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When I think of digital activism I think of social medi

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when i hear or see digital activism.. i think of what's going on around the world

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Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech

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In recent years, social media have become a common way for political groups and social movements to organize. On Twitter's 10-year anniversary, the site published a list of the most used hashtags related to social causes. Two of the top three were directly related to issues of race. According to Twitter, #Ferguson was the most used social-issue hashtag in the 10-year history of the platform, while #BlackLivesMatter was third.

Along with examining tweets that mentioned race in a general sense, the Center's analysis looked at all tweets that included the #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter hashtags from July 12, 2013, to March 31, 2016. These tweets (13.3 million in total) were then analyzed using Crimson Hexagon's algorithmic tool to determine their subject matter and tone. (A previous Pew Research Center study surveyed Americans on their awareness of and attitudes towards issues of racial equality.)

Historically, hashtags developed as an informal method of highlighting ideas in unformatted text and trying to grow conversation around a topic. In 2009, Twitter began to hyperlink and compile hashtags, making them searchable and increasing their utility as identifiers. While most hashtags are developed organically, some groups deliberately use hashtags to promote a message.

In mid-2014, as the issue of use of force by police gained national attention due to several high profile cases involving black men, some activists promoted hashtags as a way to identify their messages and display solidarity.

This was the case with the Black Lives Matter movement. Organizers of Black Lives Matter made social media - and specifically the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter - a centerpiece of their strategy. As a result, the growth of the movement offline was directly linked with the online conversation.

An early timeline of the #BlackLivesMatter and #AllLivesMatter hashtags

All told, from its initial appearance in mid-2013 through March 2016, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter has appeared on Twitter almost 11.8 million times.

As a direct response to #BlackLivesMatter, some on Twitter began using the hashtag #AllLivesMatter. That hashtag has been used a total of 1.5 million times, about one-eighth as often as #BlackLivesMatter. Over time, the volume of #AllLivesMatter tweets has generally moved in parallel with that of #BlackLivesMatter.

The phrase "black lives matter" was first used by a black community organizer in a Facebook post following the July 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. Despite its widespread presence today, the hashtag was slow to gain prominence: During the second half of 2013, it appeared on Twitter a total of just 5,106 times (or about 30 times a day).

Both the use of the hashtag and the influence of the broader Black Lives Matter movement accelerated greatly in August 2014 when Michael Brown, a black teenager, was fatally shot by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri.

The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag appeared an average of 58,747 times per day in the roughly three weeks following Brown's death. However, the use of the hashtag increased dramatically three months later when on November 25, the day after a Ferguson grand jury decided not to indict the officer involved in Brown's death, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag appeared 172,772 times. During the subsequent three weeks, the hashtag was used 1.7 million times.

Since late 2014, #BlackLivesMatter has been a continuous presence on Twitter, but its use has increased around some specific events. These include:

On Dec. 4, 2014, the day after a New York grand jury decided not to indict police officers in the death of Eric Garner, #BlackLivesMatter appeared 189,210 times - the most it was ever used in a single day.

The Oct. 13, 2015, presidential campaign debate in which Senator Bernie Sanders defended the Black Lives Matter movement and decried institutional racism spurred the hashtag to appear more than 127,000 times on Twitter the following day as many users voiced support for Sanders.

On the one-year anniversary of Brown's death, August 9, 2015, the hashtag appeared 120,067 times as well as 98,518 times the following day.

As for #AllLivesMatter, the hashtag appeared on Twitter a few times prior to the unrest in Ferguson in August 2014. However - as was the case with #BlackLivesMatter - it was the day after the announcement that there would be no grand jury indictments in the Michael Brown case when the hashtag began appearing regularly. On Nov. 25, 2014, #AllLivesMatter was used 14,308 times.

The day in which the hashtag #AllLivesMatter appeared the most during this time period was Dec. 21, 2014, the day after two police officers were killed in New York City while in their patrol car. That day the hashtag appeared 28,526 times. The hashtag #BlueLivesMatter, usually used to express support for police, was used 22,834 times that day.

The #BlackLivesMatter hashtag has been used frequently in support of the broader social movement or to flag general racial issues, occasionally as a form of criticism

From its first appearance in mid-2013, Twitter users have utilized the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag for a range of purposes. Supportive or positive references to the broader movement are among the most common. But in some cases, people included #BlackLivesMatter in tweets to criticize the movement - or simply identify the subject matter of their posts and attach them to the broader discussion occurring around racial issues.

Supportive or positive references to the broader movement make up a large portion of tweets utilizing the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag

Tweets using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag that are generally supportive of the movement are much more common than those opposing it. Over the period studied, 38% of the tweets that included #BlackLivesMatter were supportive or made positive reference to the social movement.

Slightly more than half of those, representing 21% of all the tweets using the hashtag, offered broad support for racial equality and opposition to police brutality. This February 2014 post by Mag-net, a network of social organizations, is one example:

#blacklivesmatter is a response to the dehumanization of black people. But it's also a call to action. @aliciagarza #mediajustice

- MAG-Net (@mediaaction) February 26, 2014

Others used the hashtag when describing efforts to organize protests, as in this tweet by Chicago-based activist Byron Sigcho:

'Honoring the legacy of MLK by organizing' #BlackLivesMatter #MLKchi #ReclaimChicago @peopleslobbyusa @PilsenAlliance @gozamos @mikeklonsky

- Byron Sigcho (@TeamSigcho) January 17, 2015

Another 18% of tweets utilized the hashtag to connect specific incidents of alleged police misconduct. For example, a number of Black Lives Matter supporters focused on the November 2014 death of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, as in this tweet:

Officer who killed Tamir Rice found unfit in previous police job http://t.co/UncePJxA2f via @msnbc#TRIBELIVE #CLEVELAND #BLACKLIVESMATTER!!

- Jazzmine D. McKnight (@Progress4Ohio) August 26, 2015

Among the other incidents #BlackLivesMatter supporters focused on were the April 2015 death of Freddie Gray while in police custody in Baltimore; the March 2015 shooting death of 19-year-old Tony Robinson at the hands of police in Madison, Wisconsin; and the contentious arrest of University of Virginia student Martese Johnson that same month.

Many tweets used the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag to engage with broader discussions around race

Not all the uses of #BlackLivesMatter were directly tied to specific incidents. In 15% of the tweets using the hashtag, the author was making a larger point about race - without directly focusing on the modern-day social movement. For instance, many people offered thematic quotes:

A System Cannot Fail Those It Was Never Meant To Protect. #BlackLivesMatter

- katori (@iamkatori) July 23, 2015

Variations of this particular quote appeared in tweets alongside the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter more than 2,200 times. This message, which first appeared in 2013, was often attributed incorrectly to the sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois.

Around one-in-ten tweets using the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag were critical of the movement

As the Black Lives Matter movement grew and the use of the hashtag increased, a number of tweets began to object to the movement. Some critics felt it was valuing one race above all others, while others felt the movement was unfairly condemning all police officers based on the actions of a few.

In fact, 11% of the posts including the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag were critical of the movement and/or the actions of its supporters. Sometimes these posts utilized very strong language, as in this tweet by a retired solider:

Hey #BlackLivesMatter, police saves MORE black lives everyday, than you cowards ever will, in your pathetic lifetime! #AllLivesMatter ??

- David Higgins (@dhiggins63) September 11, 2015

How the #AllLivesMatter hashtag was used: a more even mix of support and criticism

Unlike the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, the mentions of #AllLivesMatter from July 2013 to March 2016 were nearly evenly split between positive and negative posts.
About one-third of #AllLivesMatter tweets were supportive of the general sentiment, but few focused on a larger movement
In contrast to the use of #BlackLivesMatter, posts which used #AllLivesMatter in a positive manner were less likely to connect their posts with a broader social agenda. Only 7% of the tweets using #AllLivesMatter took this position. Notably - and in contrast to the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag - #AllLivesMatter did not have a specific organization backing it or promoting its use in its early stages.

More tweets, 13%, were aimed at defending the people or organizations that were often criticized by #BlackLivesMatter - most often the police. For example, in September 2015, an account for the Office of the Lieutenant Governor of Texas Dan Patrick linked to a formal statement opposing violence toward police:

#AllLivesMatter & we must end violence against our law enforcement officers: http://t.co/zBQvznTVgT #TxLege

- Office of the Lt Gov (@LtGovTX) September 2, 2015

Another 13% of the tweets with #AllLivesMatter focused on condemning the #BlackLivesMatter movement.
One-third of tweets with #AllLivesMatter were critical of its meaning
A backlash against #AllLivesMatter developed that was just as large as the hashtag itself. In fact, 33% of the tweets that contained the hashtag were criticizing the premise of #AllLivesMatter - almost the same amount (32%) that used #AllLivesMatter in a positive light.

To critics, #AllLivesMatter was a minimization of the concerns of minorities, especially in regards to issues of police brutality and discrimination.

Syndicated columnist Arthur Chu illustrated this view on November 27, 2014:

Do people who change #BlackLivesMatter to #AllLivesMatter run thru a cancer fundraiser going "THERE ARE OTHER DISEASES TOO"

- Arthur Chu (@arthur_affect) November 27, 2014

Chu's message was retweeted more than 11,000 times.

#AllLivesMatter gets used by other movements

While the vast majority of the use of #AllLivesMatter was in reference to conversations on race, several other movements used the hashtag in different contexts.

About one-in-ten (11%) tweets with #AllLivesMatter were used by someone opposing abortion. Many of those were connected with the 2015 controversy involving videos that purported to show wrongdoing committed by the health services organization Planned Parenthood. In January 2016, one user tweeted:

Americans Need To Stand United For Life. #WeThePeople Must #DefundPP TODAY.
✞#PrayToEndAbortion#AllLivesMatter#RedNationRising#RenewUS

- Byron (@Metz_Byron) January 5, 2016

Another 7% of tweets were used to promote animal rights, sometimes in support of vegetarianism. Musician Kristin Star expressed this sentiment in November 2014:

Save Lives...Live Compassionately...Be Vegan!!! #EveryoneCounts#AllLivesMatter#HelpChangetheWorld#Life#Love#Peace#Vegan#LivePeace

- Kristin Star (@Kristin_Star) November 16, 2014

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History of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter: Social activism on Twitter

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In recent years, social media have become a common way for political groups and social movements to organize. On Twitter's 10-year anniversary, the site published a list of the most used hashtags related to social causes. Two of the top three were directly related to issues of race.

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When I hear digital
I think of hashtags

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Digital activism has transformed political protest in the last two decades. Smartphones and the internet have changed the way political events, protests and movements are organised, helping to mobilise thousands of new supporters to a diverse range of causes. With such activity becoming an everyday occurrence, new forms of digital activism are now emerging. These often bypass the existing world of politics, social movements and campaigning. Instead, they take advantage of new technologies to provide an alternative way of organising society and the economy.

We've become used to the idea of digital activism and social media being used to publicise and grow political movements, such as the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and the anti-austerity movement Occupy. Activists, such as those in recent French labour protests, can now live stream videos of their actions using apps such as Periscope while online users contribute to the debate. In Barcelona, the party of new mayor Ada Colau drew up its electoral programme with the help of over 5,000 people, in public assemblies and online, including the formation of network of cyberactivists, SomComuns.

So-called hacktivist organisations such as Anonymous regularly attack the computer networks of the rich and powerful, and even terrorist organisations such as Islamic State . The recent Panama Papers follow similar revelations by Wikileaks and Edward Snowden as examples of " leaktivism". Here, the internet is used to obtain, leak and spread confidential documents with political ramifications. The Panama leaks have led to protests forcing Iceland's prime minister to step aside and calls for similar action in the UK.

Quiet activism

All these forms of online activism are essentially designed to force change by putting political pressure on leaders and other powerful groups in the real world. But new kinds of digital activity are also attempting to change society more directly by giving individuals the ability to work and collaborate without government or corporate-run infrastructures.

First, there are quieter forms of digital activism that, rather than protesting against specific problems, provide alternative ways to access digital networks in order to avoid censorship and internet shutdowns in authoritarian regimes. This includes bringing internet access to minority and marginalised groups and poverty-stricken rural areas, such as a recent project in Sarantaporo in northern Greece.

But it also involves more unusual technological solutions. Qual.net links your phone or computer to an ad-hoc network of devices, allowing people to share information without central servers or conventional internet access. In Angola, activists have started hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and linking to them on closed Facebook groups to create a secret, free file-sharing network.

Shutterstock

Second, there are digital platforms set up as citizen, consumer or worker-run cooperatives to compete with giant technology companies. For example, Goteo is a a non-profit organisation designed to raise money for community projects. Like other crowdfunding platforms, it generates funding by encouraging lots of people to make small investments. But the rights to the projects have been made available to the community through open-source and Creative Commons licensing.

The example of the Transactive Grid in Brooklyn, New York, shows how blockchain - the technology that underpins online currencies such as Bitcoin - can be used to benefit a community. The Transactive blockchain system allows residents to sell renewable energy to each other using secure transactions without the involvement of a central energy firm, just as Bitcoin doesn't need a central bank.

These platforms also include organisations that help people to share goods, services and ideas, often so that they can design and make things in peer-to-peer networks - known as commons-based peer production. For example, fablabs are workshops that provide the knowledge and hardware to help members make products using digital manufacturing equipment.

Greater democracy and co-operation

What links these new forms of digital activism is an effort to make digital platforms more democratic, so that they are run and owned by the people that use and work for them to improve their social security and welfare. Similarly, the goods and services these platforms produce are shared for the benefit of the communities that use them. Because the platforms are built using open-source software that is freely available to anyone, they can be further shared and rebuilt to adapt to different purposes.

In this way, they may potentially provide an alternative form of production that tries to address some of the failures and inequalities of capitalism. Using open tools, currencies and contracts gives digital activists a way to push back beyond the louder activity of aggressive cyberattacks and opportunistic social media campaigns that often don't lead to real reform.

The internet has always allowed people to form new communities and share resources. But more and more groups are now turning to a different set of ideological and practical tools, creating cooperative platforms to bring about social change.

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Beyond hashtags: how a new wave of digital activists is changing society

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Digital activism has transformed political protest in the last two decades. Smartphones and the internet have changed the way political events, protests and movements are organised, helping to mobilise thousands of new supporters to a diverse range of causes. With such activity becoming an everyday occurrence, new forms of digital activism are now emerging.

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When I hear the word digital activism I think of snapchat, instagram, and facebook because there is a lot of drama that is posted on there

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Credit: Andrew Eland/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Digital activism has transformed political protest in the last two decades. Smartphones and the internet have changed the way political events, protests and movements are organised, helping to mobilise thousands of new supporters to a diverse range of causes. With such activity becoming an everyday occurrence, new forms of digital activism are now emerging. These often bypass the existing world of politics, social movements and campaigning. Instead, they take advantage of new technologies to provide an alternative way of organising society and the economy.

We've become used to the idea of digital activism and social media being used to publicise and grow political movements, such as the Arab Spring uprisings in the Middle East and the anti-austerity movement Occupy. Activists, such as those in recent French labour protests, can now live stream videos of their actions using apps such as Periscope while online users contribute to the debate. In Barcelona, the party of new mayor Ada Colau drew up its electoral programme with the help of over 5,000 people, in public assemblies and online, including the formation of network of cyberactivists, SomComuns.

So-called hacktivist organisations such as Anonymous regularly attack the computer networks of the rich and powerful, and even terrorist organisations such as Islamic State . The recent Panama Papers follow similar revelations by Wikileaks and Edward Snowdenas examples of "leaktivism". Here, the internet is used to obtain, leak and spread confidential documents with political ramifications. The Panama leaks have led to protests forcing Iceland's prime minister to step aside and calls for similar action in the UK.

Quiet activism

All these forms of online activism are essentially designed to force change by putting political pressure on leaders and other powerful groups in the real world. But new kinds of digital activity are also attempting to change society more directly by giving individuals the ability to work and collaborate without government or corporate-run infrastructures.

First, there are quieter forms of digital activism that, rather than protesting against specific problems, provide alternative ways to access digital networks in order to avoid censorship and internet shutdowns in authoritarian regimes. This includes bringing internet access to minority and marginalised groups and poverty-stricken rural areas, such as a recent project in Sarantaporo in northern Greece.

But it also involves more unusual technological solutions. Qual.net links your phone or computer to an ad-hoc network of devices, allowing people to share information without central servers or conventional internet access. In Angola, activists have started hiding pirated movies and music in Wikipedia articles and linking to them on closed Facebook groups to create a secret, free file-sharing network.

Second, there are digital platforms set up as citizen, consumer or worker-run cooperatives to compete with giant technology companies. For example, Goteo is a a non-profit organisation designed to raise money for community projects. Like other crowdfunding platforms, it generates funding by encouraging lots of people to make small investments. But the rights to the projects have been made available to the community through open-source and Creative Commons licensing.

The example of the Transactive Grid in Brooklyn, New York, shows how blockchain - the technology that underpins online currencies such as Bitcoin - can be used to benefit a community. The Transactive blockchain system allows residents to sell renewable energy to each other using secure transactions without the involvement of a central energy firm, just as Bitcoin doesn't need a central bank.

These platforms also include organisations that help people to share goods, services and ideas, often so that they can design and make things in peer-to-peer networks - known as commons-based peer production. For example, fablabs are workshops that provide the knowledge and hardware to help members make products using digital manufacturing equipment.

Greater democracy and co-operation

What links these new forms of digital activism is an effort to make digital platforms more democratic, so that they are run and owned by the people that use and work for them to improve their social security and welfare. Similarly, the goods and services these platforms produce are shared for the benefit of the communities that use them. Because the platforms are built using open-source software that is freely available to anyone, they can be further shared and rebuilt to adapt to different purposes.

In this way, they may potentially provide an alternative form of production that tries to address some of the failures and inequalities of capitalism. Using open tools, currencies and contracts gives digital activists a way to push back beyond the louder activity of aggressive cyberattacks and opportunistic social media campaigns that often don't lead to real reform.

The internet has always allowed people to form new communities and share resources. But more and more groups are now turning to a different set of ideological and practical tools, creating cooperative platforms to bring about social change.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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How a new wave of digital activists is changing society

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Digital activism has transformed political protest in the last two decades. Smartphones and the internet have changed the way political events, protests and movements are organised, helping to mobilise thousands of new supporters to a diverse range of causes. With such activity becoming an everyday occurrence, new forms of digital activism are now emerging.

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I think of violents.

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When I think of digital activism i think of people arguing in social media.

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When i hear digital activism, something that i think of right awya is Facebook, SnapChat, Instagram, because of all the drama/arguments that happen

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I think of trending hashtags and fights on social media when I hear activism

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I think of social media when i hear digital activism.

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In 2010, protests and civil war broke out across the Middle East, and social media played a huge role in raising global awareness of what was dubbed the Arab Spring. But that was just the beginning of social being used as a vehicle for activism.

While some have derided hashtag activism as ineffective, there is no denying the impact of social media in raising awareness of social issues this year. Let's take a look at some of the biggest social issues on social media during 2015.

#BlackLivesMatter
As 2014 closed, stories and unrest regarding police brutality in Ferguson and other parts of the country led to big outcry on social media. These events weren't the origin of the #BlackLivesMatter movement; however, throughout 2015, the deaths of Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray, and more recently Laquan McDonald helped give the movement more momentum. #BlackLivesMatter was Tweeted 9 million times this year, and the hashtag that started on social media, has become a social calling card for social justice and racial equality activists across the U.S.
Main image courtesy of a katz / Shutterstock.com.
Paris was the epicenter for two major terrorist attacks this year. The first was the attack on the publication Charlie Hebdo in January. In the days following the attack, the hashtag #ParisAttacks, #PrayForParis & #JeSuisCharlie
#JeSuisCharlie spread across social media and at the time, was named one of the most popular hashtags in Twitter history, with more than 5 million uses.

The second incident, a coordinated attack by gunmen and suicide bombers, took place in November and reignited global solidarity with the beloved French capital. Once again, social media users expressed their support, this time with the hashtags #PrayForParis, which was used more than 7 million times, and #PrayForParis was used more than 400,000 times, according to Amobee data. On Facebook, News Feeds were awash with profile pictures featuring the French flag or the Eiffel Tower peace symbol drawing.

#IStandWithAhmed
14-year-old Ahmed Mohamed became a symbol for the issue of American islamophobia when he was arrested for taking a homemade clock to school. Following his arrest, social media rallied using the hashtag #IStandWithAhmed as a show of support, which was used more than 300,000 times on Twitter, including one from President Obama. Mohamed was also invited to visit Facebook, and offered a scholarship to MIT and an internship at Twitter.

Worldwide Refugee Crisis
This summer, the impact of the wars in the Middle East spilled over to the rest of the world, resulting in the biggest refugee crisis since World War II. As demonstrated time and time again during crisis and natural disaster, smartphones and social media became primary means of communication and connection for refugees. When pictures of drowned Syrian children began to surface on social media, human rights activists and European citizens began demanding their governments open the gates, making #RefugeesWelcome one of the top moments on Twitter in 2015.

Twitter noted in a September blog post that in the two days after #RefugeesWelcome launched, the hashtag was used more than 180,000 times.
Image courtesy of SZERVÁC Attila. #MarriageEquality
This year brought huge victories for the marriage equality movement, with both Ireland and the U.S. legalizing same sex marriage. Following the SCOTUS decision recognizing same sex marriages nationwide, people took to social media to celebrate and more than 26 million Facebook users took advantage of the rainbow filters for their profile pictures. On Twitter, users were offered users #Pride rainbow flag and #LoveWins rainbow heart emojis; #LoveWins was used 284,730 times within the first hour after the decision.
Readers: Which social activism campaign was the most powerful of 2015?

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2015's Top 5 Social Activism Campaigns: #BlackLivesMatter, #LoveWins & More

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In 2010, protests and civil war broke out across the Middle East, and social media played a huge role in raising global awareness of what was dubbed the Arab Spring. But that was just the beginning of social being used as a vehicle for activism.

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I think of trending hashtags when I hear digital activism.

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When I think of digital activism, I remember all the big trends throughout this year and how they made a big change.

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I think of social medias when I think of activism.

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Around the country, thousands have returned to the streets again to protest the deaths of black people at the hands of the police. One of those deaths, the shooting of 32-year-old Philando Castile in Minnesota was broadcast on Facebook Live by Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, spurring the outrage that prompted people around the country to act.

The fact that an extraordinarily self-possessed user managed to deploy Facebook's live tool to broadcast a police killing seemed inevitable once it had happened. Videos of other such killings, spread by social media, have been a key driver of the Black Lives Matter movement. While Facebook's decision to privilege video, particularly video hosted on Facebook itself, in its ever-changing algorithms likely helped Reynolds's video go viral, but it also raises questions about how much power social networking sites have over politics and activism.

While social media has become integral to the work of political organizing, activists are victims of the success they've helped create for the social networks. As social networking companies become the new media giants, they've become less welcoming to the grass roots. Algorithm tweaks leave some scrambling to adapt their strategies. Harassment and trolling - particularly targeting the marginalized - drive others away. And then there is the question of whether progressive activists can trust the motives of those who control the media they use.

For activists, this presents challenges. As Malaya Davis of the Ohio Student Association notes, social media remains a particularly potent tool in "high-intensity movement moments" like now, as well as for community-building in quieter times. Yet problems emerging around the use of social media have led organizers like herself to examine their strategy.
Algorithm troubles
Online organizing persists, despite the fact that Facebook sometimes seems determined to kill it. With some 1.65 billion active users, Facebook is easily the world's largest social network, and that means that every tweak in the algorithms that decide which information its users will see can have a massive effect.

Jenni Dye, who first made her Twitter account public during the Wisconsin protests against Gov. Scott Walker's 2011 anti-union law, considers that moment a "sweet spot in the emergence of social media."

"More and more people were joining Twitter and Facebook, so it was the perfect opportunity to reach a bunch of people but not so many people that your message got drowned out," she says. Now, as an elected member of the Dane County Board of Supervisors and the research director for the nonprofit One Wisconsin Now, she finds that on social media "we've reached a point where there are so many voices that it's harder to break through that noise." Even reaching people who have already "liked" her organization's page has become a challenge.

"You have to have a lot of time to keep up with the algorithm," she adds. "If you aren't going to buy into their just-pay-to-have-your-content-seen service strategy, you have to have time then to come up with a strategy of how to work within the algorithm to still be seen." That makes it harder for new voices and new organizations to break in, Dye notes. Groups or individual users who already have a lot of friends or likes will be more likely to show up in users' news feed, generating even more clicks for them.

The recent changes in the site seem aimed at producing more revenue for Facebook - users who can't afford to pay to promote their pages often find their content hidden with only a few lonely "likes." (Facebook did not respond to multiple requests for an interview for this piece.)

"Their pushing of sponsored content has become much more aggressive over the past six months or so," says Cayden Mak, chief technology officer of 18 Million Rising, a group founded to promote civic engagement and movements within the Asian-American and Pacific Islander community. "It is really tempting, because they're like, 'For a very small amount of money you can promote your thing!' and it's in everything. When I look at Facebook on my phone during off hours it's like 'Don't you want to promote 18 Million Rising?'" Other organizers complain of event invitations being limited in an attempt, perhaps, to push them toward paid advertising.

Of particular concern to political organizers lately has been the question of whether Facebook is intentionally stifling certain topics. The site launched a new tagging system in January to help organizations better target their desired audiences, but the news broke that Black Lives Matter was not an available tag in the system. That followed on the heels of a report, citing a former Facebook "news curator," that the curators regularly suppressed conservative news, and led Facebook users once again to wonder how much control they had over their experience on the site. Facebook curators also said that they were told to "inject" selected stories into the site's trending topics.

"It does raise the question of how much of this is human control," Mak says. "It's impossible to say where humans come into the process and who those humans are, what their perspectives, understandings and biases are." Those perspectives can come into play with trending topic curation or even content moderation. "If you're reporting content to content moderators in multiple countries who don't necessarily understand, especially when we talk about the ways that we talk about race and racism in the U.S. context, it opens up this door for basically naive censorship." Posts that use certain words or imagery often get pulled, he explains, even if the words were used to describe something that happened rather than to insult, or an image had news or historical value. More questions arose when Diamond Reynolds's video of the Castile shooting disappeared from Facebook. The company originally blamed its disappearance on a "glitch," but an unconfirmed report later surfaced blaming the police.

Because it's not an arm of the government or a public utility, Facebook is under no First Amendment obligations. Under the company's Terms of Service, it can block any content it wants, but its users would like some transparency in how those choices are made. Michelle Gunderson, a teacher and member of the Chicago Teachers Union and the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators says that she's been put in " Facebook jail " (had her account blocked from posting) after a post she wrote about the education reform group Teach for America was reported.

Even so, Gunderson and the CTU teachers continue to use Facebook and have found ways to work within its algorithms. They shot one-minute videos around their April strike vote, explaining their reasons for voting to walk off the job, which were particularly successful.

Facebook has been central to the work of OUR Walmart, a group of Walmart workers who have been organizing for better working conditions at the retail giant since 2012. But they spend less time these days on their main page, using a small bit of paid promotion as a supplement to it. Unlike most of the labor movement, which still uses social mainly to push one-way messages, OUR Walmart uses Facebook groups to connect to new recruits and let workers connect with each other and realize the problems that are common across multiple stores. On the Facebook groups, "people find other people in their stores," says Cynthia Murray, one of the group's founding members. "They had no idea that they were in one of our groups."

Social media, says Andrea Dehlendorf, co-director of OUR Walmart, is "such an opportunity for workers to build power for themselves, and it requires organizations to be really open and to not fear the dialogue." The workers, not staff members, are the most effective organizers.

Ultimately, whether it makes sense for organizers to spend a lot of energy (or money) on Facebook depends on which audience they are trying to reach. Social media was an effective part of the Ohio Student Association's successful campaign against Cuyahoga County Prosector Timothy McGinty after the failure to prosecute the police officer who killed 12-year-old Tamir Rice and the botched prosecutions of other officers who killed black Cleveland residents.

"Most of the stuff that we produce online is for a specific audience, typically young people, mostly young people of color who are interested in racial and economic justice, but there are also older folks who follow us on social media," says OSU's Davis. She says people under 25 are using Facebook less and spending more time on Twitter. But Twitter comes with its own set of problems.
Twitter strife
Twitter has a troll problem. This is not news to the company - its CEO admitted in 2015, "We suck at dealing with abuse." Twitter rolled out the beginnings of a new plan for dealing with the harassment that many of its users face this year, but that hasn't stopped many of the people I spoke with for this story cutting back on their use of the site.

"It feels like the fun, the joy of Twitter has been sucked out," says Dye. In part, she notes, that's because more journalists are actually using Twitter to report news, and there's also been a flood of corporate accounts using Twitter for brand-building. "On the other hand," she notes, "there is also a rise in everyday users and that has resulted in a rise of the same culture that we see everywhere on the internet, whether it's Twitter or Facebook or the comments section in your local newspaper. People say horrible things on the internet that they would never say in person."

The British think tank Demos (not to be confused with the U.S.-based organization by the same name) ran a study mapping thousands of tweets and "found 6,500 unique users were targeted by 10,000 explicitly aggressive and misogynistic tweets." They filtered tweets to attempt to avoid the kind of "naive censorship" Mak mentions, attempting to identify which tweets were genuinely abusive. They also noted that despite the study focusing specifically on misogynist abuse, 50 percent of the propagators of such tweets were women. Abuse, Mak notes, is certainly not specific to Twitter and certain other platforms, like Tumblr, "but it is endemic to those platforms."

Even aside from the question of trolls, Twitter has just become more work. Gunderson and her teachers' union colleagues have begun spending more time attending events and public meetings and live-tweeting them.

Because journalists rely on Twitter during "movement moments," Davis says there's a tendency for the media to anoint movement "leaders" based on their Twitter presence, which doesn't always reflect their actual status. She also noted the recent decision of the Dream Defenders, an organization of young people of color that grew out of the protests after the death of Trayvon Martin, to have a " social media blackout " to reconsider the role of social media in their work.

"I do not mean to send the message that the internet is not a powerful tool for our movement or that digital organizing doesn't matter," wrote Dream Defenders Chief of Strategy Rachel Gilmer on the organization's blog after the blackout. "However, we must recognize that the internet in and of itself is not a democratizing force and should not replace community-owned media outlets. As much as we would like to believe otherwise, the purpose of social media is to collect data and sell advertising space to corporations so we buy their stuff and build their power."
Whose media? Our media
The importance of controlling the media you use is not lost on any of the organizers. OUR Walmart is working on building its own platform for just that reason. Social media has allowed the independent nonprofit to function on a shoestring budget, particularly after the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which had backed the organization, cut its funding in 2015. So now the group is thinking of making its own.

The goal is to create a platform that belongs to the workers, not to a massive corporation. "What we're trying to figure out is how do you add a new space online that is really devoted to workers helping each other," says Dehlendorf. "Workers themselves have a tremendous amount of accumulated knowledge and skill and experience if we're just able to use technology to connect them to the people who have big needs."

OUR Walmart is building an app that would allow for Walmart workers not only to organize but also to connect to a group of "peer advisers" who can answer questions about Walmart policy and legal rights, and propose ways to handle problems. If the app works, Dehlendorf says her group will make it available to other worker organizations.

For now, however, Facebook and Twitter are the dominant social media and potential drivers of political behavior. In 2014, a Pew study found that 16 percent of registered voters followed candidates or other political figures on social media, and voters who use social media were more likely to volunteer for a campaign or candidate. In a January 2016 Pew survey, 14 percent of respondents said they found social media "most helpful" in learning about the election, a figure that more than doubled - to 35 percent - for those aged 18 through 29. Facebook was by far the most common site for getting election-related information.

This year, days before the deadline, Facebook sent a May 16 reminder to Californians to register to vote. It prompted the second-highest online registration activity in the site's four-year history, according to California Secretary of State Alex Padilla.

As Micah Sifry wrote in 2014, Facebook has experimented with the effectiveness of such tools for increasing voter turnout - one experiment tweaked the feeds of 1.9 million users to contain more hard-news stories, and its researchers claimed a measurable increase in voter turnout thanks to its actions. But, Sifry noted, if the company is not going to be transparent about its experiments, such power is cause for concern rather than celebration. "Using those tools, national political campaigns, building on the Obama 2012 reelection effort, are learning how to 'engineer the public' without the public's knowledge, as sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has warned," Sifry wrote.

Facebook's new tools for electioneering are likely to make the company big bucks from the major presidential candidates and high-profile congressional races. But for local candidates, it's a very different story. "For Hillary Clinton, Facebook targeting is definitely going to work for her campaign. If you're running for governor, Facebook targeting is going to work for your campaign," says Jenni Dye. "Even if you're running for a state senate seat, you're probably going to be able to utilize Facebook targeting." On the Dane County Board of Supervisors, "my district is part of a ZIP code," she says. "I don't have all of my city, so how do I target it down to those people at a price point that is reasonable for somebody who is running a local election?"

In 2011, she says, social media was much more helpful, but now, its emphasis on pay-for-play services combined with the imprecision of its tools at the hyper-local level means it's much less useful for her. And because campaigns like hers are unlikely to have lots of money to spend, Facebook has little incentive to develop targeting that will work for people like Dye. Instead, she finds herself using email to ask people to share a post on Facebook. "I have to actually purposefully activate my network to activate theirs. It's like the Facebook version of a phone tree," she says.

Social media may, as Cayden Mak notes, be closer and closer to simply becoming mainstream media these days, but that makes it paradoxically harder for organizers to avoid. The past week's uprisings around the country have underscored how important it is. "I don't know what the next 10 years looks like for traditional organizing but I know that social media is definitely going to be taking a larger role in it than what we are even experiencing now," Davis says. "It's in our best interests to figure out how do we move this to the best of our ability to build the power that we need."

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Activism moves to Facebook: Why what's good for social media might not be so good for democracy

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Around the country, thousands have returned to the streets again to protest the deaths of black people at the hands of the police. One of those deaths, the shooting of 32-year-old Philando Castile in Minnesota was broadcast on Facebook Live by Castile's girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, spurring the outrage that prompted people around the country to act.

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Increasing accessibility and the ability to communicate with thousands of citizens quickly has made the internet a tool of choice for individuals or organisations looking to spread a social message far and wide.

Independent activists the world over are using the internet and digital tools to build their community, connect with other similar-minded people outside their physical surroundings as well as lobby, raise funds and organise events.

Simply put, digital activism is where digital tools (the internet, mobile phones, social media etc) are used for bringing about social and/or political change. Examples of digital activism are scattered throughout the '80s however, things started to really snowball with the advent of web 2.0 and the dot com boom. The introduction and rapid growth of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter from 2004 onwards helped buttress digital activism to the point where entire campaigns can now be run online (sometimes with little to no offline component) and still have a wide reach.

A good timeline of digital activism around the world can be found here.

The Tools

The tools used by digital activists are vast and changing constantly as technology evolves.

Online petitions. Websites such as , ipetitions.org, are hubs of online activism, where people can communicate with others worldwide regarding their cause.

Social networks. Sites with high usage numbers such as Facebook and YouTube have proven beneficial in spreading a message, garnering support, shining information on a subject that might otherwise be overlooked by mainstream media. Protests in 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt against their respective governments were in part organised and promoted via Facebook. Social media also played a role in mobilising people in Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests in 2019, as well as connecting environmental activists around the world as part of Extinction Rebellion or Fridays for Future.

Blogs. Essentially a form of citizen journalism for the masses, blogs provide an effective means of non-filtered communication with an audience about any topic and have been used in numerous online campaigns.

Micro-blogging. Micro-blogging sites such as Twitter are used to help spread awareness of an issue or activist event. Twitter's hashtag function, which allows people to have their tweets contribute to a multi-user conversation by typing a keyword or phrase preceded by a hashtag, is used frequently as a digital tool for spreading a message. The Chinese equivalent to Twitter, Weibo is subject to scrupulous government censorship however people circumvent this blockade by using code words when writing about issues that might be government-sensitive. Other massive movements to hit the mainstream, such as #metoo, #blacklivesmatter and #fridaysforfuture, made use of the hashtag to spread a concept rapidly around the world using social media as a tool for resistance and disruption.

Mobile phones. Controversy surrounding the 2007 presidential elections in Kenya led to the introduction of Ushahidi Inc., a company which developed a piece of software that allowed people to send texts and pictures of violence following the elections which were plotted geographically on a Google map. The software has since been used to plot activity in disaster zones following earthquakes in Haiti and New Zealand and flooding in Australia and the USA. Furthermore, the built in camera featured on most mobile phones has resulted in dramatic changes to how we respond to global events, and broadcast evidence to uphold social justice (such as documenting police brutality, political protests, etc.)

Proxy servers. As a means of circumventing government intervention when it comes to online protesting, many people employ proxy servers, which act as intermediaries between a user and a site. In 2009, student protesters in Iran took to social media to voice their concern over the contentious reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This led to a cat and mouse game of the government trying to identify which media were being used by the protesters to communicate (social networks and then eventually proxy servers) and shutting them down.

Crowdsourcing platforms. Using the internet to distribute problem-solving and resource acquisition, these platforms help individuals and initiatives to mobilize a global community and create collaboration opportunities between groups of (otherwise) unconnected people. is a good example, as well as popular collective funding platforms such as Kickstarter and .

Getting the Message out There

One of the biggest benefits of using digital tools for positive change is the ability to connect with a large community and, if applicable, globalise a campaign's goals. The interconnected nature of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter lend themselves easily to information sharing, meaning an activist can post a slogan, picture or details about an issue, share it with friends, plug into like-minded online communities and distribute info through their networks in a much less time and energy-consuming way than more traditional methods of going door-to-door or standing on street corners and asking passers-by to sign petitions.

Some of the most successful movements make use of social media and online activity to rally support and then combine this with ''leg work'' on the ground, not just talking the talk, but also walking the walk. The 2019 climate strike movement is an incredibly successful example of this combination of online and offline activism. Rallying behind Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future, millions of citizens all over the world have mobilise to address the climate crisis and support environmental activism.

Beyond getting the message out there, digital activism allows anyone with access to the digital world a platform to make their case and call for change and it can be particularly beneficial to those who are often silenced or have no vehicle for their message. By allowing ordinary citizens to share their stories, it also helps create a better perspective of what is going on - and can pressure governments to take action on issues that are not normally reported on within conventional media.

In April 2014, for example, Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped more than 300 girls from a school in northern Nigeria. Some 50 girls managed to escape but 276 remained captured prompting an international outcry that was largely funnelled into a social media campaign to lobby governments to intervene. The topic #BringBackOurGirls went viral within a week, with people like activist Malala Yousafzai and US First Lady, Michelle Obama, tweeting their support. The rapid fire rate that the hashtag #BringBack OurGirls shot across the internet helped galvanise public support for the families of the girls while the case drew attention from the international media and heads of state offered to help Nigeria find and bring back the missing girls.

Another pertinent example of this is the massive upswell in the use of #BlackLivesMatter to motivate and unite a global movement against police violence, and more broadly, the ongoing challenge of systemic racism, following the killing of George Floyd on May 26th, 2020. After footage of the injustice was shared on social media, it quickly spread, ultimately inciting anti-racism demonstrations in over 60 countries worldwide. Social media continues to play a vital role in documenting the protests, publishing demonstrations of support, promoting donation and allyship opportunities and generally spreading information that the general public may otherwise have been unaware of. Overlapping with the coronavirus pandemic, this latest phase in the Black Lives Matter social movement came at a time when people were already relying on digital tools more than ever to carry out their day to day lives - and some were completely unable to leave their houses to protest in person. This was possibly a factor in why the movement developed online as fast and as strongly as it did, spreading through and connecting a global network of activists, largely via social media.

When social movements and demonstrations are criticising the status quo - such as the police force, racist social structures and historical inequalities - digital forms of media often hold a particlar power because they allow for a greater variety of voices to be heard than would be reflected in traditional media outlets. Writing about the blurring of offline and online activism that occurred in the US following the shooting of African American teenager Michael Brown, founder and director of the Meta-Activism Project, Mary Joyce, stated: "just like any other kind of activism, digital activism is only necessary when conventional methods of addressing injustice fail. "[I]nternet campaigns calling for justice" are only necessary for those whom the existing system does not serve."

Where digital activism often enjoys the biggest success however, is when it is used as a complementary tool to offline action or is used as the introductory method to encourage people to engage in offline action. One of the other key attributes of digital activism is that it is, for the large part, a non-violent form of protest. Acts of cyber crime are certainly committed under the guise of 'digital activism' (for example, cases of cyberterrorism, malicious hacking and extreme cyber bullying of a company or organisation) however, according to a study by the University of Washington, these make up around two to three percent of total digital activism cases.

Reduced to a Hashtag: Clicktivism and the Threat of Too Many Messages

Generally speaking, clicking like on someone's Facebook post or retweeting a trending hashtag on Twitter requires less effort and less forethought than signing (or setting up) a petition or joining in a demonstration on the streets. Because of this, digital activism has come under fire with some arguing that much of the online engagement in issues is too reductive and passive, defining this new era of activism as 'clicktivism', 'slacktivism' and 'armchair activism'.

Detractors of digital activism point out that it requires people to do the bare minimum to engage in a topic (while allowing them to score some virtual brownie points for their 'good deed'). Messages and ideals can get brushed aside in the push for more clicks, likes, impressions and page views when campaigning online and the information superhighway is now bumper-to-bumper with causes and campaigns which can make it difficult for any of them to achieve meaningful impact. Just like with traditional media, a lot of the time, certain campaigns and causes only start to gain momentum once a prominent individual or organisation picks up on it.

One of the biggest digital campaigns in recent years took place in summer 2014 in support of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. The campaign featured videos of people, including a number of global celebrities, tipping buckets of ice water over themselves before nominating three other people to do the same. As part of what was called the 'ALS Ice Bucket Challenge', challengees were asked to make a donation to the ALS Association or other ALS non-profit.

The web-friendly nature of the campaign (the use of videos, the involvement of celebrities as well as nominating others to do the challenge, thereby ensuring the spread of the campaign) saw it weave through the web quickly with more than 2 million video uploaded to Facebook and over 3 million up in Instagram, dominating social media feeds as well as online and offline media. The challenge helped raise 220 million USD globally for ALS yet drew criticism from some about the fact that the serious aspects of the campaign (the disease) were buried under jaunty, jovial videos of people dousing themselves in cold water. Some iterations of the challenge meant that those taking part did not have to make a donation while a number of videos uploaded made no mention of ALS at all.

Similarly, the efficacy of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign mentioned above has been called into question with the girls still in the hands of Boko Haram. An article published by Al Jazeera in 2014 highlights that despite the huge level of awareness raised about the kidnapping, to date, little has been done to successfully bring the girls back. In the article, protest coordinator Hadiza Bala Usman stated "People need to remember that 219 girls remain in captivity. We appreciate the fact that the media propelled a lot of support around the world, but that support has not translated into any rescue. For us, if whatever is said and done doesn't translate into the rescue of the girls, it hasn't really achieved anything." The reaction on social media to the girls' kidnapping was sharp and swift but attention dropped off as other campaigns and issues (such as the ALS challenge) took precedence. As stated in an article by the BBC about the ice bucket challenge, "our mental budget for charity is finite".

Co-creator of the Occupy Wall Street protests (which called for an end to social and economic inequality and challenged the amount of corporate influence on government) Micah White has argued that this passivity is undermining traditional forms of activism. In a 2010 piece for the Guardian, he wrote: "The truth is that as the novelty of online activism wears off, millions of formerly socially engaged individuals who trusted digital organisations are coming away believing in the impotence of all forms of activism. Even leading Bay Area clicktivist organisations are finding it increasingly difficult to motivate their members to any action whatsoever. The insider truth is that the vast majority, between 80% to 90%, of so-called members rarely even open campaign emails. Clicktivists are to blame for alienating a generation of would-be activists with their ineffectual campaigns that resemble marketing."

The 24 hour news cycle coupled with the breakneck pace at which we learn of, digest and move on from certain issues can often mean that issues and campaigns can run hot across the web one day and vanish the next.

Computer Literacy, Internet Accessibility, Censorship and Mobile Campaigning

Of course, a number of factors come strongly into play here regarding who can get involved and how, particularly in parts of the world where access to the internet and digital literacy skills are low or where web activity is highly monitored and often interrupted by the government and authorities.

To help circumvent issues around digital literacy and access to the web, activists use technology and media that has high penetration in some of these areas. For example, the number of people who regularly use the Internet in India hovers around the 560 million mark. Based on these figures, there are some who argue that precedence should be given to mobile campaigning in India (which has already had success when used during blood donation drives) given that 74 per cent of the population uses mobile phones.

As mentioned earlier, many activists in China use coded language in order to dodge the heavy censorship laws in the country. In 2014, as the 25 th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests approached, officials placed strict limits and blocks on any online activity or searches relating to the anniversary or the event itself. To get around this, the online community went covert, employing actions such as wearing a black shirt, replacing the protest's date (June 4 1989) with May 35 in online activity and photoshopping giant yellow ducks over the tanks in the iconic Tank Man photo and spreading that online. This endless cat-and-mouse game, whereby censors try to keep up with the codes and ban them, could result in action and codes becoming so obscure that they have reduced impact, as a 2014 article in the MIT Technology Review pointed out.

Measuring Success

The success of online and digital activism can be difficult to determine. Mary Joyce, founder of DigiActive and Meta-Activism Project, states that overall success can be perceived if the activist's initial campaign goal was achieved. However, in many cases of online activism, the goal of the online components may have been achieved (awareness building, mobilization of people) while the overall goal of the campaign was not. This trend leaves the field ripe for argument from critics of online activism to discuss the validity of it as a movement.

The larger-scale campaigns get the attention of the media, however smaller-scale campaigns can be just as effective and often meet their goals. Examples of this include non-profit organisations using online platforms to raise funds for a cause or corporations withdrawing advertising or as a result of online backlash and petitions.

While digital activism has a lot to offer the savvy campaigner, it also does sometimes have limitations as to how much effective change it can generate. With this in mind, it is worth considering that all online activity should be coupled with offline activity in order to have greater impact.
Last update: May 2020 (Kristine Mitchell)

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Increasing accessibility and the ability to communicate with thousands of citizens quickly has made the internet a tool of choice for individuals or organisations looking to spread a social message far and wide.

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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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When I think of digital activism I think of cyber bullying.

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Increasing accessibility and the ability to communicate with thousands of citizens quickly has made the internet a tool of choice for individuals or organisations looking to spread a social message far and wide.

Independent activists the world over are using the internet and digital tools to build their community, connect with other similar-minded people outside their physical surroundings as well as lobby, raise funds and organise events.

Simply put, digital activism is where digital tools (the internet, mobile phones, social media etc) are used for bringing about social and/or political change. Examples of digital activism are scattered throughout the '80s however, things started to really snowball with the advent of web 2.0 and the dot com boom. The introduction and rapid growth of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter from 2004 onwards helped buttress digital activism to the point where entire campaigns can now be run online (sometimes with little to no offline component) and still have a wide reach.

A good timeline of digital activism around the world can be found here.

The Tools

The tools used by digital activists are vast and changing constantly as technology evolves.

Online petitions. Websites such as , ipetitions.org, are hubs of online activism, where people can communicate with others worldwide regarding their cause.

Social networks. Sites with high usage numbers such as Facebook and YouTube have proven beneficial in spreading a message, garnering support, shining information on a subject that might otherwise be overlooked by mainstream media. Protests in 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt against their respective governments were in part organised and promoted via Facebook. Social media also played a role in mobilising people in Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests in 2019, as well as connecting environmental activists around the world as part of Extinction Rebellion or Fridays for Future.

Blogs. Essentially a form of citizen journalism for the masses, blogs provide an effective means of non-filtered communication with an audience about any topic and have been used in numerous online campaigns.

Micro-blogging. Micro-blogging sites such as Twitter are used to help spread awareness of an issue or activist event. Twitter's hashtag function, which allows people to have their tweets contribute to a multi-user conversation by typing a keyword or phrase preceded by a hashtag, is used frequently as a digital tool for spreading a message. The Chinese equivalent to Twitter, Weibo is subject to scrupulous government censorship however people circumvent this blockade by using code words when writing about issues that might be government-sensitive. Other massive movements to hit the mainstream, such as #metoo, #blacklivesmatter and #fridaysforfuture, made use of the hashtag to spread a concept rapidly around the world using social media as a tool for resistance and disruption.

Mobile phones. Controversy surrounding the 2007 presidential elections in Kenya led to the introduction of Ushahidi Inc., a company which developed a piece of software that allowed people to send texts and pictures of violence following the elections which were plotted geographically on a Google map. The software has since been used to plot activity in disaster zones following earthquakes in Haiti and New Zealand and flooding in Australia and the USA. Furthermore, the built in camera featured on most mobile phones has resulted in dramatic changes to how we respond to global events, and broadcast evidence to uphold social justice (such as documenting police brutality, political protests, etc.)

Proxy servers. As a means of circumventing government intervention when it comes to online protesting, many people employ proxy servers, which act as intermediaries between a user and a site. In 2009, student protesters in Iran took to social media to voice their concern over the contentious reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This led to a cat and mouse game of the government trying to identify which media were being used by the protesters to communicate (social networks and then eventually proxy servers) and shutting them down.

Crowdsourcing platforms. Using the internet to distribute problem-solving and resource acquisition, these platforms help individuals and initiatives to mobilize a global community and create collaboration opportunities between groups of (otherwise) unconnected people. is a good example, as well as popular collective funding platforms such as Kickstarter and .

Getting the Message out There

One of the biggest benefits of using digital tools for positive change is the ability to connect with a large community and, if applicable, globalise a campaign's goals. The interconnected nature of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter lend themselves easily to information sharing, meaning an activist can post a slogan, picture or details about an issue, share it with friends, plug into like-minded online communities and distribute info through their networks in a much less time and energy-consuming way than more traditional methods of going door-to-door or standing on street corners and asking passers-by to sign petitions.

Some of the most successful movements make use of social media and online activity to rally support and then combine this with ''leg work'' on the ground, not just talking the talk, but also walking the walk. The 2019 climate strike movement is an incredibly successful example of this combination of online and offline activism. Rallying behind Greta Thunberg and Fridays for Future, millions of citizens all over the world have mobilise to address the climate crisis and support environmental activism.

Beyond getting the message out there, digital activism allows anyone with access to the digital world a platform to make their case and call for change and it can be particularly beneficial to those who are often silenced or have no vehicle for their message. By allowing ordinary citizens to share their stories, it also helps create a better perspective of what is going on - and can pressure governments to take action on issues that are not normally reported on within conventional media.

In April 2014, for example, Boko Haram terrorists kidnapped more than 300 girls from a school in northern Nigeria. Some 50 girls managed to escape but 276 remained captured prompting an international outcry that was largely funnelled into a social media campaign to lobby governments to intervene. The topic #BringBackOurGirls went viral within a week, with people like activist Malala Yousafzai and US First Lady, Michelle Obama, tweeting their support. The rapid fire rate that the hashtag #BringBack OurGirls shot across the internet helped galvanise public support for the families of the girls while the case drew attention from the international media and heads of state offered to help Nigeria find and bring back the missing girls.

Another pertinent example of this is the massive upswell in the use of #BlackLivesMatter to motivate and unite a global movement against police violence, and more broadly, the ongoing challenge of systemic racism, following the killing of George Floyd on May 26th, 2020. After footage of the injustice was shared on social media, it quickly spread, ultimately inciting anti-racism demonstrations in over 60 countries worldwide. Social media continues to play a vital role in documenting the protests, publishing demonstrations of support, promoting donation and allyship opportunities and generally spreading information that the general public may otherwise have been unaware of. Overlapping with the coronavirus pandemic, this latest phase in the Black Lives Matter social movement came at a time when people were already relying on digital tools more than ever to carry out their day to day lives - and some were completely unable to leave their houses to protest in person. This was possibly a factor in why the movement developed online as fast and as strongly as it did, spreading through and connecting a global network of activists, largely via social media.

When social movements and demonstrations are criticising the status quo - such as the police force, racist social structures and historical inequalities - digital forms of media often hold a particlar power because they allow for a greater variety of voices to be heard than would be reflected in traditional media outlets. Writing about the blurring of offline and online activism that occurred in the US following the shooting of African American teenager Michael Brown, founder and director of the Meta-Activism Project, Mary Joyce, stated: "just like any other kind of activism, digital activism is only necessary when conventional methods of addressing injustice fail. "[I]nternet campaigns calling for justice" are only necessary for those whom the existing system does not serve."

Where digital activism often enjoys the biggest success however, is when it is used as a complementary tool to offline action or is used as the introductory method to encourage people to engage in offline action. One of the other key attributes of digital activism is that it is, for the large part, a non-violent form of protest. Acts of cyber crime are certainly committed under the guise of 'digital activism' (for example, cases of cyberterrorism, malicious hacking and extreme cyber bullying of a company or organisation) however, according to a study by the University of Washington, these make up around two to three percent of total digital activism cases.

Reduced to a Hashtag: Clicktivism and the Threat of Too Many Messages

Generally speaking, clicking like on someone's Facebook post or retweeting a trending hashtag on Twitter requires less effort and less forethought than signing (or setting up) a petition or joining in a demonstration on the streets. Because of this, digital activism has come under fire with some arguing that much of the online engagement in issues is too reductive and passive, defining this new era of activism as 'clicktivism', 'slacktivism' and 'armchair activism'.

Detractors of digital activism point out that it requires people to do the bare minimum to engage in a topic (while allowing them to score some virtual brownie points for their 'good deed'). Messages and ideals can get brushed aside in the push for more clicks, likes, impressions and page views when campaigning online and the information superhighway is now bumper-to-bumper with causes and campaigns which can make it difficult for any of them to achieve meaningful impact. Just like with traditional media, a lot of the time, certain campaigns and causes only start to gain momentum once a prominent individual or organisation picks up on it.

One of the biggest digital campaigns in recent years took place in summer 2014 in support of Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease. The campaign featured videos of people, including a number of global celebrities, tipping buckets of ice water over themselves before nominating three other people to do the same. As part of what was called the 'ALS Ice Bucket Challenge', challengees were asked to make a donation to the ALS Association or other ALS non-profit.

The web-friendly nature of the campaign (the use of videos, the involvement of celebrities as well as nominating others to do the challenge, thereby ensuring the spread of the campaign) saw it weave through the web quickly with more than 2 million video uploaded to Facebook and over 3 million up in Instagram, dominating social media feeds as well as online and offline media. The challenge helped raise 220 million USD globally for ALS yet drew criticism from some about the fact that the serious aspects of the campaign (the disease) were buried under jaunty, jovial videos of people dousing themselves in cold water. Some iterations of the challenge meant that those taking part did not have to make a donation while a number of videos uploaded made no mention of ALS at all.

Similarly, the efficacy of the #BringBackOurGirls campaign mentioned above has been called into question with the girls still in the hands of Boko Haram. An article published by Al Jazeera in 2014 highlights that despite the huge level of awareness raised about the kidnapping, to date, little has been done to successfully bring the girls back. In the article, protest coordinator Hadiza Bala Usman stated "People need to remember that 219 girls remain in captivity. We appreciate the fact that the media propelled a lot of support around the world, but that support has not translated into any rescue. For us, if whatever is said and done doesn't translate into the rescue of the girls, it hasn't really achieved anything." The reaction on social media to the girls' kidnapping was sharp and swift but attention dropped off as other campaigns and issues (such as the ALS challenge) took precedence. As stated in an article by the BBC about the ice bucket challenge, "our mental budget for charity is finite".

Co-creator of the Occupy Wall Street protests (which called for an end to social and economic inequality and challenged the amount of corporate influence on government) Micah White has argued that this passivity is undermining traditional forms of activism. In a 2010 piece for the Guardian, he wrote: "The truth is that as the novelty of online activism wears off, millions of formerly socially engaged individuals who trusted digital organisations are coming away believing in the impotence of all forms of activism. Even leading Bay Area clicktivist organisations are finding it increasingly difficult to motivate their members to any action whatsoever. The insider truth is that the vast majority, between 80% to 90%, of so-called members rarely even open campaign emails. Clicktivists are to blame for alienating a generation of would-be activists with their ineffectual campaigns that resemble marketing."

The 24 hour news cycle coupled with the breakneck pace at which we learn of, digest and move on from certain issues can often mean that issues and campaigns can run hot across the web one day and vanish the next.

Computer Literacy, Internet Accessibility, Censorship and Mobile Campaigning

Of course, a number of factors come strongly into play here regarding who can get involved and how, particularly in parts of the world where access to the internet and digital literacy skills are low or where web activity is highly monitored and often interrupted by the government and authorities.

To help circumvent issues around digital literacy and access to the web, activists use technology and media that has high penetration in some of these areas. For example, the number of people who regularly use the Internet in India hovers around the 560 million mark. Based on these figures, there are some who argue that precedence should be given to mobile campaigning in India (which has already had success when used during blood donation drives) given that 74 per cent of the population uses mobile phones.

As mentioned earlier, many activists in China use coded language in order to dodge the heavy censorship laws in the country. In 2014, as the 25 th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests approached, officials placed strict limits and blocks on any online activity or searches relating to the anniversary or the event itself. To get around this, the online community went covert, employing actions such as wearing a black shirt, replacing the protest's date (June 4 1989) with May 35 in online activity and photoshopping giant yellow ducks over the tanks in the iconic Tank Man photo and spreading that online. This endless cat-and-mouse game, whereby censors try to keep up with the codes and ban them, could result in action and codes becoming so obscure that they have reduced impact, as a 2014 article in the MIT Technology Review pointed out.

Measuring Success

The success of online and digital activism can be difficult to determine. Mary Joyce, founder of DigiActive and Meta-Activism Project, states that overall success can be perceived if the activist's initial campaign goal was achieved. However, in many cases of online activism, the goal of the online components may have been achieved (awareness building, mobilization of people) while the overall goal of the campaign was not. This trend leaves the field ripe for argument from critics of online activism to discuss the validity of it as a movement.

The larger-scale campaigns get the attention of the media, however smaller-scale campaigns can be just as effective and often meet their goals. Examples of this include non-profit organisations using online platforms to raise funds for a cause or corporations withdrawing advertising or as a result of online backlash and petitions.

While digital activism has a lot to offer the savvy campaigner, it also does sometimes have limitations as to how much effective change it can generate. With this in mind, it is worth considering that all online activity should be coupled with offline activity in order to have greater impact.
Last update: May 2020 (Kristine Mitchell)

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Increasing accessibility and the ability to communicate with thousands of citizens quickly has made the internet a tool of choice for individuals or organisations looking to spread a social message far and wide.

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I think of Guns when it comes to Violent activism.

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When I hear digital activism, I think of how people want to help and/or stop something.

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I think of hashtags when I think digital activism

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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...