ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a framework for understanding how the use of social media intersects with the practice of human rights advocacy at NGOs. The visibility of human rights advocacy depends on the logics of the social media field, the target audience fields and the political field(s) in which the communication takes place. Conceptualizing a field's participants as occupying relative positions based on their relative wealth naturally turns a lens concerned with inequality on that field. The inscrutability of social media logic leads to a variety of risks, including the risk of expending precious resources on social media advocacy only to have visibility stymied by opaque algorithms. The chapter sketches a research agenda for the use of social media in human rights work. The risks felt by human rights advocates about social media use are in line with the broader 'digital risk society' in which risks are particularly 'lively' and increasingly unknowable given the rapid evolution and growing penetration of technology.
