Nätaktivism ? Slackers eller individer med möjlighet att påverka sin omgivning?
The aim of this thesis was to look to the organization of people through social media and the Internet. Our study was conducted with a current event in focus. We began our study by examine the protests that had arisen as a result of that the American proposed law called "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA)was presented. With our main focus on SOPA we began to investigate those discussions and debates that during a limited period of time were conducted on a large social news site, Reddit.com, which is a form of social media. We focused on the way that people expressed themselves over social mediawhen it comes to political issues and also whether or not Internet activism can have an effect in the society. In detail, what we did do was to study the correlation between the protests against SOPA and the effect the protests had on some of the businesses that initially supported the law proposal. We useda so called Qualitative Content Analysis (Parker et al. 2011) to conduct our study on the chosen website. Our study of Reddit and the discussions on the website was done by examining and analyzing what triggered people into acting or reacting in a certain way. The study consisted of the 15 most popular comments on the website and began the analysis of these to reach the goal of this thesis. It has, throughout our study, been shown that Internet activism has the potential to implement changes insociety by conducting targeted attacks against business and politicians. Internet activism has inspired to changes in society by urging people to boycott, by urging on economic sanctions and also byturning to bigger players in society that have a potential to major influence on others.