Social Media Activism

Think for a moment about ways you have participated in social media activism. Maybe you have purchased a shirt from an online shop where the proceeds go toward a cause you care about. Maybe you signed or shared a link to a petition. Maybe. Maybe you wrote comments on a company social media account bringing attention to a particular issue. Most of us have participated in these ways countless times over the last decade. This chapter explores research that talks about whether and under what conditions these forms of social media activism can be successful.

Strong Ties and Weak Ties

In 2010, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a column in the New Yorker Magazine called Small Change. In this often-cited article, Gladwell argues that large-scale and long-lasting social change movements like the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s engaged strong ties of people who knew each other in the real world. It was these connections to each other, of being in community together, that motivated people to continue fighting for social change in the face of danger and despair.

In comparison, he argues, the “friends” we have via social media make up what he calls weak ties. While strong ties are deep connections we have to people we know and love in real life, weak ties are networks of acquaintances with whom we share information and updates. Gladwell argues that these weak ties encourage us to mistake knowing about something that is happening without actually engaging in real activism and action that actually makes a difference. In other words, Gladwell thinks we are motivated to help via social media, but only as long as it isn’t too inconvenient.

There are many examples that support Gladwell’s argument, and he cites several of those in the article itself. However, scholars today take a slightly less pessimistic approach to the role of social media in facilitating social change. So, let’s take a look at what social media does well when it comes to facilitating activism.

Social Media Strengths

1. Social media is great at helping to facilitate short, immediate awareness campaigns for relatively simple singular issues. For example, in 2016, 200,000 people signed an online petition encouraging Mars Inc. to remove artificial dyes from M&M’s. This action was relatively simple: sign and share an online petition, doing so will gain the attention of people online, the company will be forced to pay attention and will likely listen to consumers as they make this change.

2. Social media is great at supporting activism that happens in real life. As you know, the reach possible via social media is unprecedented, so social media simplifies and speeds up organizing and coordinating of protests, demonstrations, and other events. Social media also helps to quickly share logistics, for example, alerting protestors to police actions or the availability of medical or legal services. Social media also reduces accessibility barriers, for example, by providing opportunities for people to be involved who would not be able to participate in a face-to-face protest. And of course, social media is a great tool for fundraising that supports in-real-life actions.
3. Sharing certain information in favor of or in opposition to a social movement helps to create a feeling of group cohesion. When we encounter information via social media that is in support of a social movement we also support or that opposes a social movement we also oppose, it increases a feeling of togetherness we have with people who share the same perspective we do. This increases the likelihood that we will identify within the same group. It also increases group efficacy, or the sense that group members have that the work they are doing has the potential to make real change.
4. Social media often includes sharing emotional content that motivates us to continue to be involved. This emotional content is sometimes informative or positive, but we also know from research that sharing anger via social media is an incredible motivator. When we are angry, our rational brain takes a backseat to our more emotional impulses, so we engage in less critical thinking about our perspectives, we are more likely to be spurred into taking action, and we are more likely to stay engaged.
5. Social media can be a consciousness raising space for people. Content that tends to go viral is often content that touches on big emotional moments that are part of our collective experience. This content sometimes informs people about experiences they might not otherwise know about, and sometimes it forces people to see extremely emotional content that changes their minds about a social movement.This is not specific to social media. For example, the brutal murder of Emmet Till in 1955 was widely publicized in large part because his mother requested an open casket so people would have to bear witness to the horror inflicted upon her son. Media outlets ran side-by-side photographs of Emmet Till before and after the incident, sparking national discussion about the brutality of racism and encouraging people to take the concerns of Black citizens seriously.In 1965, a group of protesters in Alabama marched from Selma to Montgomery in support of increasing access to voter registration for people of color in the state. They were violently attacked by state police officers, and video of the attack was widely published on the evening news. This event, known as Bloody Sunday, forced people to see the violence facing people of color in the U.S., and doing so moved many people who were indifferent about the voting rights act to openly support it.

   So, this is not specific to social media, and there are many examples of social media encouraging the sharing of similarly emotional imagery. For example, when the murder of George Floyd was shared widely on social media, many white people who previously did not support causes like Black Lives Matter or who were indifferent to ongoing discussions of racism in the United States were more likely to seek additional information on these social movements and to take a stand.

6. Social media enables social protest cycles that are vital to sustaining movements. Let me step back and explain this one a bit further. Gladwell was right that many of the big emotional moments we share on social media are often not enough to sustain people’s activism over many years. For example, after the murder of George Floyd, we saw a huge increase in anti-racist activism. But, in the years since, the protests and sharing of anti-racist content has decreased. Gladwell would say this is because of weak ties, or the idea that the connections people had to the George Floyd murder were not felt on the same level as if this happened to someone we know in our own community.BUT, that is not what social media scholars think is happening today. Instead, they argue that social media allows us to connect events across time and distance, allowing us to piece them together as part of a larger systemic issue and to stay devoted to the cause over time as activism becomes necessary.Using the example of the deaths of unarmed Black men, this happened when Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida, and we saw high levels of information sharing and organizing on social media to get the district attorney to charge George Zimmerman and again after the verdict. The activism then waned, but increased again after other highly publicized murders such as the deaths of Eric Garner in New York, Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Tamir Rice in Cleveland, Walter Scott in South Carolina, Freddie Gray in Baltimore, and so on. In each of these cases, we saw an increase in social media activism and organizing, followed by a slight decrease in the time between events.

   Each time we have another incident and corresponding social media response, the social media activism encourages more people to hear about the incident, connect it to other similar incidents in other states with similar victims, and to be more likely to engage in activism aimed at preventing this from happening again.

   Researchers call this progression a choreography of assembly. This means that social media provides a public space that helps to facilitate a dispersed group of individuals across the U.S. and the world come to come together to engage in activism that has a common goal. The choreography of assembly enables people to feel a symbolic togetherness, that while they may be hundreds or thousands of miles away from the tragedy, they symbolically feel connected to the moment.

   It also allows people to feel emotionally connected to the cause across time and space, connecting their feelings from one incident to a reactivating of that feeling in subsequent incidents. These are social protests cycles, defined by scholars as “short periods of intense and contentious protest activity” followed by periods of waning activism. Scholars now believe these social protest cycles for them the microfoundations of long-term social movements, offering people a chance to connect and reconnect to the issue multiple times and to consistently increase their engagement.

7. Social media is great at helping protest groups frame and reframe media narratives of their movements. For example, research shows that before the #MeToo movement on social media, most news outlets covered stories of gender and sexual violence and harassment as isolated incidents. The #MeToo movement helped to reframe such instances. The quantity of people who posted about experiences of harassment and violence highlighted that far from being isolated incidents, gender and sexual violence is quite common (approximately 50% of Oregon women experience this in their lifetime). Subsequent studies show that an increasing number of newspapers now tie incidents of gender and sexual violence to being a systemic issue impacting millions of people every year. This shift in framing from individual to systemic has also encouraged people to shift their activism focus from holding individual people accountable to fighting for systemic change that would help to prevent this from happening.

Social Media Weaknesses

While social media plays a key role in organizing people, there are also several weaknesses associated with using social media as a tool in activism.

1. Social media activism campaigns are often ridiculed for being “slacktivist” campaigns. Slacktivism is the idea people engage in feel-good online activities in support of a social cause that leads to little/no practical change. Slacktivist campaigns are characterized by:
   1. Minimal personal effort to be involved
   2. The low involvement activity (for example, liking or sharing something) substitutes instead of compliments more meaningful actions.
   3. You can think of this as the “Livestrong bracelets” of activism. Remember those yellow bracelets everyone wore. Hang on, I’m googling what year people wore those to see if you were alive then. Okay, Google tells me it was in 2004, so maybe you were too young/not alive? In that case, people wore yellow bracelets to show support for people impacted by cancer. The effort people put in was very minimal – they purchased a bracelet for maybe a dollar or two. And this allowed them to brand themselves as someone who cares deeply about the issue without having to really do much else. Minimal effort, makes us feel good, does very little to promote meaningful change.
2. There is also evidence that people who participate in slacktivist campaigns do so more for personal reasons than they do for actual care about social change. In other words, they want to be seen as the “type of person” who cares about a particular issue, but not necessarily be the type of person who actually shows up to create change around that issue.
3. Social media campaigns are also bad at creating social change around complex issues. To avoid this, we can ask two big questions:What is the end goal of the campaign?
   How do you achieve that end goal?
   Let’s assess this using some examples:
   1. Steven Colbert had a long-running game where he would get his viewers to vote for him in petty contests for naming rights to things, etc. People often pointed to these campaigns as slacktivist campaigns: they directed a lot of feel-good attention toward minor and petty issues, and created very little social change. But they were effective, including this campaign to get Colbert’s portrait hung in the Smithsonian (they hung it by the bathroom doors).What is the end goal of this campaign: to get Colbert’s portrait hung in the Smithsonian.
      How do you achieve that end goal: You vote for it in an online poll and share the poll with friends to do the same.Yes, social media will be good at that (and it was).
   2. In 2014, a militant group in Nigeria kidnapped hundreds of school girls and sold them into sex slavery (which they called marriage, but was obviously not consensual marriage). People started a social media campaign to get the government to do something to bring back the girls. Millions of people shared images of themselves holding signs or in front of lettering that read #BringBackOurGirls.What is the end goal of the campaign: To get a foreign government to engage in a military intervention against an armed militia group to free hundreds of girls who were sold off and now lived in dispersed military camps deep in the forest.How do you achieve that end goal: Probably not social media. This would be a good example of a slacktivist campaign because it directed feel-good attention (we felt good for sharing images of ourselves holding #BringBackOurGirls signs) toward a social cause and raised international attention toward the issue, but it did very little to encourage any form of social change because the issue was much more complex than could be handled by Twitter.
   3. When Jon Stewart was still the host of The Daily Show, he hosted an entire episode devoted to a healthcare bill for September 11 first responders. The issue was that the money set aside to help first responders with health concerns after their work around the World Trade Center was running out, leaving first responders who risked their lives in the bombing and aftermath without much needed healthcare. Why did they need healthcare? Well, because asbestos and other carcinogens were released when the buildings fell, first responders inhaled dangerous chemicals and many ended up with late stage cancer and other very serious and deadly health issues. Congress didn’t want to take up the bill because they wanted to go home for the Christmas holiday. So, Stewart invited first responders onto the show to talk about their health concerns, and then used social media to encourage people to call their congress people to demand they vote on the 9/11 first responders healthcare bill before leaving for the Christmas recess. The campaign was successful. Congress passed the bill the next day.What is the end goal: Get Congress to stay in Washington to pass a relatively uncontroversial bill.How do you achieve that end goal: Air a TV episode and share information online encouraging people to make a phone call.

      Yes, this is something social media is good at doing. It worked.

4. Many users share misinformation, and they do so faster and with a greater audience reach than ever before. For example, think back to the PizzaGate example we learned about earlier this term. The information alleging wrongdoing by this pizza company spread fast and endangered the lives of many of the workers and customers of this shop.
5. Social media is not great at encouraging longevity. Research shows that trust, connection and longevity of social movements tends to be lower when they predominantly happen online.