ABSTRACT
The Internet provides social activists with an avenue to reach, stir emotions in and enlist people far beyond the confines of immediate location. The increasing popularity of the Internet has been accompanied by a surge in the use of the web, email and newsgroups for activist causes. From June 1998, email messages describing rapes and violence against ethnic Chinese women in Indonesia were passed around the Internet. Sometimes, these messages included first-hand accounts, image-file attachments and/or links to photographs and other texts supporting the claims. Existing and new websites incorporated images that purported to be of the raped women and often hailed the Internet audience as ethnic Chinese, calling upon their sympathies as fellow Chinese.
