Activist media practices, alternative media and online digital traces: The case of YouTube in the Italian Se non ora, quando? movement

The chapter investigates the feminist Se non ora, quando? (SNOQ) demonstration to understand what happens to alternative media when they intertwine with corporate platforms like YouTube. To this aim, the lens of media practice theory is applied to understand the activist media practices that result from the interplay between social media platform affordances and activists’ alternative media. More specifically, the chapter elaborates on activist media practices by starting from the traces that movement actors and supporters leave behind when they exploit specific affordances of mainstream media platforms to produce and circulate alternative content. The analysis suggests that the mainstreaming of alternative media content through YouTube gave rise to hybrid forms of activist media practices that only partially rested on the efforts of collective actors linked to the SNOQ movement, with individual activists and concerned citizens also participating in the production of alternative media content. Furthermore, interactions with platform affordances revealed the different media practices through which activists and other subjects mobilizing outside the SNOQ core contributed to shaping a collective discourse on the movement. Finally, our chapter illustrates yet another way to tackle activist media practices in hybrid media systems, through the use of metadata related to social media.