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Today, social media is associated with many fields of work. Having become an integral part of human life, social media has become an environment where we can express and discuss our thoughts about our daily life, political, cultural, economic and even religious issues. In this context, social media has gained an important position in the field of politics in the last two decades. However, people who use social media and its tools to mobilize, protest and demand rights often turn to social media to declare their intentions, to resist, to create identity and common goals. According to some researchers, since the emergence of social media, digital protest and mobilization can be organized much more easily than in previous periods. However, as this study has shown, social media-based protest movements vary from country to country, in essence contain some threats and risks as well as opportunities for both protesters and governments. On the other hand, the interplay between online and offline activism in contemporary protest movements is also striking (Fominaya, 2014, s. 166). This is largely due to the dialectical integrity of offline activities in physical public space and online activities (information sharing, instant communication, organizing, mobilization, documentation, etc.) on social media. In this literature review, which aims to enrich the Turkish literature on mobilization and protest movements and to obtain more in-depth information on the current mobilization and protest movements, research on social media-based mobilization and protest movements in 23 countries between 2012 and 2023 was included in the sample in order to reveal how and for what purposes social media is used in this context. In determining the articles in the sample, the filtering options offered by Web of Science were utilized and a two-stage elimination was performed. Accordingly, in the first stage, a total of 85 articles were reached by using the keywords ‘new media’, ‘social media’, ‘Internet’, ‘digital mobilization’, ‘protest movements’ and ‘social movements’ between 2012 and 2023. In the second stage, the number of articles was reduced to 23 based on the country-geographical region, representing each country-geographical region. The literature analysis was conducted under eight categorical headings: title, author, date of publication, country of research, specific topic and purpose, keywords, sample/unit of analysis, theory/paradigm, media platform, hypothesis or research questions and finally findings. The articles were then subjected to detailed reading in accordance with the qualitative content analysis technique, which is highly suitable for literature reviews, and the data obtained were tabulated under the categorical headings listed above (Table.1). This study has yielded very instructive results, especially since, despite being conducted in different countries, they are largely similar and to a lesser extent divergent. First of all, it should be noted that almost all studies paradoxically reveal the fact that social media is used both to mobilize society and share grievances and to monitor and suppress the movements initiated by the administrations. In other words, in the studies subject to the literature review, instead of the stereotypical ‘possibilities/limitations’ dichotomy focused on the tool in the axis of social media, the ‘possibilities/counter-possibilities’ conflict focused on the parties and the conditions-environment of the struggle is preferred. Another overlapping aspect of the research results is that the instrumental and spatial possibilities of social media in generating new protest and mobilization movements are as valid for the activists as they are for the administrations that want to prevent the movement, and even more so for them. In this context, the common opinion of the researchers is that the ability of social media to create public support and take protest and mobilization to a mass-societal scale cannot be considered independent of the willingness of individuals to participate in binding collective actions on social media. One of the most divergent aspects of the research results is the debate on whether social media is a new public sphere. Accordingly, while some of the researchers who evaluate social media as a digital public sphere place at the center of this evaluation the effectiveness of activist movements in developing communication processes that escape the control of those who hold managerial-institutional power, others see social media as a technological power field dominated by capital rather than a fundamental source of autonomy, or a field of control-domination where collective subjectivities and emotional mobilization can be easily fragmented. Another element that divides researchers is the dynamics of the contribution of the Internet and social media to overcoming geographical and socio-economic inequalities. While...

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