The Independent Media Center, better known as Indymedia, is an open publishing network of activist journalist collectives that report on political and social issues.

The Indymedia network extended internationally in the early 2000s with volunteer-run centers that shared software and a common format with a newswire and columns.

Indymedia is a website for citizen journalism that promotes activism and counters mainstream media news and commentary perspectives.

As protests began to wane, Indymedia covered global social justice movements, such as opposition to the war in Iraq.

[7] The network also has a focus in covering the social justice campaigns of students, Indigenous people, immigrants, and peace activists.

In February 2013, Ceasefire magazine had noted a decline in the use of Nottingham Indymedia, stating that activist usage of commercial social media had increased.

[15] In an article published by the journal Convergence Eva Giraud summarised some of the different arguments that had been made by academics and activists, which included informal hierarchy, bureaucracy, security issues including IP address logging, lack of regional engagement, lack of class politics, increase in web 2.0 social media use, website underdevelopment, decline in volunteers and decline in the global justice movement.

[13] Corporate Watch saw the rise of social media sites and the normalization of 'open publishing' as recommodifying Indymedia's key innovations for the cultural industry.

[25] European civil liberties organization Statewatch and the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC) also voiced criticism.

[26][27] EFF attorney Kurt Opsahl compared the case with Steve Jackson Games, Inc. v. United States Secret Service.

[29] On January 30, 2009, one of the system administrators of the server that hosts indymedia.us received a grand jury subpoena from the Southern District of Indiana federal court.

[32] In the aftermath of the 2017 G20 Hamburg summit protests, the German Federal Ministry of the Interior, Building and Community banned a chapter of the network called Linksunten.

[33] The ministry described the network as "the central communications platform among far-left extremists prone to violence" and stated that it was used to spread information about violent protest tactics.

[34] German internet service providers were ordered to block communication to the website, on which police were referred to as "pigs" and "murderers" and instructions for making Molotov cocktails could be found.