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Does a social media update really have to be for forever?

Not any more, thanks to Snapchat, which apparently all the kids are using. The New York Times decrees:

Because images sent through the application self-destruct seconds after they are opened, Snapchat is being embraced as an antidote to a world where nearly every feeling, celebration and life moment is captured to be shared, logged, liked, commented on, stored, searched and sold. For people who don't want to worry about unflattering pictures or embarrassing status updates coming back to haunt them, the app's appeal seems obvious.

Many young people are growing tired of the polished profiles and the advertising come-ons of Facebook, recent surveys have shown. Moreover, young Facebook users are becoming acutely aware of the permanence of the content shared through the Web - and its repercussions later in life. As perceptions of social media change, other start-ups, including Wickr and Vidburn and Facebook's own Poke, have recently released messaging and video products that self-destruct after a set period of time.

"It became clear how awful social media is," said one of Snapchat's founders, Evan Spiegel, 22. "There is real value in sharing moments that don't live forever."

The Times article discusses some of the service's sexier uses:

But Mr. Spiegel and his co-founder, Bobby Murphy, 24, say Snapchat is gaining traction for more than R-rated exchanges. Mr. Murphy describes the service "a digital version of passing notes in class."

"You can't build a business off sexting," said Mr. Spiegel, using the term for sending racy pictures via text message chats. "It's such a specific-use case. This is about much more than that."

After reading the Times piece, WNV sometime contributor Quince Mountain (whose students at a big state university are apparently all using Snapchat) rightly wondered to me about why it doesn't discuss Snapchat's potential for activists. As the recent Malcolm Harris/Twitter case shows, there are dangers in posting updates about one's activism to a corporate social media service that retains all of its records. (To solve the opposite problem - that of preserving activist photos taken on a cell phone - check out GandhiCam.)

In the annals of online-dom, Snapchat most closely resembles 4chan, the infamous bulletin-board network whose distinguishing feature is that its posts eventually disappear. The ultra-anonymity that this fosters ultimately gave rise to the phenomenon of Anonymous. As anthropologist Gabriella Coleman writes:

The seemingly paradoxical nature of Anonymous has much to do with its origins on 4chan, which has become immensely popular, iconic, and opprobrious since it launched in 2003. 4chan is an image board composed of fifty-one topic-based forums ranging from anime to health and fitness, and is widely perceived to be one of the most offensive quarters of the Internet. The "random" forum, /b/, teems with pornography, racial slurs, and humor derived from defilement. Participants communicate in a language that seems to have reduced English to a bevy of vicious epithets, sneers, and text-message abbreviations. This may be shocking to outsiders, but for insiders it is the normal state of affairs, and one of 4chan's defining and most endearing qualities.

Over time, the gross 4chan culture evolved into the roving political activism that Anonymous has more recently come to embody, even while internally those who get too far into do-gooding risk being tarred as "moralfags."

What surprising, subversive activism will emerge from the Snapchat sexters?

Help Us Spread The Word!

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Does a social media update really have to be for forever? Not any more, thanks to Snapchat, which apparently all the kids are using. The New York Times decrees: Because images sent through the application self-destruct seconds after they are opened, Snapchat is being embraced as an antidote to a world where nearly every feeling, celebration and life moment is captured to be shared, logged, liked, commented on, stored, searched and sold.

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More than 1 million people - including first lady Michelle Obama - have tweeted the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. But whether they're helping the more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria or hopping on some kind of first-world digital bandwagon depends, frankly, on whom you ask.

We've heard this debate before - first over 'slacktivism' in the '90s, then over 'clicktivism' in the aughts. 'Hashtag activism,' a term apparently coined around Occupy Wall Street, is just the latest iteration of a long-standing debate between people who think "awareness" is its own kind of protest and people who, for various reasons, do not.

The case of the Nigerian schoolgirls, abducted by a militant Islamist group in northeastern Nigeria three weeks ago, is perhaps particularly instructive. The girls - who militants have said will be sold into slavery - earned little attention outside of the country or from the Nigerian government until supporters took to Twitter to demand their safe return.

That seems like a pretty uncontroversial demand - who doesn't want the Nigerian schoolgirls brought back home? - but it hasn't sat well with everyone. The Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole went on a sort of Twitter rant against #BringBackOurGirls, arguing that the recent spate of Internet interest has not only oversimplified and sentimentalised the country's issues, but failed to achieve anything. "For four years, Nigerians have tried to understand these homicidal monsters. Your new interest (thanks) simplifies nothing, solves nothing," he said as part of his statement.

Of course, critics of lazy or 'slacker' activism love to blame its existence on the Internet - as if signing petitions or sending postcards to Congress wasn't equally passive (and, in many cases, equally pointless). It's difficult to pin down exactly when the preferred form of slacktivism switched from analogue to digital, but the change appears to have happened in the past three years. In 2007, Twitter users began unofficially organising groups and conversations around hashtags; in 2009, just in time for the election protests in Iran, the network had adopted them officially. By 2011, references to 'hashtag activism' - most of them negative - began popping up in the media, always in connection to Occupy Wall Street.
#StandwithPP
It wasn't until 2012, however, that 'hashtag activism' congealed in a major way around an actionable, concrete cause. On a Tuesday in January, the Susan G. Komen Foundation, which annually contributed $680,000 to Planned Parenthood for breast exams and mammograms, announced its plans to cut that funding off. The decision was largely political, which outraged Planned Parenthood supporters. By Friday of that week, more than 100,000 people had tweeted hashtags like #singon and #standwithpp - and Komen had restored funding.

"I absolutely believe the exposure on Facebook and Twitter really drove a lot of coverage by mainstream media," Planned Parenthood's president, Cecile Richards told the Los Angeles Times. "I've never seen anything catch fire [like that.]"

Richards had a point. While activist hashtags like #ows had trended before, rarely had a hashtag been aimed at such a specific policy - something that could, with enough awareness, be easily reversed by a handful of people.

It also helped that many of the #standwithpp activists were stakeholders in the conflict: women who used Planned Parenthood, or women's health services more generally, used Twitter as a platform to speak up for their causes.
#Kony2012
That was a major, immediate failing for #Kony2012, which trended only weeks after #standwithpp. Sparked by a documentary of the same name on Ugandan military leader and indicted war criminal Joseph Kony, and fuelled by tweets from celebrities such as Rihanna, Stephen Fry and Nicole Richie, #Kony2012 earned nearly 2.4 million tweets in March 2012 . . . but failed to articulate any specific demands, besides the self-evident "stop Kony." Worse, the documentary (and the hashtag) were organized by do-gooder Americans, not Ugandans.

They may have meant well, but the meddling, imperialist overtones of #Kony2012 would forever haunt the hashtag. Kony, critics pointed out, had been accused of abducting child soldiers since the '90s. But millions of Americans noticed only when it became trendy to do so and when it was other Americans advancing the issue. Two days after the documentary "Kony 2012" premiered, the first (and to date, only) definition of hashtag activism appeared on Urban Dictionary, beginning: "The kind of activism undertaken when you "do something" about a problem by tweeting or posting links to Facebook, without any intent of ever actually doing something. "

All the attention did accomplish something, though: In the wake of the video's publication, the African Union announced it would send a force of 5,000 to help quell violence in Uganda and bring Kony to justice. They were joined by 100 military advisers from the United States.

"We need to take advantage of the high level of interest, goodwill and political commitment to finally put an end to this crime," U.N. Central Africa envoy Abou Moussa said.
#JusticeforTrayvon
Despite the oft-repeated claim that awareness does nothing, it almost always does something - something small, perhaps, but something measurable.

Neighbourhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman was hardly investigated, for instance, when he shot and killed an unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin, in the Florida suburbs. The case initially attracted no attention outside of Florida. But when the case began to trickle out onto Twitter's trending topics list, issues like contemporary racism, gun control and Florida's controversial "Stand Your Ground" law suddenly became hallmarks of the national conversation.

Between March and April 2012, users sent more than 2.8 million tweets mentioning Trayvon. That virality was credited, in part, for attracting more than 2 million signatures to a Change.org petition calling for the arrest of Martin's shooter - and for getting notables such as President Barack Obama involved.

To the disappointment of activists, the campaign only half-succeeded. While local and state authorities reopened their investigations against Zimmerman in light of the publicity, trying him for second-degree murder in July 2013, Zimmerman was acquitted on all counts.

Hashtag activists weren't finished with the case, though. On July 15, news broke that one of the jurors from the Zimmerman trial had scored some kind of book deal with the agent Sharlene Martin. Thousands of people tweeted at Martin to abandon the book - which she promptly did.

"Black Twitter watchers know the power of the swarm," wrote Buzzfeed's Shani Hilton. "That obsessive and focused online conversation has gone from being a source of entertainment - and outside curiosity - to a cultural force in its own right."
#NotYourAsianSidekick
That's one of the profound benefits of hashtag activism: The amplification of minority voices that other forms of media - or even other forms of activism - have historically ignored. That helps explain why feminist groups, for instance, have been so eager to jump on the hashtag train. ("The Hashtag Is Mightier than the Sword," proclaimed an article in Ms.) It also explains why Suey Park, perhaps Twitter's foremost hashtag activist of late, has become such a polarising figure.

Perhaps you haven't heard of Park, but you've surely seen her "movements." In December, the 20-something activist and freelance writer launched the tag #NotYourAsianSidekick to prompt discussion of Asian-American feminism and media representation. Three months later, after an account affiliated with Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" tweeted a contextless (and apparently racist) joke about Asians, Park lit up Twitter with the hashtag #CancelColbert.

#NotYourAsianSidekick and #CancelColbert were fundamentally different, despite sharing a founder and central theme. #NotYourAsianSidekick was about having a conversation - not terribly different from #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, or even the common Twitter chats of yore. But #CancelColbert appeared to target a specific, actionable policy, like #standwithPP before it. And lots of Colbert fans - pointing out, rightly, that the joke had actually been a critique of racism - did not take that suggestion well.

Park has since clarified that she just wanted to start a conversation about racism and racial humour - something she clearly accomplished, if not in the way she may have hoped. The hashtag has been tweeted 125,000 times. The campaign has frequently been condemned as silly or ill-conceived.

"If we take #CancelColbert at face value, we can easily dismiss it as shrill, misguided, and frivolous," wrote Jay Caspian King in the New Yorker. "But after speaking to Park . . . I wonder if we might be witnessing the development of a more compelling - and sometimes annoying and infuriating - form of protest, by a new group of Merry Pranksters, who are once again freaking out the squares in our always over reacting, always polarised online public sphere."
#BringBackOurGirls
Let's be very clear, here: The people tweeting on this latest activist hashtag are in no way "merry pranksters," and their objective does not involve "freaking out the squares." But the online quest to free Nigeria's missing schoolgirls, if it can be termed a quest, springs from this varied, iterative tradition of social media activism. Accordingly, it suffers from two of the criticisms that have been levelled at #CancelColbert, #Kony2012, and hundreds of other eclectic campaigns.

First, critics argue, "hashtag activism" is lazy - it's a frictionless convenience, conducted from the safety of a computer screen, that often serves more as a flattering public symbol of concern than concern itself. More insidiously, some claim, these hashtags are often started not by the people they're supposed to help, but by privileged, pitying outsiders on the other side of the world, gender gap or class divide. That's what made #Kony2012 so vaguely icky. And that's what made #NotYourAsianSidekick and #JusticeforTrayvon so great - those hashtags transcended whatever paternalistic or imperialistic traditions may exist in traditional media and discourse, and gave a platform to an oft-disenfranchised group.

#BringBackOurGirls, for better or worse, doesn't fit neatly into either category. It was started by Nigerians, but co-opted by outsiders. You can argue that it's lazy, but you can also argue that it's doing good. In the days since #BringBackOurGirls began trending, the United States, United Kingdom and France have all promised to aid Nigeria in its search for the girls; the U.S. alone will send a team of logistics and communications experts within the next few days.

Hashtag activism deserves our scepticism and vigilance; there is, clearly, plenty of room for critique. But it's neither fair nor particularly wise to dismiss the phenomenon out of hand. Maybe writer and actress Clarke Wolfe's reply to Teju Cole says it best: "Shaming people for awareness, even if it comes from a #, simplifies everything and also solves nothing (thanks)."More than 1 million people - including first lady Michelle Obama - have tweeted the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. But whether they're helping the more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria or hopping on some kind of first-world digital bandwagon depends, frankly, on whom you ask.

We've heard this debate before - first over 'slacktivism' in the '90s, then over 'clicktivism' in the aughts. 'Hashtag activism,' a term apparently coined around Occupy Wall Street, is just the latest iteration of a long-standing debate between people who think "awareness" is its own kind of protest and people who, for various reasons, do not.

The case of the Nigerian schoolgirls, abducted by a militant Islamist group in northeastern Nigeria three weeks ago, is perhaps particularly instructive. The girls - who militants have said will be sold into slavery - earned little attention outside of the country or from the Nigerian government until supporters took to Twitter to demand their safe return.

That seems like a pretty uncontroversial demand - who doesn't want the Nigerian schoolgirls brought back home? - but it hasn't sat well with everyone. The Nigerian-American writer Teju Cole went on a sort of Twitter rant against #BringBackOurGirls, arguing that the recent spate of Internet interest has not only oversimplified and sentimentalised the country's issues, but failed to achieve anything. "For four years, Nigerians have tried to understand these homicidal monsters. Your new interest (thanks) simplifies nothing, solves nothing," he said as part of his statement.
- WASHINGTON POST

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More than 1 million people - including first lady Michelle Obama - have tweeted the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls. But whether they're helping the more than 200 schoolgirls kidnapped in Nigeria or hopping on some kind of first-world digital bandwagon depends, frankly, on whom you ask.

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On Thursday night, the official Twitter account for "The Colbert Report" committed the comedic sin of delivering a punch line without its setup. The offending tweet, "I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever," was meant to be a satirical analog to the Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, whose creation was announced earlier this week by the team's owner, Daniel Snyder.

The joke, which originally aired on Wednesday's episode, is not particularly complicated: Daniel Snyder created a charitable organization for the benefit of a community and used a racial epithet for that same community in the organization's name-so here's an absurd fictional extrapolation of Snyder's own logic. Everyone who hates both racism and Daniel Snyder laughs.

On Twitter, where words often slip free of their contexts, the unaccompanied punch line sparked a firestorm of outrage, which quickly escalated into a campaign demanding the show's cancellation. The hashtag #CancelColbert became one of Twitter's trending topics across the United States, and prompted Comedy Central to point out that the tweet in question, which was soon deleted, was posted by a corporate account that Colbert did not control.

Park, now a veteran of so-called "hashtag activism," started the campaign with the following tweet: "The Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals has decided to call for #CancelColbert. Trend it."

As #CancelColbert grew, Park acted as something of an online personal trainer, exhorting her followers to push the hashtag up the list of Twitter's trending topics. In response, tens of thousands of people came to Colbert's defense, many of them apparently outraged at the outrage. By lunchtime on Friday, when Deadspin published a post by two Korean-American writers with the tongue-in-cheek headline " Gooks Don't Get Redskins Joke," #CancelColbert had become another online feeding trough, attracting heated commentary from everyone who has ever thought anything about race in this country. (As Deadspin noted, it had also shifted the debate away from Daniel Snyder and the name of his football team.)

I called Park on Friday to ask her about how #CancelColbert got started. She said she saw the offending tweet while eating dinner Thursday night and decided to respond to it. Despite her online profile-and the forceful, yet sometimes decidedly academic, tone of her advocacy-Park does not consider herself a "full-time" activist and claims that she does not particularly enjoy hustling along a hashtag. Her degree of involvement in a hashtagged cause, she said, depends on how much "free time" she has at the moment, and whether a particular issue piques her interest. "It's not like I enjoy missing 'Scandal' to tweet about 'The Colbert Report,'" she said.

Every debate on Twitter gets put through the platform's peculiar distortion effect. The form's inherent limitations-the hundred-and-forty-character limit and a fleeting shelflife-reward volume, frequency, and fervor rather than nuance, complexity, and persuasion. This might feel unseemly to those who value a more refined conversation, but there is no denying the viral power of hashtag activists who capitalize on the speed at which a single tweet can multiply into something that resembles a protest rally. A new Twitter outrage seems to detonate every week, and, in many cases, the voices raised in these social-media movements belong to groups that do not have equal representation within the mainstream media. But they should not therefore be immune to questions or criticism: If an activist hashtag becomes a trend, has a broad, important conversation taken place? It is no simple thing to determine whether Twitter outrage can itself expand the terms of discourse and challenge the status quo.

At its best, #NotYourAsianSidekick provides a channel for thousands of Asian-American women and their allies to discuss the tokenism that so often accompanies broad conversations about diversity in this country. Dissatisfied with the idea of a "seat at the table," Park uses social media to facilitate a self-contained conversation among Asian-Americans that does not require any explanation or translation of our shared cultural norms. The ultimate significance of a string of tweets can always be questioned, but that a hashtag conversation on Twitter could have such resonance speaks to just how desperate Asian-Americans have been to talk about identity without deferring to the familiar binaries that shape most discussions of race in this country.

In our conversation, Park admitted that despite the hashtag's command, she did not want "The Colbert Report" to be cancelled. "I like the show," she said. Instead, she said, she saw the hashtag as a way to critique white liberals who use forms of racial humor to mock more blatant forms of racism. "Well-intentioned racial humor doesn't actually do anything to end racism or the Redskins mascot," Park told me. "That sort of racial humor just makes people who hide under the title of progressivism more comfortable."

It's important to note here that Suey Park identifies herself as an activist, and does not make any claim to objectivity or fairness. #CancelColbert might have rankled and annoyed people who got Colbert's joke, but Park says that the point of the "movement" was to argue that white liberals who routinely condemn what she called "worse racism" will often turn a blind eye to, or even defend, more tacit forms of prejudice, especially when they come from someone who shares their basic political beliefs. "The response shows the totality of white privilege," Park said. "They say, 'Suey is trying to take away a show we enjoy, so we're going to start a petition to take away her First Amendment rights and make rape threats.' All this happens because they were worried that a show they enjoyed might be taken away."

If we are to take Park's explanation in good faith and see #CancelColbert as the work of a master provocateur who held up a mirror up to the way that self-identifying liberals of all races respond to criticism from people that they assumed to be allies, then it should be hailed as a rousing success. In interviews and on Twitter, Park has repeatedly pointed out that she does not subscribe to a traditional distinction between liberalism and conservatism. She does not defer to white liberals who point out that the joke was meant to satirize white racists, nor does she believe that a debt of gratitude is owed to the good intentions of white liberalism. During our conversation, she mentioned Kanye West and the politics behind his public persona. Park suggested that she, like West, is playing to a part and, in the process, satirizing what we might expect from a twenty-three-year-old hashtag activist. "There's no reason for me to act reasonable, because I won't be taken seriously anyway," she said. "So I might as well perform crazy to point out exactly what's expected from me."

I am ten years older than Suey Park, and, like her, I grew up in a suburban Korean household, read critical theory in college, and now make my living peddling words on the Internet. Like Park, I am a fan of "The Colbert Report." I did not find Colbert's joke offensive in any way. But, while I was initially turned off by what I saw as a disingenuous and self-aggrandizing attempt to blow up a joke into a national issue, I also found myself agreeing with what Park has to say about the roles we, as Asian-Americans, are called to play in America's ongoing diversity drama. Unlike Park, I tend to keep my political beliefs close to the vest, especially when talking to white liberal friends, because I assume-fairly or not-that they expect me to laugh at whatever gets mocked on "The Daily Show" or satirized on "The Colbert Report." Like Park, I have seen how quickly a presumed collegiality can turn into a mocking, almost threatening, tone whenever I stray from the assumed consensus that we all hate "worse racists," Fox News, and gun nuts. Like Park, I have always assumed-again, fairly or not-that white liberals believe that as a person of color, I owe a debt of gratitude to the generations of well-intentioned white people who have fought hard for my right to write for prestigious publications.

I do not know if I believe that Park set out to incite this particular riot when she first tweeted #CancelColbert, but I also do not believe that any activist really owes an explanation for the mess she leaves in her wake. Over the past two days, much of the debate about #CancelColbert has been about the efficacy of hashtag activism and whether the act of dissent has been cheapened by the ease, and sometimes frivolity, of Twitter protests. As the debate intensified, I, too, thought that we had reached a point where hashtag activism had circled back onto itself-a moment when the earnestness of a conversation like #NotYourAsianSidekick had been compromised by self-promotion and race hustling. But journalists and pundits are particularly sensitive to charges of self-promotion and hustling because we so often use Twitter to self-promote and hustle. Unlike Park, we usually do this without any particular ideological motivation-and, if we are honest with ourselves, I think we can admit that one reason we may find Twitter activism distasteful is because it interrupts our online socializing with questions we might not want to answer.
Jay Caspian Kang is the author of the novel "The Dead Do Not Improve." Photograph by Cliff Owen/AP.

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On Thursday night, the official Twitter account for "The Colbert Report" committed the comedic sin of delivering a punch line without its setup. The offending tweet, "I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever," was meant to be a satirical analog to the Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation, whose creation was announced earlier this week by the team's owner, Daniel Snyder.

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http://bigthink.com/praxis/facebook-is-fraying-not-saving-the-world

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http://qz.com/566974/facebook-and-twitter-are-ruining-activism/

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Does a social media update really have to be for forever?

Not any more, thanks to Snapchat, which apparently all the kids are using. The New York Times decrees:

Because images sent through the application self-destruct seconds after they are opened, Snapchat is being embraced as an antidote to a world where nearly every feeling, celebration and life moment is captured to be shared, logged, liked, commented on, stored, searched and sold. For people who don't want to worry about unflattering pictures or embarrassing status updates coming back to haunt them, the app's appeal seems obvious.

Many young people are growing tired of the polished profiles and the advertising come-ons of Facebook, recent surveys have shown. Moreover, young Facebook users are becoming acutely aware of the permanence of the content shared through the Web - and its repercussions later in life. As perceptions of social media change, other start-ups, including Wickr and Vidburn and Facebook's own Poke, have recently released messaging and video products that self-destruct after a set period of time.

"It became clear how awful social media is," said one of Snapchat's founders, Evan Spiegel, 22. "There is real value in sharing moments that don't live forever."

The Times article discusses some of the service's sexier uses:

But Mr. Spiegel and his co-founder, Bobby Murphy, 24, say Snapchat is gaining traction for more than R-rated exchanges. Mr. Murphy describes the service "a digital version of passing notes in class."

"You can't build a business off sexting," said Mr. Spiegel, using the term for sending racy pictures via text message chats. "It's such a specific-use case. This is about much more than that."

After reading the Times piece, WNV sometime contributor Quince Mountain (whose students at a big state university are apparently all using Snapchat) rightly wondered to me about why it doesn't discuss Snapchat's potential for activists. As the recent Malcolm Harris/Twitter case shows, there are dangers in posting updates about one's activism to a corporate social media service that retains all of its records. (To solve the opposite problem - that of preserving activist photos taken on a cell phone - check out GandhiCam.)

In the annals of online-dom, Snapchat most closely resembles 4chan, the infamous bulletin-board network whose distinguishing feature is that its posts eventually disappear. The ultra-anonymity that this fosters ultimately gave rise to the phenomenon of Anonymous. As anthropologist Gabriella Coleman writes:

The seemingly paradoxical nature of Anonymous has much to do with its origins on 4chan, which has become immensely popular, iconic, and opprobrious since it launched in 2003. 4chan is an image board composed of fifty-one topic-based forums ranging from anime to health and fitness, and is widely perceived to be one of the most offensive quarters of the Internet. The "random" forum, /b/, teems with pornography, racial slurs, and humor derived from defilement. Participants communicate in a language that seems to have reduced English to a bevy of vicious epithets, sneers, and text-message abbreviations. This may be shocking to outsiders, but for insiders it is the normal state of affairs, and one of 4chan's defining and most endearing qualities.

Over time, the gross 4chan culture evolved into the roving political activism that Anonymous has more recently come to embody, even while internally those who get too far into do-gooding risk being tarred as "moralfags."

What surprising, subversive activism will emerge from the Snapchat sexters?

Help Us Spread The Word!

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Does a social media update really have to be for forever? Not any more, thanks to Snapchat, which apparently all the kids are using. The New York Times decrees: Because images sent through the application self-destruct seconds after they are opened, Snapchat is being embraced as an antidote to a world where nearly every feeling, celebration and life moment is captured to be shared, logged, liked, commented on, stored, searched and sold.

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During the past decade, Twitter rendered the "pound sign" obsolete and made the "hashtag" part of our vernacular. The hashtag's uses range from sarcasm and trolling to awareness of social causes. The latter usage has been instrumental in the transition of movements from online to the real world. In honor of Twitter's 1oth birthday, here are the 10 most influential hashtags around social causes, ranked by the number of times they've been used since their inception. All numbers have been provided by Twitter.
10. #GivingTuesday
In an attempt to counteract the rampant consumerism that blankets the holiday season starting with Black Friday, Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday (but certainly not ending there), 92Y and the U.N. Foundation gave life to #GivingTuesday. The social initiative, which began in 2012 and whose hashtag has since amassed 3,100,000 uses, asked that charities use #GivingTuesday in their call-outs for donations on the first Tuesday in December.

The first #GivingTuesday generated $10.1 million in donations.
9. #YesAllWomen
In response to Elliot Rodger's misogyny-fueled killing rampage at the University of California in Santa Barbara and the #NotAllMen defense that followed, #YesAllWomen aimed to give women a place to share their experiences with rape, abuse, sexism and judgment. The hashtag was used 3,700,000 times to help share the compelling and heartbreaking stories of women all over the world.
8. #PrayforJapan
#PrayforJapan originated after an 8.9-magnitude earthquake and tsunami hit Japan in March 2011, killing nearly 2,000 people. The hashtag, which has been used 4,000,000 times, resurfaced in November 2015 after a smaller earthquake triggered false reports of an impending tsunami. Even Justin Bieber tweeted it alongside #PrayforParis.
7. #BringBackOurGirls
The #BringBackOurGirls hashtag miraculously managed to become a divisive one, despite its goal of uniting users around the demand for the safe return of Nigerian school girls kidnapped by a militant Islamist group. Although critics were quick to point out the "laziness" of this use of hashtag activism, some of the 6,100,000 users of #BringBackOurGirls defended the trending topic, offering their own criticism of those who shame others for not meeting their standards of awareness.

Our prayers are with the missing Nigerian girls and their families. It's time to #BringBackOurGirls. -mo pic.twitter.com/glDKDotJRt

- The First Lady (@FLOTUS) May 7, 2014

6. #IceBucketChallenge
6,200,000 uses of #IceBucketChallenge on Twitter helped make this awareness campaign so incredibly popular that folks were looking for ways to avoid it entirely. In the summer of 2014, you couldn't log on to Twitter, and even Facebook or Instagram, without seeing a friend or colleague being doused with cold water in the name of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease) and hoping you weren't called upon to complete the challenge next.

Despite the copious cynicism the challenge inspired, the ALS Association raised millions thanks to the campaign.
5. #Sandy
In late 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, wreaking havoc throughout the Northeast. #Sandy chronicled the perils of those affected and the damage done in states such as New York and New Jersey. But nearly four years later, a new study suggests that the hashtag was good for more than spreading awareness.

According to a study published earlier this month in the journal Science Advances, the 7,200,000 uses of #Sandy on Twitter and other relevant location-tagged tweets helped researchers find "a strong relationship between proximity to Sandy's path and hurricane-related social media activity." Their findings allowed the researchers to suggest that activity on social platforms, such as Twitter, can be used to rapidly assess damage and aid in disaster response.
4. #IndyRef
The Scottish independence referendum, or #IndyRef for short, monopolized much of the Twitter conversation on the evening of Sept. 18, 2014. But Twitter users weren't just following #IndyRef to learn the results of the historic vote about Scotland's leaving the United Kingdom. The hashtag was used 8,500,000 times and was a clear indicator of how political engagement and debate are occurring more frequently online.
3. #BlackLivesMatter
For those eager to criticize hashtag activism, the Internet raises you #BlackLivesMatter. Used 12,000,000 times, the hashtag has quite literally transformed from an online-community unifier to a political movement and tangible organization.
2. #LoveWins
After the Supreme Court's historic ruling on same-sex marriage, Twitter included a rainbow heart emoji with each of the 12,800,000 mentions of #LoveWins. The monumental decision led other social networks to create ways to let users colorfully show their support, such as Snapchat's custom rainbow location-based filters and Facebook's rainbow profile-picture filter.

Today is a big step in our march toward equality. Gay and lesbian couples now have the right to marry, just like anyone else. #LoveWins

- President Obama (@POTUS) June 26, 2015

1. #Ferguson
It should come as little surprise that #Ferguson cruised to No. 1, more than doubling the usage of the second-most popular social-issues hashtag. Since its first use, #Ferguson has been tweeted 27,200,000 times and has helped amplify the voices of a community that feared it would not be heard. Unrest in Ferguson, Mo., hit Americans' Twitter timelines before the story seized cable news's attention. Social media became a critical component of balanced coverage of the protests in Ferguson.

Sitting in McDonalds in #Ferguson, man says to cashier: "They're trying to make this about looting...this is about police murdering a kid"

- Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) August 13, 2014

For those not in #Ferguson: what questions do you still have? Are their angles/content you want explored haven't seen yet?

- Wesley Lowery (@WesleyLowery) August 13, 2014

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These 10 Twitter hashtags changed the way we talk about social issues

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During the past decade, Twitter rendered the "pound sign" obsolete and made the "hashtag" part of our vernacular. The hashtag's uses range from sarcasm and trolling to awareness of social causes. The latter usage has been instrumental in the transition of movements from online to the real world.

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The social-justice movement is always brewing on Tumblr, where users exchange views and organize demonstrations. A "die-in" in Clayton, Mo., last month. Credit Credit Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

On a recent day, the feed of a Tumblr blog called Black Culture featured a drawing of Lupita Nyong'o, a video of a protest at William Paterson University and a text that read, "black lives > white feelings." The blog FreeQuency Frequently Writes posted a Tweet from Solange Knowles decrying depictions of outspoken women, while another called Soul Revision turned up a post with the hashtags #SeasonOfInconvenience and #BlackLivesMatter.

As protests sparked by a grand jury's decision not to indict Darren Wilson began spreading nationwide, furor was also growing in cyberspace, in the social-justice halls of Tumblr, a social-blogging platform dominated by users in their teens, 20s and early 30s. Their feeds were vivid mash-ups of articles, GIFs, cleverly labeled images, court documents, smartphone videos, stickers and cartoons, and their posts contained news about Ferguson, along with tidbits about identity, inequality, police abuse, racism, body shaming and more.

"A lot of millennials have been discouraged for a long time," said Zellie Thomas, 30, creator of Black Culture. "Now, with social media, they feel empowered, like people are hearing their voice. And Tumblr is a great platform for all types of media."

There are more than 215 million blogs on Tumblr and, according to comScore, an analytics company, 50 percent of Tumblr users are from 15 to 34 years old. The company's internal surveys show that 64 percent of users say that they care about social causes and look into them on Tumblr. These numbers suggest that millennials, who have long been pigeonholed as an apathetic bunch, have a strong interest in social issues - it's just hidden from the eyes of their elders.

On Facebook and Twitter, users tend to engage with people they know, while on Tumblr, they connect based on themes and interests. Because of the anonymity it allows and the variety of media it can host, Tumblr gives young people a chance to experiment with different personas, many of which might not match the ones their friends and family are familiar with.

"You can create your own identity via Tumblr," said Moya Bailey, 31, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University in women's studies and digital humanities. "I see many more diverse images on Tumblr than I see anywhere else. It's one of the few places where I see fat people, trans women and trans women of color who are celebrated."

The cyber social-justice movement is always brewing on Tumblr, and it picks up steam when shocking news hits the country or when protests take place offline. On Dec. 4, when a jury decided not to indict in the Eric Garner case, Tumblr experienced what Liba Rubenstein, director of social impact and public policy at Tumblr, called "extreme peaks" in the use of the "social justice" and "black lives matter" tags.

"Tumblr is kind of like a gateway drug for activism," said Philip Howard, 44, the principal investigator at the Digital Activism Research Project at the University of Washington. "Once you connect to other people who feel strongly about race or crime or gay marriage, you stay engaged on that one issue area."

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Young demonstrators on the steps of the Pennsylvania State Capitol in Harrisburg this month during the Black Lives Matter "die-in," protesting police abuses. Credit James Robinson/The Patriot News, via Associated Press

Because Tumblr allows users to post anything from a video to a Tweet, and because reblogging a post is as easy as two clicks, Tumblr is an ideal dumping ground for media that might not easily coexist on Facebook or Twitter. "So much of activism is driven by digital artifacts like a video or a photo of someone beaten up by cops, and Tumblr helps people post and repost these," Mr. Howard said.

The platform's capacity to spread messages quickly is key, said Kim Moore, 29, creator of Soul Revision. Ms. Moore turned to Tumblr to raise awareness of social issues. "I thought this would be a good place to branch out more," she said. "I went on Tumblr and never left."

Mwende Katwiwa, 23, creator of the FreeQuency Frequently Writes Tumblr and a community organizer offline, thinks Tumblr has helped create new opportunities for engagement. "The last national movement in the black community didn't have access to social media like this," Ms. Katwiwa said. "Without those retweets and reposts, we wouldn't still be talking about Trayvon Martin."

Ms. Bailey said that many people describe what they do on Tumblr as getting an education on topics that aren't explored deeply in standard school textbooks, like African-American history or colonialism. Similarly, Mr. Howard, whose Research Project devotes time to measuring the success of digital movements, said that while many online campaigns don't force changes in public policy, they keep stories in the news and help expose people to new sources of information.

But whether passion on Tumblr translates into participation in the real world is up for debate. Ms. Katwiwa described a time when she used Tumblr to promote a protest in New Orleans. She was disappointed when of the thousand or so people who promised to show up, only 400 materialized. "One fault of social media is that it has people thinking that's all you have to do," she said. "I think it's a tool in a toolbox. It should be used in conjunction with ground-level activism."

Ms. Moore, on the other hand, recalled organizing a moment of silence in San Diego after Michael Brown was killed. Nearly 400 people attended the event - a number that's large for the small and conservative San Diego, Ms. Moore said - and many others followed up with emails asking to participate in the future. "I was blown away at how engaged and how passionate people can be on Tumblr," she said.

An emotionally difficult downside of using Tumblr is the negative responses activists receive from commenters. As part of her thesis project at Wayne State University, Amanda Levitt, 29, creator of Fat Body Politics, collected disparaging comments from a blog she moderates, This Is Thin Privilege.

She saved a total of 4,200 negative comments, some of them suggesting she should die. There were points at which the messages overwhelmed Ms. Levitt and she took breaks from using the platform, but she always returned. "A lot of people I enjoy talking with are online so it's hard not being in that space," she said.

Mr. Thomas shares the sentiment. "Activists online deal with a lot of hate and death threats, and very vicious attacks," he said. "It's something a lot of us have to try to ignore. And it's still worth it."

While online attacks may be unpleasant, Mr. Howard suggested that they are a part of contemporary political engagement and can help activists develop a psychological armor. "We all make mistakes with whatever media is new to us," he said. "It's part of contemporary growing pains. Each generation has had to learn what activism means for them."

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Millennials and the Age of Tumblr Activism

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On a recent day, the feed of a Tumblr blog called Black Culture featured a drawing of Lupita Nyong'o, a video of a protest at William Paterson University and a text that read, "black lives > white feelings."

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This post was co-authored by Sarina Larson.
Social media is an activism platform yielding more value each day. In 1989, during a lecture, Noam Chomsky stated, "Look, the peace movement in the Sixties became a huge mass movement, with tens of millions of people involved: it began with people doing just what you said, inviting somebody to come talk in their living rooms... When the time is right, things happen fast." Comparing how quickly activists came together to form the Civil Rights and Anti-War movements in the '60s, to current sprouting social movements fueled by hashtags like #ICantBreathe, one can observe the exponential amplification value that social media serves in activism today.

Social media provides an open global community for citizens to have a voice and make an impact on social change in real time. To commemorate Human Rights Week (December 10-17) and International Human Solidarity Day (December 20), we revisited some of the most impactful social movements of 2014 that were simultaneously shared to social networks with hashtags we'll never forget. We, the people, have hashtagged.
#BringBackOurGirls
On April 14, 2014, the Nigerian militant Islamist group Boko Haram kidnapped 276 school girls in the town of Chibok. "Boko Haram" translates to the unacceptance of Western education, and the group allegedly performed this act to showcase their beliefs of the place women should hold in society; working in the home and not attending school. As this occurred, the Twitter and Facebook spheres exploded with influencers and average joes holding up signs in a photograph with the hashtag "#BringBackOurGirls" on it. To date, there are still 219 girls in captivity. Despite this social media activism campaign going viral, did it, or will it, make an actual impact on bringing back the remaining 218 girls and stopping Boko Haram? - @SarinaPrimrose
#MyNYPD
On April 22, 2014, the New York Police Department sent out a tweet inviting people to share photos taken with officers, using the hashtag #MyNYPD. More than 70,000 New Yorkers responded on Twitter with graphic photos and videos of police officers engaging in violent behavior. Citizens of other major cities -- including Los Angeles, Denver and more -- joined in to create hashtags for their respective police departments, sharing an array of images depicting police brutality. The recurrent issue of police using excessive force against citizens sparked the #MillionsMarchNYC protests, happening right now in response to Eric Garner's unjust death in Staten Island. - @MsAnalogMedia
#BoycottClippers
On April 25, 2014, a recorded conversation went public of Donald Sterling -- now former owner of the Los Angeles Clippers -- demanding his mistress, V. Stiviano, to stop bringing black people to his basketball games. Sterling's racist remarks were in response to Stiviano attending a Clippers game with African-American basketball legend Magic Johnson. The public responded in outrage on social media with the hashtag #BoycottClippers. During a warmup session before a playoff game, Clippers players engaged in a silent protest, wearing inside-out shirts hiding the team logo. Sterling's bigotries cost the team endorsement deals with major corporations. Just days later, the National Basketball Association banned Sterling from the league indefinitely, fining him $2.5 million. - @MsAnalogMedia
#ICantBreathe
On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner -- an unarmed 43-year-old black man from Staten Island, N.Y. -- died from a chokehold at the hands of Daniel Pantaleo, a white police officer. Video footage of Garner struggling to say his last words, "I can't breathe," surfaced on the Internet, sparking public outrage. On December 3, the Staten Island grand jury decided against indicting Officer Pantaleo in Garner's death. Entertainers, pro athletes, and people around the world immediately fired back with social media posts using the hashtag #ICantBreathe and the recurrent #BlackLivesMatter -- representing a social movement that began in 2012 encouraging African-Americans to strive toward liberation from oppression. Today, peaceful protests continue around the country -- including #MillionsMarchNYC and #MansionShutdown -- involving supporters of all races joining together in solidarity. - @MsAnalogMedia
#WeAreHere
On September 8, 2014, Alicia Keys released the song, "We Are Here". She launched this to get fans and people around the world to voice why they are here, by posting a photo with a caption that says "I am here to..." and writing the hashtag "#WeAreHere" underneath. In all, her inspiration to create the #WeAreHere movement was to promote world peace and inspire people to speak up about the causes they care about. Influencers around the world participated; however, they spoke up about non-humanitarian things they are here for, too. Why are you here? Get in on the #WeAreHere hashtag. - @SarinaPrimrose
#UmbrellaRevolution
In September 2014, university students in Hong Kong took to the streets to peacefully protest the Chinese government's decision to vet all Chief Executive 2017 candidates. The Occupy Central group quickly joined them to ignite what was is known as the Umbrella Revolution. This movement has been constantly compared to the Tiananmen Square protest, and massacre, of 1989. The difference: social media and global news coverage provides second-by-second updates today, allowing the protesters to prove to the world their peaceful movement and rally remote support, too. - @SarinaPrimrose
#OpKK / #HoodsOff
On November 16, 2014, Anonymous -- the global hacktivist group promoting world peace -- launched a campaign against the notorious white supremacy group, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). The KKK had allegedly threatened to use lethal force against peaceful protesters in Ferguson earlier that week. Anonymous responded. They first DDoS'd (distributed denial of service) KKK websites and hacked the "@KuKluxKlanUSA" Twitter account, posting a "You should've expected us" message addressed to Klan members. Then, Anonymous removed all "racist garbage" from the @KuKluxKlanUSA account. Finally, they organized a protest in Ferguson held December 6 in response to further threats from the KKK, and their extremely organized internet activism fight continues to this day in an effort to peacefully put an end to the KKK's existence. - @SarinaPrimrose
#WhyIStayed
On September 8, 2014, video footage of former Baltimore Ravens football star Ray Rice assaulting his wife, Janay Rice, was made available to the public. Victims of domestic violence responded on Twitter with the hashtag #WhyIStayed. The conversation began with Beverly Gooden -- a domestic violence survivor and advocate -- who described in detail how difficult it was to leave her abusive partner. Gooden's goal to reverse victim-blaming inspired other women to come forward with traumatic stories, explaining why they stayed, followed by stories of hope with #WhyILeft. - @MsAnalogMedia
#BeenRapedNeverReported
On October 26, 2014, CBC fired radio host Jian Ghomeshi, following growing allegations of sexual assault and choking. The Toronto Star, and later Canadian police, began investigating accusations against Ghomeshi made by nine women and one man. Two reporters, Antonia Zerbisias and Sue Montgomery, sparked the confessional hashtag #BeenRapedNeverReported on Twitter by recounting stories of sexual abuse. Other victims openly shared candid experiences, breaking the stigma of silence and shame associated with rape. - @MsAnalogMedia
#Ferguson
On November 24, 2014, Prosecuting Attorney Robert McCulloch announced that Ferguson, Missouri-based police officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted for the killing of unarmed 18-year-old Mike Brown. The country uproared on both sides of the coin instantaneously, and street protests, both peaceful and violent, set off instantly around the country in Ferguson, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Detroit, and more. The music community, specifically the hip-hop community, had a lot to say to express their disappointment in the "#FergusonDecision". Some even produced songs to quickly voice their concern to fans and the world, peacefully. The response to Mike Brown's case has ignited a civil rights movement as intense as the one that occurred in the 1960s. Imagine if Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks had Twitter? - @SarinaPrimrose
View the full Storify feed of top 10 social activism hashtags of 2014 here.
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From Folsom, CA, Sarina Larson is a California girl with a global perspective. She has lived in the Netherlands, Thailand, the U.S. and has traveled to 25 countries. She channels her inner humanitarian and social entrepreneur as a marketing consultant, co-Founder at BoostBlocks and co-Founder of the music centered non-profit, Bizlanthropy.
Follow Sarina Larson on Twitter: @SarinaPrimrose
Connect with Sarina on Google+
Tasha Mitchell is a Media Specialist with a decade of professional experience in branding and media relations. Tasha runs an integrated media company Analog Media that specializes in web design, social media marketing, e-newsletters, e-commerce, and more. When she's not working, she's networking at events, concerts and cafes - writing along the way. Her interests include arts and culture, social issues, and new media. Follow Tasha Mitchell on Twitter: @MsAnalogMedia

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This post was co-authored by Sarina Larson. Social media is an activism platform yielding more value each day. In 1989, during a lecture, Noam Chomsky stated, "Look, the peace movement in the Sixties became a huge mass movement, with tens of millions of people involved: it began with people doing just what you said, inviting somebody to come talk in their living rooms...