The Catalan fight for independence meets a reasonable amount of online support, but how are people helping?

Chiara Calleja
Nov 5 · 3 min read

This year’s protests and demonstrations surpassed the ones of two years ago which broke out after an illegal referendum. There has been plenty of support ever since. People took to the streets of Barcelona on October 14th after the Spanish government sent 9 political prisoners to jail for 13 years. There has been a lot of backlash especially between the Spanish police called La Guardia Civil and Catalans. Although this movement has been receiving a lot of recognition, especially online I feel that very little has been done to help Catalonia.

The Spanish government, although powerful can be challenged and people have been doing so online. I follow twitter most often than not and whenever something about this topic comes up I cannot help but dig deeper into it. There had also been a hashtag trending worldwide for a day which called the Spanish state fascist for jailing innocent people. The exact hashtag appeared like this: #SpainIsAFascistState. Now one would ask, what will such a hashtag do? That is where Slacktivism comes in. A lot of people contributed by retweeting, sharing videos of policemen brutally attacking activists, journalists and protestors for standing up for themselves, as well as commented on threads against the independence movement.

But this is where my concern lies. I fall victim to slacktivism. I use my account on twitter to do the same thing as most people do. I take time out of my day to share information like this to raise awareness — which I’m sure I do, however, do little to help out. My retweets and concern about the protesters getting hurt or assaulted did not prevent that from happening. So I ask myself, what is the whole point of being active online?

Although I’m not doing much from behind my screen, I still feel that by sharing posts on Facebook for my followers to see, I am doing the minimum one can do to contribute by exposing what the Spanish government has been doing the past month.

Slacktivism is a very tricky kind of digital activism. Although it’s mostly negative it’s hard for a person to ignore its potential benefits. But needless to say, scrolling through facebook, liking or sharing a post about a certain cause will not change the world anytime soon.

This project is part of a University Study Unit called “Social media and 21st Century Communications.