Digital technologies have reshaped how politics are understood and carried out, providing diverse imaginaries and possibilities for contesting power. Digital technologies have not only catalyzed the challenge of state power in authoritarian contexts, but also helped reconfigure political action and redefine the sphere of politics itself. In the Middle East, it is essential to distinguish between the promises of digital technologies and the imaginaries underpinning them, and the tangible reality of a region that seeks to change, but is hindered by the enduring legacy of the modern state. Despite the contentious politics and powerful revolutionary momentum, the Middle East continues to face challenges that impede its ability to alter its course. This paper traces a particular imaginary of the digital as instrument for socio-political revolutions. Based on rich archival material, industry reports, and trade publications, this research traces the emergence of networked publics and the development of digital imaginaries to offer a locally-anchored, theoretically-grounded analysis of the Digital Middle East’s revolutionary ebbs and flows. The dynamics that animate the region’s digital transformation are traced through technological milestones. At the start, the paper identifies various digital moments associated with the term ‘revolution’ to trace the emergence of networked publics. The paper then examines the different digital imaginaries associated with the ‘digital era.’ The paper concludes by addressing how revolutionary logics provide a rationale for digital engagement, what political and sociocultural processes are ignored when assessing the role of revolutions, and how digital imaginaries empower networked publics beyond revolutions.

In order to hinder attacks on democratic norms and processes in digital public venues, designing strategies of exclusion is a pressing concern. Nevertheless, we lack systematic studies of how digital public venues should be governed to protect – rather than undermine – democratic values through exclusion. The purpose of this contribution is to offer a systematic theorization of the concept of democratic exclusion in the context of digital public venues. I will in particular draw on two strands of literature within democratic theory which have contributed greatly to the normative theorization of democratic exclusion, but have done so in relation to other types of political settings: the works within feminist political theory on exclusion of dominant groups within parliaments (e.g. Dovi 2009; Murray 2014) and the literature on hate speech regulation and democratic self-defence against (primarily) antidemocratic parties (e.g. Müller 2016; Invernizzi Accetti and Zuckerman 2017; Malkopoulou and Kirshner 2019). First, I will analyze if and how these previous contributions can be applied to the specific context of digital public venues, where special conditions of access and visibility apply. I will then assess to what extent the platforms’ existing governing strategies and policies concerning the exclusion of problematic content or accounts are compatible with the relevant exclusion principles formulated in these works. Building on this analysis, in its final parts the study will move on to carve out more specific suggestions for how exclusion on digital venues should be governed, and what principles should guide this governance.

Online media platforms have become an arena for activists to engage with political discourses. Since COVID-19, an increasing number of citizens have begun to actively participate online to express their ideas towards political issues. Various types of user-generated content were circulated on various social media platforms: they wrote textual content on Wechat with various metaphors and created user-generated videos on video-streaming platforms to express their opinions. In this context, this study examines how citizens express democratic opinions against ideological discourse, what role social media platforms play as an arena for activists’ participation, and what social media factors facilitate active online civic participation. Adopting a cross-platform perspective, this study compares how Douyin and Wechat facilitate civic participation differently and how people engage with political content differently on these two different media platforms. I employed digital ethnography, augmented by the walkthrough method (Light et al., 2018), and qualitative content analysis to examine how WeChat and Douyin play different roles in civic participation. This study argues that the social networking platform WeChat provides more in-depth participation and has more resistant forms than Douyin, especially for expressing counter-ideas to mainstream discourses. Among the various forms of resistance, sharing WeChat articles is one of the most visible and effective ways to express democratic opinions in mainstream discourse.