The truth about using social media as a tool for social change.

By Natalie Sanders

It has been a long term for student, Aiden Littau, at Oregon State University. As he is finalizing the details of the next climate change march in Corvallis, he is stressed and weathered. He is currently pushing his climate change movement onto the web, to raise more local awareness. He is scatter-brained but hopeful for his use of social media to create a bigger platform for followers of climate change.

Aiden has been working intensively on a blog to disperse to the local community near Oregon State University. During the start of the year, Aiden participated in a couple of climate change strikes alongside a peer, Jessica Snyder. She states, on behalf of the climate change crisis, “ I saw that there needs to be change on a local level first, in order to make change on an international level.” As Jessica organized these marches in Corvallis, she inspired Aiden Littau to take matters into his own hands. Aiden has been writing and perfecting this blog in order to make a change. Aiden states, “I want to reach out and inspire people through the web because it broadens the platform that I am working with. A lot of people in the younger generations want to make change, but want change to be simple and convenient. Technology is the best option when it comes to being simple and convenient.” Technology may have its flaws, but he is hopeful for the outcome.

Using technological advances and social media platforms as an activism tool can be positive and can be negative. As time and the amount of technological devices people have has increased, activism seems limitless. People have more opportunities to have a voice and to follow others in a cause, and activists have another tool to reach out to people. Activism through social media has become very beneficial for many causes, and detrimental to others. This concept of activism through social media platforms has been coined as Cyberactivism. 

Throughout the history of Cyberactivism, it is impressive to see what works with people through technology and what doesn’t. The first significant cyberactivism case is the Lotus Marketplace. This was meant to be a database program designed to be the same concept as yellow pages. It contained information of businesses, therefore, consumers could easily search and contact businesses. The initial idea contained two separate versions of the software, Lotus Marketplace: Households, and Lotus Marketplace: Businesses. The issues with the Lotus Marketplace: Households breached consumer privacy. Many found out that their personal information was being sold to third-parties. According to an essay written in Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice, Laura J. Gurak and John Logie state, “…privacy advocates felt that Marketplace was an inappropriate and invasive application of consumer data.” (pg.26). On that Occasion, protesting events were constructed online. Many users explained their frustration on discussion boards, and some pushed for legal action to be conducted. The program was canceled shortly after this conflict rose. 

After this, many social and political issues were taken to the web for pursuing justice. People started using the internet to raise awareness, organize protests, and interact with other causes. Petition.org was the next step in cyberactivism history, it was a place for people to start a petition and spread awareness about a cause. Other online users could sign the petition. This is very significant because activists were able to take their causes from a local level to a national and even international level.

GeoCities, a web-hosting service, was the next significant milestone in cyberactivism history. Different websites were placed in different regions on this GeoCities map. This made it easy to find local businesses, users, etc. The only problem with this invention is that members’ names were displayed in public URLs, causing an uproar of privacy issues among users. Yahoo! proximately took over the interface and made some changes to policies and procedures of GeoCities. Unfortunately, the policies didn’t adjust the privacy policy enough, which backfired. A user named Jim Townsend started a website, “Boycott Yahoo!”. His initial statement regarding this was, “Stop using Yahoo. Boycott them, and all of their properties. This includes Yahoo.com, GeoCities.com and Broadcast.com. Don’t buy products from merchants at shopping.Yahoo.com and let them know why!” (Martha McCaughey, pg.36). This small act ignited users to protest against GeoCities, eventually leading to the concept to be shut down.

These were the most significant convulsion to the use of social media as a way of protesting. From then on, many protests were taken to the internet in order to gain more publicity. Social media has become a great tool for activists because they can spread awareness to demographics they might not have planned to reach. A good example of cyberactivism that was very prominent is the #BlackLivesMatter movement. This movement was driven strictly from the internet. A large amount of users interacted with this hashtag and movement. This movement spread like wildfire on the internet. Now, this is a very recognizable hashtag to most people of recent generations. According to Scaling Social Movements Through Social Media: The Case of Black Lives Matter, “As scholars have noted, partly due to its ‘public sphere’ nature, social media creates participation opportunities—such as boosting protest turnout or supporting fundraising campaigns—that broaden mobilization, thus helping scale movement endeavors.” (Marcia Mundt, pg.1). The interaction of the Black Lives Matter movement was groundbreaking. This movement created an audience larger than expected. 

A factor that really pushed the demand for justice with the Black Lives Matter movement is the images that were related to it. According to Beyond the Hashtags, Deen Freelon analytically writes, “Taking a closer look at the images that were circulated most widely adds to this sense of narrative consistency. Among all the images in our dataset, the top 10 most-shared say a great deal about what motivated Twitter users to produce and circulate BLM-related content.” Most of the images released were very impactful to the community. The images usually showed the police and victims around the time of the protests surrounding Ferguson, Trayvon Martin, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Capturing powerful images and associating them with a movement can be very impactful. This can increase the audience and followers behind the activism.

A student at Tualatin High School in 2014 raised awareness towards a cause against sexual assault in a similar way as the Black Lives Matter movement. Around 20 girls in this high school came forward about a football star that was attending Tualatin High who had assaulted them. Justice was not being served, so Angelisa Coleman took the problems into her own hands. She interviewed many women who were victims of sexual assault in the local area and compiled their statements into a blog. Finally, when the blog was completed, she released the blog URL on social media with a simple and familiar hashtag so local students could dive into the hashtag results. Many students engaged with the blog. Angelisa Coleman speaks on behalf of her blog, “A lot of people found the blog profound, and some found it daunting. Either way, I wanted people to react that way. I wanted people to hear multiple stories in detail in order to raise awareness for assault survivors.” The blog was not continued afterwards, but it created a fiery angst among people of the community. The blog served its time and purpose of raising awareness. This blog enabled students to raise awareness among the community not just listen to gossip inside the school walls.

Aiden Littau hopes to have the same results with his climate change blog. He is aiming to post often on the blog and disperse it among Oregon State University students. Considering he is an English and Education major, he hopes to inspire and make his voice be heard. Aiden states, “I really think I have a good network in which I can reach a lot of people. I want my voice to make people realize that they need to be active and aware of climate change. If I do this, I can reach new people and hopefully inspire them as well.” 

Cyberactivism is the new way for activists to engage with potential followers. This tool, if used correctly, can spread a movement within minutes of posting. The need for social change is essential in this day and age. Activists struggle with reaching new audiences and mass amounts of people. Cyberactivism can be used to push activism and instill change. As citizens of society, this is part of our future of social change. We are no longer limited to the boundaries of our nation. We are limitless in the age of technology.

Works Cited

Freelon, Deen, et al. Beyond the Hashtags. Center for Media and Social Impact, 2016.

McCaughey, Martha, and Michael D Ayers. Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice. Routledge, 2003.

Mundt, Marcia, et al. “Scaling Social Movements Through Social Media: The Case of Black Lives Matter.” Social Media + Society, vol. 4, no. 4, 2018, p. 205630511880791., doi:10.1177/2056305118807911.