Profile picture research

Together with my supervisor Hilde Coffé, I’ve done some research into people changing their profile picture as part of coordinated campaigns, and as a form of political action. We were interested in finding out who changed their profile picture, and why they were motivated to do so.

The title of the paper is “Changing Facebook Profile Pictures as Part of a Campaign: Who Does it and Why?”, and it’s published in the Journal of Youth Studies. You can also have a look at a conference presentation about the research here (PDF).

Examples of campaigns:

Note: I don’t own the copyright to any of these images!

Generation Zero's "Fix Our Future" campaign called on people to submit regarding climate change targets in 2015
Generation Zero’s “Fix Our Future” campaign called on people to submit regarding climate change targets in 2015 (and they provided a FB profle pic)
Labour leadership election 2014
New Zealand general election 2014
Marriage equality campaign
Picture5
Source: MIT Media Lab

Picture4

Picture6
The New Zealand campaign picture
Misc campaigns
Picture1
People greened their profile pictures to support the Iranian democractic movement

Further reading online

Last updated February 2019

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

%d bloggers like this: