Facing up to Facebook: how digital activism, independent regulation, and mass media foiled a neoliberal threat to net neutrality

ABSTRACT

This study traces how Facebook-promoted internet.org/Free Basics, despite initial acclaim, was eventually rejected in India – and how net neutrality came to be codified in the process. Topic modeling of articles (N = 1752) published over two-and-a-half years in 100 media outlets pinpoints the critical junctures in time at which the public discourse changed its trajectory. Critical discourse analysis of different phases of the discourse then identifies the causal factors and contingent conditions that produced the new policy. The study advances an understanding of technologies as social constructs and technological change as a social process, shaped by the dynamic interaction of a complex array of social actors coming together at critical junctures. It also draws attention to how discourse, produced by social actors in contingent conditions, recursively shapes the dominant ideology and structures these interactions. In addition, the study demonstrates how algorithmic and interpretive research techniques can be combined for longitudinal analysis of textual data sets.

KEYWORDS:

• Internet governance
• social construction of technology
• process tracing
• public policy
• India

Notes on contributor

Saif Shahin is an assistant professor in the School of Media and Communication, Bowling Green State University. His research focuses on critical big data studies, social media studies, global media and politics, and media sociology. He has published articles in refereed journals such as The International Journal of Press/Politics, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism, and Communication Methods and Measures. He has also authored chapters in books on social media, race, and international politics  [email: [email protected]].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Saif Shahin http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7608-7283