Benefits of social media activism

One of the main ways social media has transformed activism is through significantly increasing the reach of participants. Suddenly, anyone has full access to the entire world with just the click of a button or swipe of a finger. Protestors do not have to be on the streets shouting or holding signs in order to get attention, all they have to do is post something or stream something and they will get their messages across. Tufekci (2012) speaks to this when he says, ‘Social media have greatly empowered protestors [movements] in three key areas: public attention, evading censorship, and coordination or logistics’ (Tufekci, 2012, p.2). Protestors are able to captivate and engage with larger audiences than ever before. Movements that may have been in the hundreds or occupying one city before social media, have become global with millions of participants who are for the cause. The freedom of speech as well that exists through social media platforms protects participants and enables them to say what they truly feel without interference of those who are against their cause. As opposed to activism in the past where there were few media outlets like newspapers which many times were owned or controlled by those against the messages people wanted to disperse, protestors now have the ability to choose their platform and their message and still ensure that millions hear what they have to say.

Logistically and in terms of coordination, social media is second to none because it facilitates easy and effective organization as well as the gathering of useful data about participants, their feelings about the movement and the reaction of audiences to what is being said.

This element of organization is one of the most talked about benefits of social media and rightfully so because socially media makes organization much easier and much cheaper

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than ever before. People are able to create messages and send them to millions within minutes or events on Facebook and inviting entire groups or fried lists which can then do the same with their groups or friend lists also in minutes. Indeed, a powerful argument has emerged that social media are becoming increasingly integral to “organizational communication processes because they afford behaviors that were difficult or impossible to achieve in combination before these new technologies [… were introduced and] may alter socialization, knowledge sharing, and power processes in organizations” (Treem &

Leonardi, 2012). This has allowed movements to not only increase their reach, it has allowed them to increase their capacity for change and therefore has increased both their chances of change and demands for change (Navarro, Martínez-García, and Fernández, 2018). In increasing their reach, they increase the awareness of their movement. “With their popular appeal and multimodal affordances commercial social media have reinvigorated hopes for the potential of the Internet for providing social movements with new possibilities for increased visibility” (Uldam, 2018, p.41).

Through this increased visibility, they have access to more opportunities and also can become more trusted. When people trust an organization or movement, they are more likely to support it and participate. Research states that “events in recent years have shown that new media technologies have not only increased the civic engagement of citizens around the world, but have also facilitated greater activism” (Ahuja, Patel, and Suh, 2018, p. 2203). These authors reference the increase in participation in some of the most dangerous and risky movements worldwide for example, the platform Moveon.org which was able to mobilize over three million members in a campaign against the Iraq War through online platforms; Indignados in Madrid fighting for social justice, Occupy Wall Street which saw huge success and took place in New York (Constanza-Chock, 2012), and the movement in Egypt to overthrow an autocratic regime.(Ahuja, Patel, and Suh, 2018) There are movements growing all over the world and the participants are increasing by the day thanks to social media and the utilization of the tool by those working on behalf of the movements.

The impact and potential impact that social media activism (SMA) has on the future of society and politics ensures that it will continue to be used and developed for generations to come. As technology evolves, social media will evolve, and as social media evolves, social media activism will evolve accordingly. Another thing that is evolving is government and political systems around the world. “Just as the character of social

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activism and civic engagement is evolving, so are the strategies and techniques of governmentality” (Poell and Van Dijck, 2016, p. 229). Every aspect of social movements and those affected are changing with time and many of those changes are simply reactions to changes within the other elements in motion. Social movements need to ensure that they keep up with the changes in order to maintain its advantages.

Another key advantage of social media and beneficial characteristic of social media as a tool in social movements, is its flexibility. The fact also that one movement can exist across multiple platforms with different features, elements and even audiences also helps to expand the movement, its message, increase reach, participation and also impact.

“Digital activism on social media has different narrative forms because narrative conventions may differ from platform to platform” (Yang, C. 2016, p. 14). Thus, even the narrative is increased or flexible within the main goal and points of the movement which allows for increased understanding and appeal of the movement by multiple audiences who can relate.

Another key benefit of social media usage is that is allows for more leadership within the organization of the movement and less movement “leaders”. There is less focus on titles and hierarchy and more focus on the message and change. This gives more accountability and more shared responsibility to every single participant than traditional movements. In comparing traditional movements with modern movements using social media, it is evident that

“new social movements that are arranged in more flexible and informal ways are distinguished from labor movements in terms of their organizational structures.

Respectively, this nature of new social movements necessitates more fragmented, atomized, and multipartite participation and activism forms. In this sense, social media activism performed via social networking sites has emerged one of the most significant and newest participation channels in the movements” (Ravanoğlu Yilmaz, 2017, p. 148).

Because of this, and the success this way of activism has had, it is certain that social media will continue to be used by movements that exist now and those that will exist eventually.

And although social media will be utilized in current and future movements, many people are still strangely sceptical about whether it is actually impactful. It has certainly been

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noted that internet-enabled action in social movements has received an increasing amount of attention lately, especially in regard to its capacity to either facilitate or undermine social change (Wilkins et al., 2019). There have been very mixed views and reviews of social media activism. Some are certain it is not helpful; others believe it is a very useful tool, others think it is valuable sometimes and then there are those who are simply unsure about whether or not it is beneficial.

One thing that was evident in the research done is that social media platforms have become essential tools for almost all, if not all, 21st-century social movements (Mundt, Ross, and Burnett 2018). Many authors, scholars and activists are therefore studying its use in movements, how it can be beneficial, and also how it can be disadvantageous to movements. However in observing the research that has been done so far on the topic, it was observed that a lot of the publications in this subject area were based more on the opinions of authors rather than actual hard data gathered from experiments (Shirky, 2011;

Chatelain and Asoka, 2015; Garcia and Ferré Pavia, 2015; Cohen and Jackson, 2016;

Taylor, 2016; Rickford, 2016; Hoffman et al., 2016; Micó and Carbonell, 2017; Dowling, 2017). This is partly due to the fact that social media activism is still fairly new (just about 10 years old) and also due to the fact that it is extremely difficult to study this field because determining the impact of social media in isolation is almost impossible when multiple factors come into play within a movement. There are not many useful statistics that can be measured, analysed or weighed because on any given platform, the social media tools are various and serve multiple purposes, the tools within the different platforms act in tandem with other tools both online and offline, and people’s feelings are not always factual or a reflection of reality.

It was also observed that the majority of literature observed actually focused on Twitter as a Social Media platform as opposed to Facebook. This was most likely due to the fact that Twitter provides users with access to data and its data collection tool feature which allows anyone to view statistics for different hashtags, tweets, and users. As the information is already collected, all researchers have to do is analyse the data and many have taken advantage of that opportunity (Esteve del Valle and Bravo, 2018; Campbell, 2018; Guerrero-Solé, 2017; Taulé et al., 2017; Puig Abril, 2017; Bosco et al., 2016;

Balcells and Padró-Solanet, 2016; Alonso-Muñoz, Miquel Segarra, and Casero-Ripollés, 2016; Bonilla and Rosa, 2015; Ferré Pavia and Perales García, 2015; Gerbaudo, 2012;

Waseem, 2016; Carney, 2016; Yang, 2016; Ince, Rojas, and Davis, 2017, Swami et al.,

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2017). The data they have collected has indeed been useful, but it has left a significant gap in the research about social media activism and the various other tools like Facebook that are transforming movements.

As such, in spite of the perks of researching Twitter, Facebook needs to be studied when it comes to SMA “because its use is not solely political. Facebook is useful as a source of information for those who are not otherwise exposed, and those who have little political interest” (Siegel, 2018, p. 8). It is a flexible platform with multiple ways of self-expression and engagement from groups to group chats, from creating posts to sharing posts, from posting profile pictures to sharing pictures from other users, and from talking to friends to talking to people one has never met Facebook, due to its versatility, caters to and is used by the diverse and vast majority but despite that several people have still been sceptical about its effectiveness as a tool for activism and whether it can aid in movement success. The use of Facebook both in general and also specifically as a tool in activism will be discussed more in depth a bit later down in this section.

At the end of the day

“social media are not simply tools or spaces that can be appropriated for activist purposes. Instead, these media should be understood as techno-commercial assemblages, which shape and translate user activity. Deploying techniques such as data mining, user profiling, and targeted advertising, social platforms structure how users can express themselves and connect with each other” (Poell and Van Dijck, 2016, p.230).

If that is understood by movements and by users, they can better use the social media platforms, maximize the effects of their usage, and ultimately make the changes necessary to create a better world.