Post Away!
https://medium.com/awaken-blog/how-companies-can-respond-to-the-metoo-movement-8b5d22bef9ae
Social media directly produces stronger and more powerful movements. It allows people to conveniently see how they can get involved quickly, and be able to help make the change just like that. People want to change society according to their own morals and opinions, and spreading information on social media makes it so easy for people to be casually on a platform and come across something that they can relate to and want to work with. (Velasquez)
Social media activists have incorporated many aspects into their methods, including the hashtag, which is the most common way for them to produce a trending message. For example, during the Black Lives Matter movement, people would tweet something relating to the movement and add the hashtag #BLM so that people would easily see what the tweet was about. The Me Too movement incorporated this tactic very successfully as well, as their use of the hashtag #metoo was one of the main reasons, if not the main reason, that this movement was recycled back into society and this time as one of the most known movements in current history. The hashtag gives immediate awareness to the protest and easily catches peoples eyes, allowing many users to spot it and proceed to see what it is about, maybe realizing along the way they want to get involved. Social media also gives activists the ability to interact with lawmakers directly, as most lawmakers are themselves on social media platforms. If a movement becomes apparent online, there is a plethora of journalists, celebrities, and government officials that may find themselves passionate about that same cause and decide to post about it, which attracts even more attention from those who follow these well-known people and are interested in their life.
The use of the hashtag is particularly how the Me Too movement became so popular, as so many celebrities felt very passionate about it and continuously advocated for it, leading to the movement becoming the main topic of the Golden Globes and eventually to the Ford and Kavanaugh testimony at the Supreme Court. (Brown) Even though the case was lost, it lead to significant social changes in society and is still majorly talked about in present day. Social media becomes the place that everybody apart of movements congregates to, allowing even more people to see what it is and become involved, and this continues to happen until the movement itself is written in history books.
COMMENTS:
Billy Smith-
As an active twitter user myself, I can confidently say that I constantly see hashtags and trending headlines about activist movements. Whenever I see one, I click on it right away to see what it's all about and am met with thousands of other users talking about it and sharing information too. Last year when I first came across the #metoo hashtag I had no idea what it meant until I saw all of the tweets and quickly realized. Now aware of this cause, I shared it with my sister and she became one of the millions to tweet about their experience. Without twitter I wouldn't have become so informed so quickly about this important protest movement, so I think it's safe to say that social media helps make activist efforts much stronger.