Abstract
This essay discusses the development of three activist movements on social media and how social media platforms have contributed to a greater source of activisms, particularly in teens and young adults. This will focus around three relevant topics of social activism including, Black Lives Matter, the Me Too/97 percent movement, and the Global Warming Crisis. I examined the hashtags surrounding this movement and looked at how much interaction each one got. I also analyzed the users on Instagram that liked an activist post surrounding the climate crisis on demographics to see how many of those users would be classified as a teen or young adult. I included studies done by experts in the field and included their research and findings in this paper surrounding how activism on social media carries over into one’s personal life as well as some things to be aware of when using social media for activism purposes. From my own primary research and the findings of scholars in the field, it is clear that social media does encourage activism among people, but especially teens and young adults and that this is linked to these users being more likely to go out and participate in marches and protests for social issues. Some possible implications of this research are that people should be more aware of how people utilize these apps to create social change and to understand that there are more ways to promote activism than just in person. Some future studies could focus on how often activism is demonstrated in person, such as in protests and marches, compared to activism demonstrated through social media platforms.
Keywords: Activism, Social Media, Youth, Teens
Introduction
Social media has become increasingly more popular over the last couple decades. More and more people are flocking to these social media apps to post about their lives, keep in contact with friends and family, and even to gain their news. However, one thing that has become more prevalent on social media in recent years is the rise of activism done through social media. In this paper, we will be examining how the rise of social media has affected activism and the implications that has in the real world. I will be conducting primary research looking at the #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #97percent and #ClimateCrisis hashtags to gauge how often social media is being used for activism purposes and I will be examining how the youth in particular utilize social media to connect with others in these movements.
Black Lives Matter
The Black Lives Matter Movement was started in 2013 but it really started gaining popularity on social media in 2020 after the death of George Floyd. The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on Instagram has 27.6 million posts as of December of 2021. One particular hashtag I wanted to look at surrounding this movement was the #blackouttuesday posts. This was one way that people banded together as a form of protest through social media. During this one particular Tuesday, June 2 in 2020, Instagram users would post a solid black square to show their support for the community and to stand up against police brutality and racism. To date, this hashtag has 19.4 million posts. When looking at the recent posts posted to the hashtag now however, there are hardly any black squares. This is because people started taking down their posts after getting criticism for it. This was explained in an article by CNN titled “Why posting a black image with the ‘Black Lives Matter’ hashtag could be doing more harm than good”. In this article, Willingham writes that “While these posts may be well-intended, several activists and influencers have pointed out that posting a blank black image with a bunch of tags clogs up critical channels of information and updates” (2020, para. 2). Even with many people taking down their blackout posts however, there are still a ton of posts under this hashtag, and this just goes to show the power that a simple hashtag can have on our community and how much activism and change can be done through social media. Figure 1 (shown below) shows a black post that Lebron James posted for Blackout Tuesday with the hashtags #BlackoutTuesday and #BLM. From this image, we can see that celebrities were also posting for this movement and this gives some scope on just how much attention this movement received and how many people were participating in it. It is clear from this chart in Figure 2 that the rise in posts featuring topics of Black Lives Matter and police brutality and racism had a huge peak in June of 2020 following George Floyd’s death on May 25, 2021. Amy Stornaiuolo and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas explain in their article how social media has affected the youth in particular and has given them a voice to speak out on activist movements. Stornaiuolo teaches in the literacy, culture, and international education division while Thomas is an expert on children’s literature, youth media, and fan culture. In this article, they study how young users of participatory media sites engage in political, civic, and social activism online in order to create social change. They include many current examples of how young people are using social media as a form of activism, talking about the hashtags #BLM and #LoveWins. For this study, they collected 78 academic articles and books, then narrowed it down to 43 to analyze digital youth activism and examine the experiences of youth and the inclusion of youth voices and perspectives. They conclude that when we examine how the youth utilize socially attuned practices in a variety of ways in their daily lives, we can begin to understand how they are able to disrupt educational inequalities. In the essay, Stornaiuolo and Thomas state that:
these social media platforms have emerged as powerful sites for documenting state-sanctioned violence and mainstream media portrayals of marginalized communities and racialized bodies because young people now carry the tools with them to engage in those documentary practices, disseminating those experiences to others, and finding solidarity with others similarly facing forms of oppression and marginalization (2017, para. 19).
From this quote, it is clear that social media has huge impacts on how people, especially the youth are able to participate in politics and social movements and how they are able to make their voices heard and create lasting change.
Figure 1. Lebron James Blackout Tuesday Post. From Xinhua Net showing Lebron James’ Blackout Tuesday post along with the hashtags he posted it under.
(http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-06/03/c_139110611.htm)
Figure 2. Trending Hashtags Graph. From ScienceAdvances showing the most popular hashtags from January of 2020 to January of 2021.
(https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abe6534)
Me Too Movement/97 Percent
The second activism movement that I will be discussing that went viral thanks to social media is the #MeToo movement. This movement actually started all the way back in 2006 but it started getting popular in 2017 after a tweet went viral by actress Alyssa Milano. In her tweet, shown in Figure 3 below, she asked her followers to write “me too” if they had been sexually harassed or assaulted. Similar to this is the 97 percent TikTok trend that emerged from the Me Too Movement. The 97 percent refers to a study that was done that “found 97% of women in the U.K. between the ages of 18 and 24 have experienced some form of sexual harassment in public” (Reiniger, 2021, para. 2). This study was taken from a group of 1,089 women and also discovered that 71 percent of the respondents had reported being sexually harassed in a public space. This trend blew up on TikTok with many young girls and women coming out about their own experiences and stories to shed light on the reality of things in order to spur social change. Posts relating to this would have the #97percent hashtag and this hashtag had been viewed over 23.3 million times according to TikTok data as of March 2021. When researching this number now in December of 2021, the #97percent now has 463.3 million views. On Instagram, the hashtag #97percent has 5.9 thousand posts and the #metoo hashtag has 3 million posts. It is clear that some movements such as the #97percent movement take off on certain platforms better than others. From these numbers, we can see that most people that were interacting and posting with the hashtag on TikTok more than Instagram but that overall, social media still played a huge role in how far and fast awareness spread. Michael Xenos and Ariadne Vromen, both of which are political scientists and Brian Loader who works in the department of Sociology discuss how social media is related to engagement in politics in the real world. In this article, they discuss how young people are able to make headlines in the news through their “savvy” utilization of social media. They focus on figuring out the relationship between the growth of social media use and how that impacts political engagement. For their data, this article focused on survey data from Australia, the USA, and the UK. They limited their population samples to individuals within the range of 16-29 years of age and measured both political engagement and social media use within their sample groups. 3,685 young people participated in the surveys with 1,216 coming from Australia, 1,228 from the UK, and 1,241 from the USA. Loader, Xenos, and Vromen conclude that “Our results lend strong support to our hypothesis that social media are positively related to political engagement” (2013, para. 33). This supports the theory that the development of social media does lead to an increase in social activism and political engagement among people but especially in teens and I think this is particularly clear to see when looking at the Me Too and 97 Percent Movements.
Figure 3. Alyssa Milano Tweet. From Critical Media Project showing Alyssa Milano’s tweet that went viral and fueled the #MeToo movement in 2017.
(https://criticalmediaproject.org/metoo/)
Climate Change Crisis
One of the biggest problems being talked about on social media in the last couple years has been the Climate Change Crisis. For my research, I looked at the types of people shown that liked a post on Instagram. This post was of a person holding up a sign stating, “The climate is changing; Why aren’t we?”. In total, this post received 5,306 likes but Instagram only showed the profiles of 97 of these users. I analyzed the ages of these users based on things such as their bios, profile photos, and posts and found that about 67% of them were teens or young adults. Most of the rest of the profiles shown did not give much information about themselves in their bio and did not have a profile picture of a real person. If given more time, I would analyze the data for posts on more activism movements. There are limitations to my research because there is no way to know if someone is portraying themselves realistically on social media. I also found that many of the users that liked this post about the climate crisis also had resources and links in their bios for this movement, so they are probably also posting about this on their social media stories and posts. I believe that the results turned out this way because it is mainly young people using Instagram. As of 2021, 67% of users on Instagram are in between the ages of 18-24 years old (Sehl, 2021, para. 9). This information closely aligns to what I found from my data. Media coverage of the climate crisis actually started all the way back in 1999, however, the advancement of social media really helped it to take off. When looking at the hashtag, #climatecrisis on Instagram, there are 864 thousand posts posted to it as of December 2021. This includes a variety of posts such as awareness/information posts, posts from marches, and posts to catch your attention such as a polar bear losing its habitat or a sea full of plastic. When looking at this hashtag, there is a uniformity across the types of posts that show up under the top results. They are all fighting very hard for something to change to prevent any more global warming and are usually doing so by posts that are meant to evoke emotion and shock the viewer to encourage change. CBC News talked about how teens are utilizing social media to engage in activist movements in the segment “The Weekly with Wendy Mesley”. In this video, Mesley states that “Thunberg is doing the same with climate change. She’s hijacking the news cycle through hashtags, viral moments, and massive protests that dominates social media timelines” (2019, 2:33-2:43). This quote explains perfectly just how much social media can help to scale a complaint to a full-scale protest. In her news segment, Mesley explains how Greta Thunberg did just that. Thunberg protested solely outside of the Swedish parliament, advocating for less carbon fuel emissions when she was just 15. Since then, she has inspired thousands of young people like her to also start caring about and advocating for a healthier and cleaner planet. Boulianne, Lalancette, and Ilkiw discuss the protest activities that occurred surrounding encouraging the government to act on climate change in their article titled “School Strike 4 Climate’: Social Media and the International Youth Protest on Climate Change”. They mention that “Social media presents an opportunity to voice one’s concerns about climate change and the need for action, as well as document the discontent among citizens by posting pictures of the protest event. Social media users may connect their local events to global events” (Boulianne, 2020, para. 17). This explains why so many people have taken to social media to document and talk about these problems that they see in their communities and their world. It is really easy to connect to others on social media.
Drawbacks of Social Media Activism
While there are clearly many benefits of using social media for activism purposes, such as greater reach, visibility, and speed, there are also some things to keep in mind if you are considering using social media for activism purposes. One of these drawbacks is that along with the visibility from other people, companies are also more likely to view your post. Companies have a reputation to uphold, and they will do a lot to make sure that their reputation is not slandered. Julie Uldam explains this concept and some of the steps that companies will take to protect their reputation in her article “Social Media Visibility: Challenges to Activism”. Uldam includes examples from the company BP and how they responded against participants in the ‘f***ing the future’ campaign. Uldam writes “In some cases, the monitoring of individuals leads to further action so as to ensure the containment of criticism… This subvertising entailed defacing the billboard ads with black paint to represent oil and substituting the slogan ‘fuelling the future’ with ‘f***ing the future’” (2017, para. 36). Uldam goes on to explain how “Activists respond to corporate monitoring of their activities in social media in numerous ways, including self-censorship” (2017, para. 39). This includes creating fake names and addresses to make sure that companies can not track you and what you are posting. Companies would actually work to take down websites or posts that are saying negative things about their brand. This as a result, lowers the overall visibility of the post and may jeopardize the author’s social media accounts which is why this is something you should be weary of if you are planning on using social media to protest. Another thing to consider when using social media to further your activism is that activism looks different depending on the social media platform you are using. Instagram is centered around pictures for example as well as reposting and circulating images on your story, while Twitter is focused on short tweets with many hashtags to catch the attention of many. On Facebook, people generally write out longer and more thoughtful posts, however, there are not usually as many young users on Facebook. Choosing the right social media platform or figuring out the best way to post on each one does include some extra work and effort on your part, but it could be worth it for greater reach and visibility of your post.
Conclusion
Overall, there are many things to consider when using social media to post about social activist movements. There is going to be a bit of a learning curve when it comes to finding the right way to post for each platform and figuring out how to reach the most people, however it can prove extremely beneficial to furthering your movement. There are many benefits that can be seen throughout the Black Lives Matter, Me Too/97 percent, and Climate Crisis movements such as being able to reach a wide range of people in a short amount of time. Research has shown that this digital activism actually does carry over into the real world with a person being more likely to participate in protests if they were more active politically online.
References
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