This paper examines how active digital citizenship (Isin and Ruppert 2015; Hintz et al. 2018) is reconfigured in a world shaped by pervasive connectivity and ongoing political, economic and social crises. It uses the case of Russia's 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine as an example of a "participatory warfare" environment (Ford and Hoskins 2022) wherein the war, as an all-encompassing experience, is intensely digitally mediated and accessible to a wide variety of actors, including ordinary citizens.
Grounded in structured ethnographic observation, longitudinal content analysis and interviews with Ukrainian social media users (2022-2024), the paper examines how citizens navigate the algorithmically structured networks of connections and interactions on social media platforms to achieve civic agency in the highly volatile and uncertain context of the war. It also explores how citizens use these networks to hold the powerful (state) actors to account, as well as to hold the platforms themselves accountable for their interventions in the conflict.
Extending the theoretical concept of "networked citizenship" (Lokot 2020) to account for algorithmic agency (Bonini and Treré 2024) and the conditions of participatory war, the paper offers insights on how citizens resist the extractive and limiting platform logics and "game" the algorithms through collaboration, subversion, or tactical disruption, to refashion social media platforms into spaces of meaningful and inclusive democratic engagement, participatory action and resistance. The findings also shed light on how these novel "digital acts of citizenship" and innovative tactics can reshape the existing accountability mechanisms from the bottom up in conflict settings.
