Hacktivists from the Inside: Collective Identity, Target \nSelection and Tactical Use of Media during the Quebec \nMaple Spring Protests
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Much of the research on Anonymous has studied the group from an ethnographic perspective or focused on social media posts to learn what is most important for the movement. There have been only few attempts to analyze how hacktivists are choosing suitable targets for cyberattacks with protest objectives. The present study attempts to provide insight into their shared values by looking at interactions among Anonymous members on public chatrooms during the four months of the Quebec student demonstrations known as the 2012 Printemps Érable protests. A thematic analysis was performed to categorize the important themes. The results show that the core values of Anonymous’s group is congruent to that of \nAnonymous’s social media accounts, emphasizing freedom of expression, often linked to freedom of speech and freedom \nof information as integral to the target selection process. Also, participants in the chatroom proposed traditionally suitable targets (i.e., the government, the police, political parties) and seems to agree upon which targets should be rejected such as traditional news media, deemed important to diffuse its message and provide information about its operations.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".