Online social movement
Both proponents and critics have raised valid points about the potential and the shortcomings of online social movements, which have been increasing evident in the numerous examples around the world.
In 1990, software company Lotus and credit bureau Equifax gained access to names, addresses and purchasing behavior of 120 million Americans in CD-ROM format.
The Pew Research Center found that some 64% of Americans feel that the statement ‘social media help give a voice to underrepresented groups’ describes these sites very or somewhat well.
Strict social distancing measures prevented traditional physical demonstrations in several countries, such as Italy, or limited the number of people that could gather, as in France and Germany.
Moreover, with the concept of people-less protests, first described by Yunus Berndt, a form of political activism at the intersection of online and offline spheres emerged.
Protests began the night of 12 June 2009, following the announcement that incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won nearly 63% of the vote, despite several reported irregularities.
[27] The protests then spread to five other countries: Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, where either the regime was toppled or major uprisings and social violence occurred, including riots, civil wars or insurgencies.
Sustained street demonstrations took place in Morocco, Iraq, Algeria, Iranian Khuzestan, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman and Sudan.
[29] In 2013, the movement began with the use of the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter on social media after the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of African-American teen Trayvon Martin in February 2012.
[35][36][37] Following the exposure of the widespread sexual-abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein in early October 2017,[38][39] the movement began to spread virally as a hashtag on social media.
[42][43] The movement was created in 2018 and consists of more than 300 prominent women in Hollywood, including Natalie Portman and Rashida Jones, and work with a legal fund to lobby and get protective laws passed.
Seif Bedour is one such student who became the victim of Egypt’s flawed law enforcement after being arrested for accompanying one of his friends to the Cairo police station as a witness in her rape case.
Bedour was arrested in August 2020 and has been held in detention for four months on charges of morality despite not having any connections to the alleged rape case or having been present at the crime scene in 2014.
The detention of witnesses in the case has cast shadow over the ‘Me Too’ movement started in the region and passed out a message that social morality is held above the rights of the Egyptian women.
[52] The event followed the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting a month earlier, which was described by several media outlets as a possible tipping point for gun control legislation.
#EveryChildMatters is connected to the hashtag #WearOrangeDay, a campaign for people to wear orange shirts in remembrance of the survivors and those who didn't make it home.
The online world provides the power to organize without any formal organisations, which speeds up the process of mobilization and allows for greater scale in rapid time frames.
[64] This can be understood as New Power, which supports informal leadership and radical transparency, conducive for large amounts of participation by people on social media.
The online world enables the synchronization of opinions across disparate geographies, creating new norms of behavior and belief through regular repetition and affirmation of messages.
[3] This motto highlights how the online world brings together diverse voices against something they all feel strongly about by acting as integrating screens since people use these devices to connect with others, rather than to isolate themselves.
In many ways, social media has created networks conducive for unification across different identities, supporting intersectional approaches to fighting injustice.
[3] Amanda D. Lotz noted that this is a key strategy, where multiple shows and commercials are created in order to compete, so that the most effective version can succeed, while the others disappear.
For instance, the Twitter ban in Turkey by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan who intended to “wipe out” the social media platform was met with furious outrage from the population, experts and the global community.
Zeynep Tufekci introduces the Mount Everest metaphor in her comparison of the Civil Rights Movement’s achievements with the Arab Spring’s relative limited scope of change, especially in Egypt.
The director Jason Russell thereafter had a major breakdown and the social movement dissipated, which can be owed to lack of strong organization and network internalities.
In particular, more people having access to social media might democratize the risk of promoting violence, especially where institutions are not stable and there can be large amounts of distrust and disinformation.
According to Fenton, "Claims for the extension and re-invention of activism need to be considered in the context of the material social and political world of inequality, injustice and corporate dominance.
"[3] For example, "in his analysis of the Purple Movement (Popolo Viola) in Italy and its extensive use of Facebook, Coretti (2014)[78] demonstrates that, while the myth of the network as open and inclusive persists, it acts as a disguise for the communication protocols of commercial social networking platforms that may well enable large-scale mobilization but ultimately, through their very functionality, encourage organizational centralization and fragmentation in social movements".
[79] The proprietary nature of the design of platforms, such as Facebook pages, possibly fails to provide movements with the necessary instruments in a shared democratic management of their resources.
With the help of many open source media platforms, such as Creative Commons and P2P Foundation, the public can easily gain access to the essence of these social movements.
