Toxic Activism: Can social media help or hinder campaigning?
Online activism is often dismissed as ‘clicktivism’ or ‘PowerPoint activism’ but can it actually enact legitimate change?
Over the last year while sitting at home in lockdown, we have seen it too often — a terrible event in the news, followed by a host of social media presentations about the social issues surrounding the topic and why people should care. A scroll through Instagram is now disrupted by a sea of colourful images, providing bitesize information about serious topics. For many this social media ‘armchair activism’ is the laziest form of engaging with social injustice.
These infographics have given rise to several social media accounts which have grown to millions of followers, and since the pandemic started most the activism we now see and can engage with is through social media.
Infographics on Instagram feature very serious and triggering topics presented in a colourful and exciting manner which can often seem insensitive and could be thought to diminish the seriousness of the topics being covered. They may educate more people, but some argue they do nothing to help the route cause. These visually appealing slides can risk glamorising traumatic events and may also add to the spread of misinformation, further impacting on campaigns and delegitimising them.
It can be worthwhile, for international issues, Instagram infographics give a platform to topics that aren’t receiving Western media coverage.
And, on a local scale, it empowers individuals to advocate for issues they find important. But it should be done in conjunction with activities such as protests, letter writing and advocacy.
Globally, many campaigns such as, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo,and Kill the Bill have all been able to further their goals through ‘clicktivism’. And studies also suggest that people who engage strongly with politics online also do the same offline.
Campaigner, Pablo O’Hana argues that social media has actually been instrumental in progressing causes and movements.
He said: “Black Lives Matter is a really good example of that, you had protests in the UK, in the US, and all around the world, that were connecting online, which made it so powerful. And no matter where you were, you saw it, you saw either a black square, or a news article, or pictures of protests.”
“And you just wouldn’t have been able to do that 10–20 years ago, because you wouldn’t have had that immediate access to content and information. Social media has been really important.” he says.
However, O’Hana who has been involved in the referendum remain campaign in 2016 as well as general elections, and campaigns to legalise abortion in both the republic of Ireland and northern Ireland, also notes that social media can lead to an inflated type of activism, where people just post content online without doing any of the work to affect change.
“You see it in every campaign, where people just want to post stuff on social media and never actually come and do the groundwork. And the reason I champion social media so much in campaigning is because it’s so good at activating and organising. But that is what it should be used for.” he explains.
Instagram infographics like this can be a helpful teaching tool, but these ‘explainer’ posts rely on the simplification of complex ideas. The information goes through a process of generalisation to fit the facts into a beautifully made Instagram post. But these eye-catching fonts, backgrounds and visuals have the potential to trivialise and grossly over simplify serious topics.
Infographics also generate slacktivism, which gives you the feeling of doing something and creating change, whilst in reality not much is being done at all. And very often this means that people are unable to take the next step to translate their social media into action.
This is exactly how social media can create ‘toxic activism’. Which has led to the rise of performative activism, whereby people feel compelled to reshare social justice content in order to maintain optics of their supposed allyship.
When the rate of activism feels like it’s not bringing with it a steady stream of progress or when people are constantly being exposed to new hard hitting content, there is a lack of motivation and passion to actually fight for social justice issues. And a lot of it can feel meaningless.
For Rianka Gill, a climate justice activist, the pandemic has moved all her activism online.
“If all we can do is share stuff on social media, then I just hope that people are checking the information before they share it, because it can be really harmful to share infographics that haven’t been researched properly. It really is a double edged sword.” she says.
Over the last few years Gill has noticed that activism has become ‘cool and trendy’ on social media.
Body positive activist, Emilie Epperlein, worries about the future of activism as we start to come out of lockdown.
“[After the pandemic], I think that activism will become slightly less inclusive again. Over the last year everything has been online so we’ve been able to talk and connect with people from all over the world, that we wouldn’t have been able to before, for whatever reason, and now things may start to move back offline” she says.
Dr. Hedy Greijdanus, researcher in social psychology at the University of Groningen, has been studying the psychology of online activism and says that while the issue is complex, most research suggests that online and offline protests often positively correlate.
“You see that there’s actually a positive relation between online activism and offline activism, but there are of course some circumstances that need to be met in order for that to happen.” she explains.
“Some people can act online in a relatively easy way, and they also see this as very meaningless and inconsequential, but online behaviour is visible so people can also be held accountable.”
Dr Greijdanus explains that social media was instrumental in the #MeToo movement. “It started out as people sharing their individual experiences but if you look through the hashtag, you can see all those individual experiences and make it into a shared and a collective issue.”
“And social media will help you to reach people that you wouldn’t normally talk to outside of your community and in the current climate it’s even more difficult to get people out on the streets.” she continues.
But Dr Greijdanus also acknowledges the serious downsides to social media activism. “Last summer we had blackout Tuesday, where people posted black squares on social media. And the intention was,to show support to the Black Lives Matter movement. But what it actually did was just fill peoples entire timelines with black square so it was a bit like censoring our social media timeline.”
Dr Greijdanus also explains that: “Whilst sharing posts and liking tweets may hold people to account, it can also be seen as performative. If you want to increase your reach you need to do more than just repost content online and actually go onto the streets.”
The studies suggest that more often than not online and offline activism correlate, either because people’s online and offline behaviours are intertwined or because one person’s online activism can mobilise and encourage others for their offline protests. Dr Greijdanus concludes that: “the pros outweigh the cons.”
In reality activism on social media is far more complicated that it seems and conversations need to become more nuanced when debating this topic. It isn’t a question of whether social media is good OR bad, but rather a conclusion that social media is both good AND bad.
As more of us start to engage with activism online, prompted by the words and infographics we see on our timelines, it’s clear that the revolution will not be tweeted — well, not entirely.
