Data activism is a social practice that is becoming more well known with the expansion of technology, open-sourced software and the ability to communicate beyond an individual's immediate community.
[6] By increasingly involving average users, they are a signal of a change in perspective and attitude towards massive data collection emerging within the civil society realm.
For example, the first deployment of the Ushahidi platform in 2008 in Kenya visualized the post-electoral violence that had been silenced by the government and the new media.
[6] These differentiated approaches to datafication result in different repertoires of action, which are not at odds with each other, since they share a crucial feature: they take information as a constitutive force capable of shaping social reality[10] and contribute to generate new alternative ways of interpreting it.
[12] The Ending the Backlog Initiative brought attention to this issue by demanding that the data from these rape kits be processed.
[17] After the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, Safecast was an organization established by a group of citizens that were concerned about high levels of radiation in the area.
After receiving conflicting messages about levels of radiation from different media sources and scientists, individuals were uncertain which information was the most reliable.
This brought about a movement where citizens would use Geiger counter readings to measure levels of radiation and circulate that data over the internet so that it was accessible by the public.