Memory, resistance, and the everyday politics of social media in authoritarian contexts

Based on a four-year ethnography (2019–2023) with 40 Turkish university students aged 18–23, this study traces sharing through social media as contributing to collective memory and belonging and, within terrains where mistrust runs deep, can be seen as a quiet form of resistance. While approaching memory not as a fixed archive but as something enacted—in fragments, silences—the study explores how digital and embodied acts fold together. Despite moments of withdrawal and the numbing rhythm of surveillance with its constant swell of information, social media emerges as both a tool and a symptom, showing how authoritarianism settles into pauses, jokes, and what remains nearly unsaid.