Online Grassroots Campaigns and Their Hybrid Forms of Representative Claims

This paper investigates campaigning styles of three major platforms and organizations in Germany that regularly mobilize for protest campaigns at the grassroots. The three cases are Change.org, Campact – two sites comparable to MoveOn or Avaaz – and Greenpeace Germany. While many studies have discussed online protest campaigns, the paper is based on face-to-face-interviews with the leading campaign managers of these actors and with participating activists. The paper investigates these cases as hybrid organizations within a hybrid media system by showing that each actor follows a strategic concept of successful online campaigning. These concepts can be described best within the framework of Michael Sawards "representative claim". They develop unique forms of representing specific voices of the unheard. It is shown that each actor follows their own modes of combining legacy styles of campaigning and newer individualized lifestyle participation (connective action). Furthermore the development of own software of these three actors shows that beyond commercial social media there are attempts to include activists' audiences across given spatial separations both online and offline. Existing theories and normative debates about online-participation and clicktivism fell short to grasp the full change of organising civic advocacy in times of a/b-testing and media infrastructures that allow everybody to become a campaign initiator. Self-developed protest media sites allow these actors to change given spatial understandings of what a NGO (Greenpeace), a social movement organization (Campact) or a petition platform is (Change.org). Greenpeace nonetheless has opened up more and more beyond the usual rank and file. Campact in comparison shifts towards the role of a major coordinating agency of street protests (against TTIP), while Change.org serves as a campaign provider that empowers and brings together local personal affected individuals and supports them to form new voices within a pluralist public sphere.