Integrated & Alone

Abstract

Online social activism ('slacktivism') carries low barriers to entry and is generally considered to be low risk and low impact for participants. However, recent social and political activism shows 'hashtag activism' is effective in mobilizing offline action, but also in raising awareness and ensuring social movements remain within the public discourse through the use of viral Twitter hashtags. In an examination of three recent viral hashtags associated with ongoing social movements: #metoo, #takeaknee, and #blacklivesmatter, I find that users not only use hashtags to aggregate discussion, but also use them in tweets alone to express solidarity and victimhood. Users participating in activist spaces actively work to integrate social movement hashtags into their tweets, enabling the hashtag to function on multiple levels, both to their personal followers as well as to the initial tweet. With social media research pushing toward large-scale data sets, this level of nuance is easily lost. I find hashtags are being used alone serves as a means of communicating user solidarity and personal stories, and suggest criticism of how they are used by scholars and journalists falls short of the mark.