It’s easy to dislike social media activism. It has tons of problems worthy of criticism. The most annoying one is probably virtue-signaling. Every action on a social media platform puts out a certain image of you to the virtual world and your followers, whether intentional or not.
When you add activism to a platform where people are presenting idealized versions of themselves, being socially aware becomes another way to look good in front of others. Which means, a lot of holier-than-thou attitudes and inauthentic support. And that’s not going away anytime soon, it’s inherently linked to the nature of these platforms. We’re left only ever able to guess the intentions behind a post.
But, as much as I hate to say this, the intentions don’t really matter. The thinking behind a post doesn’t change its outcome. An Instagram story about the Amazon fire has the same effect whether it comes from genuine interest or someone trying to look socially aware to their followers.
It’s like we’re all in a giant subway car together. We can’t know if that person just gave a dollar to someone in need out of sympathy or because people were watching. And even if the dollar was given conspicuously, it still has the same effect.
Which brings us to the other big problem: whether or not social media activism has an effect. Every other month another article comes along saying it can’t create change and will always be less effective than boots on the ground activism. I really don’t understand why this has been parroted so consistently ever since Malcolm Gladwell declared that “the revolution will not be tweeted.” It’s just blatantly wrong. Everything is tweeted. I think I can confidently say the revolution would end up trending. I mean isn’t it obvious that real-life activism won’t be replaced by its virtual cousin? I don’t think anyone is trying to make that switch.
Sure, there are useless petitions that circulate around (in the UK last year, the top ten most signed digital petitions were all failures) but doesn’t that type of failure happen in real life activism as well? Even the social media movements around the Amazon fires and Sudan, which arguably had a larger digital presence than physical ones and weren’t greatly effective, must have been better than nothing.
Spreading awareness about something that people wouldn’t know about otherwise is still a good thing, as it is the first step towards taking action. Some argue that weak movements with large online presences create complacency and give people the satisfaction of participation despite not deserving it. But at the end of the day, these aren’t the people who would be going outside to protest anyway. Let them pat themselves on the back and tell their friends about their monthly donations, it’s not doing anyone any harm except those forced to listen to them.
Online activism is just a new tool to be utilized by real-life protest. It has its pitfalls, but it doesn’t detract from anything. And despite having a young history, it has already created many powerful movements, such as BlackLivesMatter, the Arab Spring protests, and the MeToo movement. They might have had their failures, but this probably comes down to the inexperience with social media as revolutionary tools. It’s not like real-life protests are always successful. In the coming decades, technology will play an ever-increasingly important part in protest.
Arlo O’Blaney
grew up in New York City and is currently a Human Rights major at Bard College. He intends on using this background to pursue a career in journalism. He almost played D3 Lacrosse but realized how bad of an idea that was.