Recommended Readings
Velasquez, Alcides. “Social Media for Social Change: Social Media Political Efficacy and Activism in Student Activist Groups.” Taylor & Francis, www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08838151.2015.1054998.
This source speaks of the political use of social media specifically for student activist groups. Various activist, advocacy, or political student groups at a university were asked a series of questions regarding their social media use and their ability to use it for activism related reasons. The study showed that positive social media experiences related to movements was directly related to the efficacy of said movement.
Brown, Dalvin. “19 Million Tweets Later: A Look at #MeToo a Year after the Hashtag Went Viral.” USA Today, Gannett Satellite Information Network, 14 Oct. 2018, www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/10/13/metoo-impact-hashtag-made-online/1633570002/.
This source talks about the effect that the Me Too Movement had on society one year after it happened. It speaks of the women who started the tweet #Metoo on twitter that become a quick phenomenon, and the millions of those who continued it. This movement became so popular that it was talked about in almost every other media outlet at the time and grabbed the attention of celebrities, journalists, lawmakers, and other government officials.
Seay, Laura. “Does Slacktivism Work?” The Washington Post, WP Company, 12 Mar. 2014, www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/12/does-slacktivism-work/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.93b981b300a3.
Slacktivism is defined in this article as one who will solely retweet, share, or post something on a social media outlet and feel as if they have contributed to the movement. This type of activism effort is seen as a lazy way to become involved as it requires very minimal effort and leads to low efforts to produce actual change in the targeted area of society. People who attempt to make real efforts such as writing to Congress or attending protests are the ones credited for involvement in the movement and not slacktivists.
Boyd, D. Eric. Exploring the Empowering and Paradoxical Relationship between Social Media and CSR Activism. Aug. 2016, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296315006037.
The extent of which social media empowers consumers’ CSR activism is studied. It reveals that people have mixed experiences from social media enabled activism. Two paradoxes were shown on the negative end with one being about social judgment and the other having to do with the time and effort necessary to produce CSR activism. The study concluded that since there is differing experiences from differing reasons, there is now a direction for more research to be done.
Goh, Debbie. Protesting the Singapore Government: The Role of Collective Action Frames in Social Media Mobilization.” Telematics and Informatics, Pergamon, 23 July 2015, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0736585315000878.
The specific ways that Singaporeans tried to organize a movement on social media against immigration policy was examined. They studied the thousands of posts on various sites such as Twitter and Facebook to determine how efficient the activists were in their tactics used to create this movement. While they were successful in mobilizing many people to their cause and spreading the awareness of it, the movement did not necessarily succeed in it's actual efforts to create change in immigration policy.
Beauchamp, Zack. “Social Media Is Rotting Democracy from Within.” Vox, Vox, 22 Jan. 2019, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/22/18177076/social-media-facebook-far-right-authoritarian-populism.
Social media is called "democracy's enemy" as it allows opponents to easily spread misinformation regarding the opposing side. This spread of wrong information can lead to actual governmental outcomes, such as in Brazil when a far-right president was elected due to this slander. Social media makes it very simple to cause division and very hard to fix it, leading to more arguments than progress. Using online outlets for activism is not efficient and will lead to false claims being made everywhere.