynist organization Momentum was the way in which the wave of socialist revival in the UK tried to take an organizational form and work toward the transformation of the Labour party. The first-past-the-post system meant that the only realistic option for socialists was working within the existing mainstream left party, while at the same time developing a parallel structure to mobilize youth supporters suspicious of bureaucratic…
Theorizing Reactive Democracy: The Social Media Public Sphere, Online Crowds and the Plebiscitary Logic of Online Reactions
The diffusion of social media has profoundly transformed the nature and form of the contemporary public sphere, facilitating the rise of new political tactics and movements. In this article, I develop a theory of the social media public sphere as a “plebeian public sphere” whose functioning is markedly different from the traditional public sphere, described by Jürgen Habermas. Differently from Habermas’ critical-rational publics, this social medi…
From individual affectedness to collective identity: Personal testimony campaigns on social media and the logic of collection
In recent years, there has been much debate about the consequences of the internet and social media for activism and social movements. According to Lance W Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, digital activism involves a logic of ‘connective action’, in which collective action and collective identity lose importance. To assess the validity of this theory, I focus on personal testimony campaigns that have by now become a familiar digital tactic, espec…
Mobilised yet unaffiliated: Italian youth and the uneven return to political participation
Young people have long been considered the most politically apathetic section of the population. Yet, recent elections in the United States and Europe seem to point to a reversal of this trend. To explore this issue, we analyse a survey on youth and political participation in Italy conducted in 2018. Comparing the results with a similar 2004 survey, we find strong evidence of a growth of political participation by young people. Following our mode…
Unite against Trumpism
Political science (27 works) · Law (21 works) · Politics (21 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Social Media and Politics (17 works) · Media studies (12 works) · Populism, Right-Wing Movements (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Law (10 works) · Social media (9 works)