This presentation highlights the suppression of dissenting voices and activism on social media, as well as the global impact of these practices—such as influencing international platforms to comply with Chinese censorship rules and exporting surveillance technologies to other countries. It underscores how China's digital policies reshape the global conversation on freedom of expression.

How and why the Russian government influences public information broadly: social media, traditional media, cultural and educational institutions, domestic and international audiences, and more. Specifically, we'll look at what Russian state goals for informational control have been since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. 
 

The platformization of protest movements is well understood, but how have cultural productions, significantly reshaped by platform affordances, become integral to social media protests as expressions of transgressive speech? This presentation explores hashtag movements within the Nigerian digital space to address this question, highlighting how past hashtags and their various afterlives circulate through popular visual aesthetics on social media.

Technological advances and ongoing inequalities intersected in San Isidro, Cuba, culminating in a July 11, 2021, historic protest. In this talk, John Paul Henry will trace the origins of the activist group (the San Isidro Movement) from an overlooked neighborhood in Havana and how artists in this group used video footage to create a political movement that spread across the nation.