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Dan Mercea

Biographic Data

ID291202
NAMEDan Mercea
GIVEN NAMESDan
FAMILY NAMEMercea
SIGNATUREMERCEA D
AFFILIATIONSCity, University of London
ORCID0000-0003-3762-2404
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS36
TOTAL CITATIONS163
AUTHOR COUNT36
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR2011
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX6
  • How movement parties contest democratic backsliding: Evidence from Hungary and Romania

    Open Access•Lorenzo Mosca, Bálint Mikola et al.•ARTICLE•Democratization•2026

    Democratic backsliding is on the rise globally, prompting renewed attention to the strategies through which democracies resist authoritarian encroachments. One form of resistance involves the transition of protest movements into the electoral arena, in the form of so-called “movement parties.” While widely studied in Western Europe, this new party form has received little attention in Eastern European countries where governing elites are fundamen…

  • Beyond the campus: Exploring self-protective behaviors and mobile phone use among women students in urban environments

    Open Access•Michael Saker, Dan Mercea et al.•ARTICLE•The Communication Review•2026

    Women are advised to avoid urban settings after dark and to carry a mobile phone. These precautions can reduce experiential fear of crime (EFC), which is influenced by the surrounding environment. However, these measures do not allow women to completely avoid potentially risky spaces. Women students commuting to urban universities are a prime example of this challenge. However, research on higher education and fear of crime (FoC) has largely focu…

  • One foot in parliament, one on the streets: Studying the fluid relation between individual participation and party evaluations of protest

    Open Access•Felipe G Santos, Matthias Hoffmann et al.•ARTICLE•Party Politics•2026•References: 16

    This paper investigates the interconnection between electoral and non-electoral politics. Through a unique integration of social media and nationally representative survey data, we examine how political parties in Denmark, Germany, and the United Kingdom evaluate episodes of street protest and how these evaluations relate to their voters’ participation in such protests. Our analysis shows that all political parties, regardless of type or ideology…

  • Young democrats, critical citizens and protest voters: Studying the profiles of movement party supporters

    Open Access•Felipe G Santos, Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Acta Politica•2025•Cited by: 6•References: 52

    The rise of movement parties in Europe has disrupted traditional notions of party politics, introducing new avenues for citizen engagement and political mobilisation. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the electorate of movement parties, using nationally representative survey data from six European countries. We identify four types of movement parties: green/left-libertarian, far-right, eclectic, and centrist, and examine the distinc…

  • Protest as a relational field: An analysis of brokerage positions within and across contentious episodes and the individuals occupying them

    Open Access•Matthias Hoffmann, Felipe G Santos et al.•ARTICLE•International Journal of Sociology•2025•References: 30

    This paper analyses participation in multiple protest episodes to explore the potential for people to broker relations between same-issue and different-issue episodes. Through an analysis of original survey data from six European countries, we map two-mode networks of individuals and protest episodes in each country to identify protesters in two brokerage positions: coordinators that can broker relations via same-issue contentious episodes and bo…

  • Actual, Potential, and Non-Participants: Advancing the Differential Analysis of Protest Participation

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, Felipe G Santos et al.•ARTICLE•Political Studies•2025•Cited by: 2•References: 54

    In this article, we contribute to the analysis of protest participation on a gradient from non- to actual participation. Using survey data from six European countries, we take the analysis beyond a binary differentiation between participants and non-participants. We evidence a participation gradient underpinned by a combination of social and political variables and separate patterns that allow for distinctions between non-, potential, and actual …

  • Policy over Protest: Experimental Evidence on the Drivers of Support for Movement Parties

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, Felipe G Santos•ARTICLE•Perspectives on Politics•2025•Cited by: 2•References: 88

    Across the world, political parties are incorporating social movement strategies and frames. In this study, we pivot from the dominant focus on party characteristics to analyze drivers of support for movement parties in six European countries. We report results from a choice-based conjoint survey experiment showing that contrary to previous research, movement party voters favor neither candidates who are institutional outsiders nor those who acti…

  • Protesting at the intersection of individual characteristics and obstacles to participation: An Analysis of the in-Person, Online and Pivoting Styles

    Open Access•Felipe G Santos, Matthias Hoffmann et al.•ARTICLE•Journal of European Public Policy•2025•Cited by: 2•References: 44

    Engaging with long-standing debates on the crisis of democracy, manifested as a downturn in civic involvement, this paper scrutinises the evolving landscape of protest participation. First delineating three distinct protest participation styles – in-person, online and what we conceive of as a pivoting style – we identify individual characteristics among protesters that are associated with each style and consider how different obstacles to partici…

  • Educational journeys: Understanding How Women Commuter Students’ Daily Mobilities Can Shape Their Higher Education Experience

    Open Access•Michael Saker, Dan Mercea et al.•ARTICLE•Mobilities•2025•References: 3

  • Protesting the lockdown: Geo-indexing a movement publicly opposing Covid-19 policies on Facebook

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, Michael Saker et al.•ARTICLE•Social movement studies•2024•References: 46

    The Covid-19 pandemic saw restrictions being implemented to curb the spread of the virus.This seeded anti-lockdown demonstrations across the globe.Leveraging network, quantitative and qualitative textual analysis tools, we scrutinize the expression of opposition to these restrictions on 96 public Facebook groups and pages, and its connection to physical places across the globe.To grapple with this relation, we propose the concept of geoindexing a…

  • Wayfearing” and the city: Exploring how experiential fear of crime frames the mobilities of women students at a city-based university using a bespoke chatbot app

    Open Access•Michael Saker, Dan Mercea et al.•ARTICLE•Mobile Media & Communication•2023•Cited by: 1•References: 9

    Personal safety apps provide new ways for crime data to be utilized by citizens within the context of urban mobilities. Yet, high-profile stories reveal the fear many women continue to experience in their daily lives. Operating as locative media, personal safety apps seem to imply that environments can simply be avoided. This is not always possible. Women students attending a city-based university, for example, might have to move through various …

  • Understanding familial locative play: Exploring parent online social learning to play Pokémon Go

    Open Access•Michael Saker, Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Convergence The International…•2022

    Pokémon Go is a hybrid reality game (HRG) that research suggests is played by families in the context of joint-media engagement. Yet, the game interface itself provides little information about how to approach the game. Given this and the fact that many parents play this HRG with their young children, we examine the process of parent online social learning to play Pokémon Go. Drawing on an original study of Pokémon Go conducted between August and…

  • Lifting the Veil on the Use of Big Data News Repositories: A Documentation and Critical Discussion of A Protest Event Analysis

    Open Access•Matthias Hoffmann, Felipe G Santos et al.•ARTICLE•Communication Methods and Measures•2022•Cited by: 1•References: 18

    This paper presents a critical discussion of the processing, reliability and implications of free big data repositories. We argue that big data is not only the starting point of scientific analyses but also the outcome of a long string of invisible or semi-visible tasks, often masked by the fetish of size that supposedly lends validity to big data. We unpack these notions by illustrating the process of extracting protest event data from the Globa…

  • Disinformation and Data Lockdown on Social Platforms

    Shawn Walker, Dan Mercea et al.•BOOK•Disinformation and Data Lockdown…•2021

  • Guy Next Door and Implausibly Attractive Young Women: The Visual Frames of Social Media Propaganda

    Open Access•M Bastos, Dan Mercea et al.•ARTICLE•AoIR Selected Papers of Internet…•2021

    This study introduces a mixed-methods approach to classifying the visual frames of state-sponsored social media propaganda. We relied on Twitter’s Election Integrity data to sample five key propaganda targets of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), including Russian and American partisan groups. We manually coded profile images and subsequently applied qualitative and quantitative processing to the images. The visual motifs identified in IRA Twitt…

  • Understanding movement parties through their communication

    Dan Mercea, Lorenzo Mosca•ARTICLE•Information Communication & Society•2021

    In many countries, movement parties have gained traction among the electorate. This special issue spotlights the communication of movement parties as an avenue for researching their purchase on democratic politics. Through a combination of empirical studies and commentaries, the issue covers multiple countries where movement parties have established a foothold in politics. The introduction makes the case that communication has played a vital part…

  • Exploring narrative linearity between Twitter and the news: Echoes of the Arab Spring in Brazil

    Open Access•Helton Levy, Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Discourse & Society•2021•References: 16

    This article explores the use of narrative theory as an analytical framework to investigate the extent to which popular hashtags and the news can develop into intersecting stories. It juxtaposes the case of hashtag-based reports seen during the Arab Spring to understand the coverage of notorious political episodes in Brazil. Namely, the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro. Here, narrative linearity emerges a…

  • Guy next door and implausibly attractive young women: The visual frames of social media propaganda

    Open Access•M Bastos, Dan Mercea et al.•ARTICLE•New Media & Society•2021•Cited by: 5•References: 12

    This study combines data analysis with multilevel processing of visual communication to classify the visual frames of state-sponsored social media propaganda. We relied on Twitter’s Election Integrity data to sample five propaganda targets of the Internet Research Agency, including Russian and American partisan groups, and explored how their operations deviated from canonical state propaganda marked by symbols of national identity and heroic masc…

  • The Political Information to Protest: An Assessment of Topical Social Media Usage in Contentious Politics

    Open Access•Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•AoIR Selected Papers of Internet…•2020

    This article leverages social media and survey data to probe the scope and depth of political knowledge possessed by participants in the Romanian 2017 #rezist protests. For several months, demonstrators gathered in town squares around the country to oppose a project law intended to water down penalties for corruption in high office. Against the backdrop of well-founded scepticism regarding exposure to and engagement with political knowledge on so…

  • Tying transnational activism to national protest: Facebook event pages in the 2017 Romanian #rezist demonstrations

    Open Access•Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•New Media & Society•2020•Cited by: 4•References: 14

    This article considers the use of public social media in transnational expatriate activism. It is an investigation of connections among users of Facebook event pages associated with 122 cities worldwide where demonstrations took place in 2017, in support of the anti-corruption Romanian #rezist protests. An exploration of interconnections between socio-demographics, space and network characteristics, it probes the association of geographic locatio…

  • The disinformation landscape and the lockdown of social platforms

    Shawn Walker, Dan Mercea et al.•ARTICLE•Information Communication & Society•2019

    This introduction to the special issue considers how independent research on mis/disinformation campaigns can be conducted in a corporate environment hostile to academic research. We provide an overview of the disinformation landscape in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and social platforms’ decision to enforce access lockdowns and the throttling of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for data collection. We argue t…

  • Parametrizing Brexit: Mapping Twitter political space to parliamentary constituencies

    M Bastos, Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Information Communication & Society•2018

    In this paper, a proof of concept study is performed to validate the use of social media signal to model the ideological coordinates underpinning the Brexit debate. We rely on geographically enriched Twitter data and a purpose-built, deep learning algorithm to map the political value space of users tweeting the referendum onto Parliamentary Constituencies. We find a significant incidence of nationalist sentiments and economic views expressed on T…

  • Transnational activism in support of national protest: Questions of Identity and Organization

    Open Access•Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Global Networks•2018•Cited by: 5•References: 44

    In this article, I consider the question of whether transnational activism supporting national protest attains a cohesive collective identity on social media while remaining localized organizationally. I examine a corpus of social media data collected during two months of rolling protests in 2013 against the largest proposed open-cast gold mine at Roşia Montană, Romania, which echoed among Romanian expatriates. A network text analysis of the data…

  • Movement social learning on Twitter: The case of the People's Assembly

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, Kutlu Emre Yilmaz et al.•ARTICLE•The Sociological Review•2018•Cited by: 2•References: 45

    The article examines the UK movement People's Assembly against Austerity. It probes the extent to which opposition to austerity expressed on Twitter contributes to building bridges among disparate social groups affected by austerity politics and to enabling their joint collective action. The study aims to add to the scholarship on anti-austerity protests since the credit crunch. Numerous of those protests have been accompanied by vibrant activity…

  • Persistent Activist Communication in Occupy Gezi

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, Duygu Karataş et al.•ARTICLE•Sociology•2018•Cited by: 3•References: 45

    We revisit the notion of activist persistence against the backdrop of protest communication on Twitter. We take an event-based approach and examine Occupy Gezi, a series of protests that occurred in Turkey in the early summer of 2013. By cross-referencing survey data with longitudinal Twitter data and in-depth interviews, we investigate the relationship between biographical availability, relational and organisational ties, and social and personal…

Next
  • The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News

    Open Access•M Bastos, Marco T Bastos et al.•ARTICLE•Social Science Computer Review•2017•Cited by: 53•References: 3

    In this article, we uncover a network of Twitterbots comprising 13,493 accounts that tweeted the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, only to disappear from Twitter shortly after the ballot. We compare active users to this set of political bots with respect to temporal tweeting behavior, the size and speed of retweet cascades, and the composition of their retweet cascades (user-to-bot vs. bot-to-bot) to evidence strategies for bot…

  • Digital prefigurative participation: The entwinement of online communication and offline participation in protest events

    Open Access•Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•New Media & Society•2011•Cited by: 30•References: 11

    This article reviews the main findings of a three-year empirical study that examined the possible contribution of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to participation in offline social movement protest events. Participation was examined as manifest in mobilization, identity building and organizational transformation. Digital prefigurative participation is a tentative construct that attempts to capture the CMC aspect of engagement in the three p…

  • Protest communication ecologies

    Dan Mercea, Laura Iannelli et al.•ARTICLE•Information Communication & Society•2015•Cited by: 18•References: 14

    The flurry of protests since the turn of the decade has sustained a growth area in the social sciences. The diversity of approaches to the various facets and concerns raised by the collective action of aggrieved groups the world over impresses through multidisciplinarity and the wealth of insights it has generated. This introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communication and Society is an invitation to recover …

  • Serial activists: Political Twitter beyond influentials and the twittertariat

    Open Access•M Bastos, Marco T Bastos et al.•ARTICLE•New Media & Society•2015•Cited by: 13•References: 11

    This article introduces a group of politically charged Twitter users that deviates from elite and ordinary users. After mining 20 M tweets related to nearly 200 instances of political protest from 2009 to 2013, we identified a network of individuals tweeting across geographically distant protest hashtags and revisited the term “serial activists.” We contacted 191 individuals and conducted 21 in-depth, semi-structured interviews thematically coded…

  • Towards a Conceptualization of Casual Protest Participation: Parsing a Case from the Save Roşia Montană Campaign

    Open Access•Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•East European Politics and…•2014•Cited by: 11•References: 13

    There is currently an empirical gap in the literature on protest participation in liberal democracies, which has overwhelmingly focused on Western Europe and North America at the expense of Eastern Europe. To contribute to closing that gap, this article reviews findings from a multi-method field study conducted at FânFest, the environmental protest festival designed to boost participation in Save Roşia Montană, the most prominent environmental ca…

  • Young democrats, critical citizens and protest voters: Studying the profiles of movement party supporters

    Open Access•Felipe G Santos, Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Acta Politica•2025•Cited by: 6•References: 52

    The rise of movement parties in Europe has disrupted traditional notions of party politics, introducing new avenues for citizen engagement and political mobilisation. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the electorate of movement parties, using nationally representative survey data from six European countries. We identify four types of movement parties: green/left-libertarian, far-right, eclectic, and centrist, and examine the distinc…

  • Guy next door and implausibly attractive young women: The visual frames of social media propaganda

    Open Access•M Bastos, Dan Mercea et al.•ARTICLE•New Media & Society•2021•Cited by: 5•References: 12

    This study combines data analysis with multilevel processing of visual communication to classify the visual frames of state-sponsored social media propaganda. We relied on Twitter’s Election Integrity data to sample five propaganda targets of the Internet Research Agency, including Russian and American partisan groups, and explored how their operations deviated from canonical state propaganda marked by symbols of national identity and heroic masc…

  • Transnational activism in support of national protest: Questions of Identity and Organization

    Open Access•Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Global Networks•2018•Cited by: 5•References: 44

    In this article, I consider the question of whether transnational activism supporting national protest attains a cohesive collective identity on social media while remaining localized organizationally. I examine a corpus of social media data collected during two months of rolling protests in 2013 against the largest proposed open-cast gold mine at Roşia Montană, Romania, which echoed among Romanian expatriates. A network text analysis of the data…

  • Being a Serial Transnational Activist: Serial Transnational Activism

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, M Bastos•ARTICLE•Journal of Computer-Mediated…•2016•Cited by: 5•References: 14

    Transnational activism endures as a political practice turning a mirror onto the world's powerbrokers. We analyse a variety of transnational activism best characterized as serial by virtue of an observed systematic time and border-spanning commitment to protest communication. Following statistical disambiguation of a dataset of 2.5 million unique Twitter users, we identified a subset of exceptionally prolific communicators and interviewed 21 of t…

  • Tying transnational activism to national protest: Facebook event pages in the 2017 Romanian #rezist demonstrations

    Open Access•Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•New Media & Society•2020•Cited by: 4•References: 14

    This article considers the use of public social media in transnational expatriate activism. It is an investigation of connections among users of Facebook event pages associated with 122 cities worldwide where demonstrations took place in 2017, in support of the anti-corruption Romanian #rezist protests. An exploration of interconnections between socio-demographics, space and network characteristics, it probes the association of geographic locatio…

  • Persistent Activist Communication in Occupy Gezi

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, Duygu Karataş et al.•ARTICLE•Sociology•2018•Cited by: 3•References: 45

    We revisit the notion of activist persistence against the backdrop of protest communication on Twitter. We take an event-based approach and examine Occupy Gezi, a series of protests that occurred in Turkey in the early summer of 2013. By cross-referencing survey data with longitudinal Twitter data and in-depth interviews, we investigate the relationship between biographical availability, relational and organisational ties, and social and personal…

  • Actual, Potential, and Non-Participants: Advancing the Differential Analysis of Protest Participation

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, Felipe G Santos et al.•ARTICLE•Political Studies•2025•Cited by: 2•References: 54

    In this article, we contribute to the analysis of protest participation on a gradient from non- to actual participation. Using survey data from six European countries, we take the analysis beyond a binary differentiation between participants and non-participants. We evidence a participation gradient underpinned by a combination of social and political variables and separate patterns that allow for distinctions between non-, potential, and actual …

  • Policy over Protest: Experimental Evidence on the Drivers of Support for Movement Parties

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, Felipe G Santos•ARTICLE•Perspectives on Politics•2025•Cited by: 2•References: 88

    Across the world, political parties are incorporating social movement strategies and frames. In this study, we pivot from the dominant focus on party characteristics to analyze drivers of support for movement parties in six European countries. We report results from a choice-based conjoint survey experiment showing that contrary to previous research, movement party voters favor neither candidates who are institutional outsiders nor those who acti…

  • Protesting at the intersection of individual characteristics and obstacles to participation: An Analysis of the in-Person, Online and Pivoting Styles

    Open Access•Felipe G Santos, Matthias Hoffmann et al.•ARTICLE•Journal of European Public Policy•2025•Cited by: 2•References: 44

    Engaging with long-standing debates on the crisis of democracy, manifested as a downturn in civic involvement, this paper scrutinises the evolving landscape of protest participation. First delineating three distinct protest participation styles – in-person, online and what we conceive of as a pivoting style – we identify individual characteristics among protesters that are associated with each style and consider how different obstacles to partici…

  • Movement social learning on Twitter: The case of the People's Assembly

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, Kutlu Emre Yilmaz et al.•ARTICLE•The Sociological Review•2018•Cited by: 2•References: 45

    The article examines the UK movement People's Assembly against Austerity. It probes the extent to which opposition to austerity expressed on Twitter contributes to building bridges among disparate social groups affected by austerity politics and to enabling their joint collective action. The study aims to add to the scholarship on anti-austerity protests since the credit crunch. Numerous of those protests have been accompanied by vibrant activity…

  • Wayfearing” and the city: Exploring how experiential fear of crime frames the mobilities of women students at a city-based university using a bespoke chatbot app

    Open Access•Michael Saker, Dan Mercea et al.•ARTICLE•Mobile Media & Communication•2023•Cited by: 1•References: 9

    Personal safety apps provide new ways for crime data to be utilized by citizens within the context of urban mobilities. Yet, high-profile stories reveal the fear many women continue to experience in their daily lives. Operating as locative media, personal safety apps seem to imply that environments can simply be avoided. This is not always possible. Women students attending a city-based university, for example, might have to move through various …

  • Lifting the Veil on the Use of Big Data News Repositories: A Documentation and Critical Discussion of A Protest Event Analysis

    Open Access•Matthias Hoffmann, Felipe G Santos et al.•ARTICLE•Communication Methods and Measures•2022•Cited by: 1•References: 18

    This paper presents a critical discussion of the processing, reliability and implications of free big data repositories. We argue that big data is not only the starting point of scientific analyses but also the outcome of a long string of invisible or semi-visible tasks, often masked by the fetish of size that supposedly lends validity to big data. We unpack these notions by illustrating the process of extracting protest event data from the Globa…

  • Networking Democracy: Social media innovations and participatory politics

    Brian D Loader, Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Information Communication & Society•2011

    Early conceptions of digital democracy as a virtual public sphere or civic commons have been replaced by a new technological optimism for democratic renewal based upon the open and collaborative networking characteristics of social media. This article provides an introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communication & Society which attempts to present a grounded analysis on these claims drawing upon evidence-base…

  • Digital prefigurative participation: The entwinement of online communication and offline participation in protest events

    Open Access•Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•New Media & Society•2011•Cited by: 30•References: 11

    This article reviews the main findings of a three-year empirical study that examined the possible contribution of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to participation in offline social movement protest events. Participation was examined as manifest in mobilization, identity building and organizational transformation. Digital prefigurative participation is a tentative construct that attempts to capture the CMC aspect of engagement in the three p…

  • Probing the Implications of Facebook Use for the Organizational Form of Social Movement Organizations

    Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Information Communication & Society•2013

    This article examines the use of Facebook by social movement organizations (SMOs) and the ramifications from that usage for their organizational form. Organizational forms have been viewed to be in flux as networked communication becomes embedded in mobilization repertoires. In what follows, it is shown that the utilization of Facebook by networked heterarchical organizations is seen to grant them access to a hitherto untapped demographic for the…

  • Towards a Conceptualization of Casual Protest Participation: Parsing a Case from the Save Roşia Montană Campaign

    Open Access•Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•East European Politics and…•2014•Cited by: 11•References: 13

    There is currently an empirical gap in the literature on protest participation in liberal democracies, which has overwhelmingly focused on Western Europe and North America at the expense of Eastern Europe. To contribute to closing that gap, this article reviews findings from a multi-method field study conducted at FânFest, the environmental protest festival designed to boost participation in Save Roşia Montană, the most prominent environmental ca…

  • Tents, Tweets, and Events: The Interplay Between Ongoing Protests and Social Media

    Open Access•M Bastos, Marco T Bastos et al.•ARTICLE•Journal of Communication•2015

    Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular uprisings. In this article, we use time-series data of Twitter, Facebook, and onsite protests to assess the Granger causality between social media streams and onsite developments at the Indignados, Occupy, and Brazilian Vinegar protests. After applying Gaussianization to the data, we found contentious communication on Twitter and Facebook forecasted …

  • Serial activists: Political Twitter beyond influentials and the twittertariat

    Open Access•M Bastos, Marco T Bastos et al.•ARTICLE•New Media & Society•2015•Cited by: 13•References: 11

    This article introduces a group of politically charged Twitter users that deviates from elite and ordinary users. After mining 20 M tweets related to nearly 200 instances of political protest from 2009 to 2013, we identified a network of individuals tweeting across geographically distant protest hashtags and revisited the term “serial activists.” We contacted 191 individuals and conducted 21 in-depth, semi-structured interviews thematically coded…

  • Protest communication ecologies

    Dan Mercea, Laura Iannelli et al.•ARTICLE•Information Communication & Society•2015•Cited by: 18•References: 14

    The flurry of protests since the turn of the decade has sustained a growth area in the social sciences. The diversity of approaches to the various facets and concerns raised by the collective action of aggrieved groups the world over impresses through multidisciplinarity and the wealth of insights it has generated. This introduction to a special issue of the international journal Information, Communication and Society is an invitation to recover …

  • Being a Serial Transnational Activist: Serial Transnational Activism

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, M Bastos•ARTICLE•Journal of Computer-Mediated…•2016•Cited by: 5•References: 14

    Transnational activism endures as a political practice turning a mirror onto the world's powerbrokers. We analyse a variety of transnational activism best characterized as serial by virtue of an observed systematic time and border-spanning commitment to protest communication. Following statistical disambiguation of a dataset of 2.5 million unique Twitter users, we identified a subset of exceptionally prolific communicators and interviewed 21 of t…

  • Media, Participation, and Social Change: Introduction to the Special Section

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, Laura Iannelli•ARTICLE•Social Media + Society•2016•References: 6

    The article introduces a special section that strengthen our understanding of the relationship between media, collective action, and participation in social change, by exposing how knowledge about it is produced. We develop our arguments referring to a body of literature that has scrutinized the social organization of public communication— through broadcasting media, the press, or social media—in the attempt to explain why some visions for social…

  • The Geographic Embedding of Online Echo Chambers: Evidence from the Brexit Campaign

    Open Access•M Bastos, Marco T Bastos et al.•ARTICLE•SSRN Electronic Journal•2017

  • The Brexit Botnet and User-Generated Hyperpartisan News

    Open Access•M Bastos, Marco T Bastos et al.•ARTICLE•Social Science Computer Review•2017•Cited by: 53•References: 3

    In this article, we uncover a network of Twitterbots comprising 13,493 accounts that tweeted the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, only to disappear from Twitter shortly after the ballot. We compare active users to this set of political bots with respect to temporal tweeting behavior, the size and speed of retweet cascades, and the composition of their retweet cascades (user-to-bot vs. bot-to-bot) to evidence strategies for bot…

  • Parametrizing Brexit: Mapping Twitter political space to parliamentary constituencies

    M Bastos, Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Information Communication & Society•2018

    In this paper, a proof of concept study is performed to validate the use of social media signal to model the ideological coordinates underpinning the Brexit debate. We rely on geographically enriched Twitter data and a purpose-built, deep learning algorithm to map the political value space of users tweeting the referendum onto Parliamentary Constituencies. We find a significant incidence of nationalist sentiments and economic views expressed on T…

  • Transnational activism in support of national protest: Questions of Identity and Organization

    Open Access•Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Global Networks•2018•Cited by: 5•References: 44

    In this article, I consider the question of whether transnational activism supporting national protest attains a cohesive collective identity on social media while remaining localized organizationally. I examine a corpus of social media data collected during two months of rolling protests in 2013 against the largest proposed open-cast gold mine at Roşia Montană, Romania, which echoed among Romanian expatriates. A network text analysis of the data…

  • Movement social learning on Twitter: The case of the People's Assembly

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, Kutlu Emre Yilmaz et al.•ARTICLE•The Sociological Review•2018•Cited by: 2•References: 45

    The article examines the UK movement People's Assembly against Austerity. It probes the extent to which opposition to austerity expressed on Twitter contributes to building bridges among disparate social groups affected by austerity politics and to enabling their joint collective action. The study aims to add to the scholarship on anti-austerity protests since the credit crunch. Numerous of those protests have been accompanied by vibrant activity…

  • Persistent Activist Communication in Occupy Gezi

    Open Access•Dan Mercea, Duygu Karataş et al.•ARTICLE•Sociology•2018•Cited by: 3•References: 45

    We revisit the notion of activist persistence against the backdrop of protest communication on Twitter. We take an event-based approach and examine Occupy Gezi, a series of protests that occurred in Turkey in the early summer of 2013. By cross-referencing survey data with longitudinal Twitter data and in-depth interviews, we investigate the relationship between biographical availability, relational and organisational ties, and social and personal…

  • The disinformation landscape and the lockdown of social platforms

    Shawn Walker, Dan Mercea et al.•ARTICLE•Information Communication & Society•2019

    This introduction to the special issue considers how independent research on mis/disinformation campaigns can be conducted in a corporate environment hostile to academic research. We provide an overview of the disinformation landscape in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and social platforms’ decision to enforce access lockdowns and the throttling of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for data collection. We argue t…

  • The Political Information to Protest: An Assessment of Topical Social Media Usage in Contentious Politics

    Open Access•Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•AoIR Selected Papers of Internet…•2020

    This article leverages social media and survey data to probe the scope and depth of political knowledge possessed by participants in the Romanian 2017 #rezist protests. For several months, demonstrators gathered in town squares around the country to oppose a project law intended to water down penalties for corruption in high office. Against the backdrop of well-founded scepticism regarding exposure to and engagement with political knowledge on so…

  • Tying transnational activism to national protest: Facebook event pages in the 2017 Romanian #rezist demonstrations

    Open Access•Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•New Media & Society•2020•Cited by: 4•References: 14

    This article considers the use of public social media in transnational expatriate activism. It is an investigation of connections among users of Facebook event pages associated with 122 cities worldwide where demonstrations took place in 2017, in support of the anti-corruption Romanian #rezist protests. An exploration of interconnections between socio-demographics, space and network characteristics, it probes the association of geographic locatio…

  • Disinformation and Data Lockdown on Social Platforms

    Shawn Walker, Dan Mercea et al.•BOOK•Disinformation and Data Lockdown…•2021

  • Guy Next Door and Implausibly Attractive Young Women: The Visual Frames of Social Media Propaganda

    Open Access•M Bastos, Dan Mercea et al.•ARTICLE•AoIR Selected Papers of Internet…•2021

    This study introduces a mixed-methods approach to classifying the visual frames of state-sponsored social media propaganda. We relied on Twitter’s Election Integrity data to sample five key propaganda targets of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), including Russian and American partisan groups. We manually coded profile images and subsequently applied qualitative and quantitative processing to the images. The visual motifs identified in IRA Twitt…

  • Understanding movement parties through their communication

    Dan Mercea, Lorenzo Mosca•ARTICLE•Information Communication & Society•2021

    In many countries, movement parties have gained traction among the electorate. This special issue spotlights the communication of movement parties as an avenue for researching their purchase on democratic politics. Through a combination of empirical studies and commentaries, the issue covers multiple countries where movement parties have established a foothold in politics. The introduction makes the case that communication has played a vital part…

  • Exploring narrative linearity between Twitter and the news: Echoes of the Arab Spring in Brazil

    Open Access•Helton Levy, Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Discourse & Society•2021•References: 16

    This article explores the use of narrative theory as an analytical framework to investigate the extent to which popular hashtags and the news can develop into intersecting stories. It juxtaposes the case of hashtag-based reports seen during the Arab Spring to understand the coverage of notorious political episodes in Brazil. Namely, the 2016 impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro. Here, narrative linearity emerges a…

  • Guy next door and implausibly attractive young women: The visual frames of social media propaganda

    Open Access•M Bastos, Dan Mercea et al.•ARTICLE•New Media & Society•2021•Cited by: 5•References: 12

    This study combines data analysis with multilevel processing of visual communication to classify the visual frames of state-sponsored social media propaganda. We relied on Twitter’s Election Integrity data to sample five propaganda targets of the Internet Research Agency, including Russian and American partisan groups, and explored how their operations deviated from canonical state propaganda marked by symbols of national identity and heroic masc…

  • Understanding familial locative play: Exploring parent online social learning to play Pokémon Go

    Open Access•Michael Saker, Dan Mercea•ARTICLE•Convergence The International…•2022

    Pokémon Go is a hybrid reality game (HRG) that research suggests is played by families in the context of joint-media engagement. Yet, the game interface itself provides little information about how to approach the game. Given this and the fact that many parents play this HRG with their young children, we examine the process of parent online social learning to play Pokémon Go. Drawing on an original study of Pokémon Go conducted between August and…

  • Lifting the Veil on the Use of Big Data News Repositories: A Documentation and Critical Discussion of A Protest Event Analysis

    Open Access•Matthias Hoffmann, Felipe G Santos et al.•ARTICLE•Communication Methods and Measures•2022•Cited by: 1•References: 18

    This paper presents a critical discussion of the processing, reliability and implications of free big data repositories. We argue that big data is not only the starting point of scientific analyses but also the outcome of a long string of invisible or semi-visible tasks, often masked by the fetish of size that supposedly lends validity to big data. We unpack these notions by illustrating the process of extracting protest event data from the Globa…

Political science (29 works) · Social Media and Politics (29 works) · Sociology (25 works) · Law (22 works) · Politics (20 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Social media (16 works) · Media studies (14 works) · Public relations (13 works) · Law (12 works)

Ethnos_APP • Open Source Project • MIT License • Frontend v2.0.0 • Privacy and Cookies • API Documentation: api.ethnos.app/docs • API Source Code: GitHub • DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17049435 • Frontend Source Code: GitHub • DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17050053 • cruz.rio.br • Expectantes Misericordiae