Digital Activism during the July 36 Protest in Bangladesh

ABSTRACT To address the need to study the role of social media during political crisis in non‐Western context, this study investigates Facebook digital activism at the peak of the July 2024 student‐led revolution in Bangladesh. Through thematic and lexical analyses of 4,000 comments from 60 protest‐related posts, we found that most comments (57.8%) in our sample were ideological, unprovocative, and hashtag‐driven. Provocative comments (24.6%) exhibited higher vocabulary density and rhetorical variation than unprovocative comments. While some comments supported the protest, others attempted to delegitimize it. By focusing on this political non‐Western crisis, this study challenges the binary view that trolling and digital activism are mutually exclusive, and instead it underscores their overlapping roles in online political discourse.