Digital Transnational Advocacy: Horizontalism, Political Opportunities, and Influence

In recent decades, digital platforms have provided new transnational political opportunities for advocacy by creating a tenuous connection between unaffiliated ordinary dissidents to some of the most powerful global actors. While academically understudied, call for help horizontal campaigns on social media initiated by ordinary dissidents in repressive conditions hoping for external support are increasingly becoming popular worldwide. Influenced by social movement studies and transnational advocacy literature, this study conceptualizes such campaigns as digital boomerangs and provides an analytical framework for analyzing them. Further, with a novel computational analysis of all Iranian hashtag activism campaigns for global attention and news articles regarding Iran sourced from all over the world, I demonstrate that receiving international attention for such campaigns is rare but possible. Without the help of organizations or offline protests, underprivileged dissidents can share their domestic concerns on a global scale with large scale digital campaigns.