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Leaktivism and its Discontents

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posted on 2018-09-18, 10:51 authored by Athina Karatzogianni
[First paragraph] With the appearance of Anonymous and WikiLeaks from 2006 onwards, the past decade has witnessed the unstoppable acceleration and proliferation of what has been as a form of whistleblowing plugged straight in to twenty-first century, information-age global politics: what Micah White (2016) dubbed ‘leaktivism’ and Gabriella Coleman (2017) called ‘the public interest hack (PIH)’. Between 2015 and 2017, the DNC Leaks, DCLeaks, and the Panama Leaks follow the trend set by WikiLeaks (Brevini et al. 2017) to global prominence in 2010, and Edward Snowden (2013) as significant examples of what is fast becoming the decade of ‘leaktivism’. In normative terms, the ‘internet’ is used to obtain, leak and spread confidential documents with political ramifications, with the aim to expose corruption, wrongdoing and inequality, potentially enhancing accountability in the democratic process, through greater transparency. Coleman provides a typology and then an excellent brief genealogy of this in ‘The Public Interest Hack’ (2017) in the Hacks, Leaks and Breaches issue she co-edited with Christopher Kelty for the journal LIMN, exploring ‘how are hacks, leaks and breaches transforming our world, creating new collectives, and changing our understanding of security and politics’ (Coleman and Kelty 2017).

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Citation

Karatzogianni, A, Leaktivism and its Discontents, In: 'The Routledge Companion to Media and Activism', Routledge, 2018

Author affiliation

/Organisation/COLLEGE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, ARTS AND HUMANITIES/Department of Media, Communication and Sociology

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Published in

Karatzogianni

Publisher

Routledge

isbn

9781138202030;9781315475059

Acceptance date

2017-10-01

Copyright date

2018

Available date

2019-09-19

Publisher version

https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Companion-to-Media-and-Activism/Meikle/p/book/9781138202030

Notes

The file associated with this record is under embargo until 18 months after publication, in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. The full text may be available through the publisher links provided above.

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en

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