Digital advocacy and algorithms: Challenges and opportunities for civil society

This chapter is about digital advocacy and civil society in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Social media has often been discussed as a game-changer when it comes to advocacy. The technical structures of social media are continuously changing and, therefore, so are the conditions for digital advocacy. Extensive research has focused on different digital advocacy strategies. However, there has been less attention paid to the role of social media algorithms in advocacy, even though they have a profound impact on how digital advocacy is organized and performed. Therefore, this chapter discusses how social media users interact with algorithms in processes of becoming mobilized and protesting. Fridays For Future – a school strike to protest climate inaction – will be used as example to deepen our understanding of what significance digital environments and social media algorithms have for digital advocacy. The chapter concludes by broadening the scope and discussing concerns about the development of digital advocacy in relation to other types of AI such as advances in machine learning, facial recognition, and other tools such as ChatGPT.