Feminist Activism in the 21st Century Begins with a “Post”
The largest protest march in America’s history began with a Facebook post.
This may seem an extraordinary feat — and it was. But for Alison Dahl Crossley, PhD, who has examined the mobilizing capacity of Facebook over the past decade, the nearly five million women and their allies who gathered in Washington D.C. and at sister marches around the world on January 21, 2017, is a testament to how the “Internet promotes feminist mobilization.”
In her article “Facebook Feminism: Social Media, Blogs, and New Technologies of Contemporary U.S. Feminism,” Crossley distills years of research she conducted at colleges across America to show how Facebook became the platform for feminist activism that it is today. “Facebook is a unique infrastructure for mobilization and recruitment,” Crossley writes, “in that respondents had large and diverse friendship networks that were used to spread feminism and raise feminist consciousness.” It is the digital platform itself, abetted by advancements in technology that have rapidly facilitated the “communication patterns and information flow” that have made Facebook the preeminent tool for social justice activism in the twenty-first century. . . .
Read the piece in full here.
