Katie Kuksenok, SCC lab member and CSE PhD student, recently shared an article titled Hope, Lies & The Internet: Social Media in Ukraine’s Maidan Movement on the online journalism platform Medium. Kuksenok was a visiting scholar at the Central European University Center for Media, Data, and Society this past year, conducting research in Kyiv on online activism campaigns, and multilingualism in social media, connected to the Maidan movement.
Image from Hope, Lies & The Internet: Social Media in Ukraine’s Maidan Movement by K. Kuksenok on Medium
When asked about the effects of social media on political movements, Kuksenok notes that “a political movement is a physical phenomenon, not just an online one. Real-world action and discussion is the critical outcome, not the virtual interaction that helps organize or inform. Measuring online activity, the numbers of Likes and Shares, is a truly tiny fragment of the picture. A video shared on social networks, created by journalists, re-appropriated by individuals engaged in truth-finding campaigns has an impact not because of how much it is Liked and Shared, but because it gained critical mass and became a catalyst for discussion beyond the technology.”
The article is an introduction to the role of social media in the Maidan movement. The intersection of multilingualism and online engagement will be the subject of her contribution at the upcoming international SOYUZ meeting on post-socialist studies.
The entire article Hope, Lies & The Internet: Social Media in Ukraine’s Maidan Movement by K. Kuksenok can be read on Medium: https://medium.com/what-about/
