Protest and Rage through Social Networks: Towards Renewed Forms of Political Participation in Algeria

Abstract

This article examines the shift of political outrage and protest, which have traditionally taken the shape of demonstrations, occupations and so forth, into the digital space by way of social media pages. The research is based on the Facebook pages of four daily newspapers in Algeria, focusing on reader interaction through their comments on page content. The study seeks to answer two main research questions: How were readers, through their commentary on a given page, able to build a protest discourse that could be considered a new type of political participation in response to an almost entirely closed physical public space? Secondly, how does this become a source for political engagement in the field?