Member Research Spotlight
From clicks to chaos - how online activism is changing
23/03/26
Online activism is often dismissed as “clicktivism.” But digital protest has evolved. Today, it can be coordinated, automated and intentionally disruptive to create real pressure on institutions and platforms.
New research by Cassie Lowery, Professor Laura Smith and Dr Matthew Edwards published in Political Psychology, helps make sense of this shift. In ‘The dangers, directness, and purposes of online collective actions’, the team mapped 31 different types of online collective action, showing that digital activism is far more varied than commonly assumed.
Rather than treating online protest as one single behaviour, the researchers identified two broad types:
Ingroup-assisting actions – such as crowdfunding or organising supporters. These strengthen and mobilise communities.
Outgroup-attacking actions – such as coordinated review flooding or digital disruption. These aim to pressure or directly target opponents.
These forms of action differ in their goals, skills required, and potential risks.
Why does this matter?
For policymakers and platforms, the key message is clear that not all online activism is the same. Some actions build civic participation. Others deliberately strain digital systems. Effective responses depend on understanding these differences.
A high-profile example followed the overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2022. Activists used automated review-posting tools to flood listings for Crisis Pregnancy Centers on Yelp, temporarily overwhelming the platform and prompting warning notices.
The study shows that online activism now spans a spectrum, from constructive engagement to system-level disruption. Recognising that range is essential for protecting democratic expression while responding proportionately to harm.
Understanding engagement across the online manosphere
25/02/26
Online communities rarely exist in isolation and neither do the people who participate in them. New research led by Dessie Bocheva, alongside Dr Joanne Hinds, Dr Olivia Brown and Lukas Mayer, reveals how individuals move across multiple communities within the online manosphere, reshaping how we understand the spread of harmful and misogynistic content.
The paper, Examining membership across multiple online communities in the “manosphere”, draws on more than four million Reddit posts across 20 subreddits to map how users engage across these spaces. The findings show that many individuals participate in several manosphere communities simultaneously, challenging assumptions that users operate within a single, fixed ideological space.
This pattern of multi-community membership matters. When users participate across interconnected spaces, harmful narratives can travel into less-extreme spaces, creating new challenges for moderators and those working to curb the dissemination of hateful ideology online. By recognising that the manosphere is an interconnected ecosystem rather than a collection of isolated groups, the research provides crucial insight for prevention strategies, moderation practices and policy development. This directly aligns with our theme of online safety and harms.
The study has already informed policy engagement. Its findings formed part of our evidence submission to the Women and Equalities Committee inquiry on the growing prevalence of misogynistic views and behaviours among young men and boys, both on- and offline. The research will also help shape the agenda for an upcoming Parliamentary roundtable focused on addressing and eliminating technology-facilitated violence against women and girls (VAWG), ensuring that policy discussion is grounded in robust empirical evidence.
Building on these findings, Dessi Bocheva has recently completed some new qualitative research across two contrasting online communities (one mainstream and one extreme) to understand how actors operate across both spaces to build traction and bridge audiences. Dessi and her co-authors developed the Measure of Relative Engagement (MRE) to assess individuals’ postings across communities for the published paper, and this tool is now being reapplied in her latest research to capture variation in participation patterns across different contexts.
Together, this programme of work exemplifies our commitment to understanding digital societies in ways that directly inform policy, platform governance and public debate. By generating robust, interdisciplinary evidence on online safety and harms, the research speaks directly to the Institute’s core themes and mission. You can find out more about our core research themes here: https://www.idsb.ac.uk/research
