Social Media Activism Reduced to Reshares

Dec. 6, 2019

By Olivia Boardman Heavily-filtered selfies flooded your feed. You could follow anyone and everyone, from people you didn’t know to celebrities in movies you had never seen. Amateur, grainy photos evolved into heavily produced posts from your peers. It became a game of gaining followers and likes rather than sharing photos with friends. As social media has changed over the years, it has manifested a collective consciousness of social awareness. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, in particular, have come to be milk boxes on which activists can call others to action and enact change. The ease of creating social awareness with these platforms has had some very serious impact. For example, Rodney Reed, a man on death row in Texas, was sentenced to death for the abduction, strangulation and rape of Stacy Stites in 1996. Fifteen days before his execution date, Skylar McCullar tweeted about the man’s innocence. The original tweet, which included where to sign a petition for a stay of execution, got 71,736 retweets. As the days counted down to his execution, celebrities and news outlets started picking up the story. The number of signatures rose 66% within the first day. It is now 99% complete with 2,982,421 actions taken so far of their new goal of 3,000,000. As a result of the reach of the post, 16 Texas state senators wrote to the governor to grant Reed a reprieve, and will be going on trial again in 2020. However, not everyone’s intentions with social media activism are pure. Instagram, which came into the picture in 2010, has come to dominate the social media game with 1 billion users. Nearly 500 million people use their Instagram stories everyday to project their thoughts, opinions, cups of coffee—and activism. Sometimes this can come with intentions of remaining trendy or “woke.” To be “woke” is to be aware of and actively attentive to important facts and issues, especially that of racial and social justice, according to Merriam-Webster dictionary. Instagram has become a host to an epidemic of false activism, or “slacktivism,” according to the Washington Post. People share and like posts related to social justice and consider their actions activism. However, activism involves policy, change and active engagement in the solution to a problem. Liking or reposting a photo or message does not enable change as much as our society would like to think that it does. Real change requires action beyond the screen. There are plenty of real social media activists like Greta Thunberg, Alphonso David (president of the Human Rights Campaign) and Tarana Burke (founder of the #MeToo movement) out there, live streaming marches and producing educational graphics for their followers to share. The problem is that while some posts can be tied to raising awareness or getting people to people put effort into their activism, slacktivists can share a post about the same issue and receive the same respect without putting in the work. They take advantage of a good cause and twist it to suit their own personal desire for internet clout, thereby undermining the good intentions of the original campaign. This becomes clear when sharing a post becomes a scam. On October 16th, instagram profile @allstarsdigital shared a photo asking followers to “spread the word!” and that for every share on an instagram story, they would feed a dog and send a picture to the person who shared the photo. The post began receiving shares from people who thought they were doing the right thing, and wanted to help the cause. The comments started pouring in, and quickly there were people commenting on the absurdity of the post. Instagram user Ethan Whealdon said “@allstarsdigital should just feed the dogs instead of asking for likes. The people that actually want to take care of the dogs won’t ask for likes and shares they will just do it unnoticed.” Over the following weeks after the original post, people continued to post comments, asking to receive photos of the dogs that were supposedly fed and calling the post a scam. Instagram users quickly began to realize the post was only a marketing scheme, which opened their eyes to the idea that people would post on social media in a way to appear like they are doing good for others, when they really aren’t actually doing anything at all. ●●● Slacktivism may seem like it has no repercussions because activists post on all forms of social media, instead of marching in the streets, but real social media activism comes from the work of social justice advocates, who have taken to the platform to reach others. When their posts get shared by people who won’t take the time to read more and act, their efforts get lost in the likes and shares. If anything, slacktivist content exploits those who are actually putting in the effort to make the original posts. Activists like Mia Mingus took to Instagram for the purpose of reaching a wider audience, as opposed to exploiting their struggles for views and likes, she said. Mingus focuses on justice for those with disabilities and transformative justice on her account. Transformative justice references the criminal justice system and its impact on people of color. “I started using my [Instagram] account for activism because I didn’t see that many posts about, in particular, disability from a radical perspective and from people of color, but also transformative justice,” Mingus said, in an Instagram direct message. Mingus puts an emphasis on community development and how communities can work together to sponsor transformative justice. She travels and speaks on panels across the country about her work and uses Instagram to provide more visibility, and her account now has 37,000 followers. Her feed is filled with posts about her life and her activism, which most of the time intertwine. The mere act of existing as a member of an oppressed community is a protest in itself, but slacktivists don’t have that issue. They can share and like posts all day long without having to contribute to the resolution of these issues in the real world. While actual activists have a long history of facing violence and imprisonment for their work, slacktivists face no repercussions from their activism. Activism isn’t a fad or a joke, it’s real and extremely important to the survival of marginalized groups, and for people to treat it as trendy is disrespectful to true activists. Awareness without action means nothing.