Lessons About the Invisible Work of Orchestrating Social Media Activism

This post summarizes a scientific paper titled “Participatory Writing as Activism: The Work of Organizing a Swedish MeToo Initiative Through Social Media” by Ida Larsen-Ledet and Chiara Rossitto. You can find the paper here or contact the authors at ida@larsen-ledet.online or chiara@dsv.su.se. 🇸🇪 Vi förstår också svenska, om du föredrar det.

If you want to have a look at the metoo initiative we describe in the paper, check it out here: www.instagram.com/patron.ur.

By now, the world has become familiar with activism driven through social media. Well-known examples include the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, and metoo. How do tweets, Facebook messages, and hashtags result in such an immense impact? Coining a hashtag, telling a story, or inciting action seems like a simple act because it becomes associated with the posts, tweets, and images people upload. But in reality, a lot of work — at the very least a lot of thinking — has gone into these tweets, messages, and hashtags, and how they are used and presented.

The paper we summarize here draws attention to the invisible work that goes into organizing online activism.

It does so by presenting and analyzing an activist feminist project that started in Sweden in 2019. A group of four female hunters decided to take a stance against gender-based discrimination and harassment in the Swedish hunting community. Hunting is a common leisure activity in Sweden and is, for many Swedes, a big part of their identity. But among people who hunt, women are being excluded, doubted, belittled, and assaulted. The four founders set up an Instagram account under the name patron.ur (“bullet.out”) to say: That’s enough (Det är nog nu!). Patron.ur collected and shared people’s own stories of the gender-based discrimination and harassment that occurs among hunters in Sweden. Our paper is based on conversations with the initiative’s founders and observations of the Instagram page, starting from the project’s launch, and an online survey with patron.ur’s followers.

Patron.ur’s Activist Work

Patron.ur’s activism unfolded as a participatory writing project: The founders asked people to submit written stories of personal experiences, which were then published on the Instagram page. By not only showcasing people’s individual experiences but displaying them together, patron.ur brought attention to the larger structures that each experience was a part of. The result was a page that told a shared story, yet preserved the feeling that this story was being told by many individual voices.

Patron.ur achieved this through careful editorial work to curate both individual stories and the page as a whole. To leverage the shared story they produced through people’s participation and their editorial work, the founders also worked to establish broader visibility for the initiative and continuously develop the community, or public, around their message. This was aided by Instagram followers sharing posts and tagging organizations and institutions to draw attention to patron.ur.

The nature of the problems patron.ur sheds light on meant that both founders and followers got emotionally involved. Our paper frames this emotional involvement as another kind of labor, using the term emotional labor. This is important for two reasons: One, it is important to acknowledge that emotional labor is part of the hard work of activism. Two, emotional engagement motivated people to support both the initiative and each other.

Lessons About Orchestrating Social Media Activism

By following and learning about the work of patron.ur’s founders, contributors, and followers, we have identified these six points of reflection. We hope they can be useful for social media activists, platform designers, and other people interested in online activism.

1. Consider the power of social media

… for good: Activism can happen on, and have impact through, social media. Whereas it has been suggested that activism only happens in the streets and that social media is only a place for organizing street action, patron.ur has had impact on relevant institutions in their community with social media as their primary place of action.

… and for bad: Social media platforms can present obstacles as well. The front page feed notoriously shifts around the order of posts, and patron.ur experienced people abusing the “report” feature to get the page (temporarily) banned.

2. Platforms are not ready-made for activism.

It takes work to make use of the possibilities they offer and to work around the challenges they sometimes produce.

Structure the story you want to tell through ordering and numbering. Patron.ur deliberately ordered the stories so that similar stories would be spread apart, to ensure that each individual experience would stand out. By explicitly numbering the stories, they were able to counteract the Instagram feed’s tendency to display things out of chronological order.

Frame your story. Just like this blog post had an introduction to give you some context and motivation for these lessons, you can help people understand your story by explaining what you are trying to achieve and why. Patron.ur did this by occasionally posting mission statements or updates in-between the stories they shared, to explain their motivations and signal progress.

Create visual coherence. Patron.ur used a consistent style for their thumbnail images, which made their posts recognizable in the Instagram feed. This and the numbering were inspired by Slutavverkat, a related initiative, which additionally resulted in a form of coherence between the two initiatives.

3. Extend beyond the platform

… by using multiple tools. Social media is primarily designed for sharing content and connecting people, not for editorial work. Patron.ur used Google Docs to collect and keep track of submitted stories, and they used a separate app for styling the thumbnail images.

… by taking action through other means as well. Patron.ur proactively reached out to institutions and traditional media to call attention to their cause. Taking additional avenues can also be a way to reach people who do not use your chosen platform, or who have limited access to it.

4. Learn from previous or existing efforts.

Patron.ur benefitted from engaging with Slutavverkat and getting advice from them before even making their first Instagram post. They learned not only from the form and presentation on Slutavverkat’s Instagram page but also from how Slutavverkat managed the collection of stories behind the scenes.

5. Understand impact by seeing the bigger picture.

Social change takes time, and the results of activism will sometimes come further down the line. After four months of intense activity, the Patron.ur Instagram page went almost completely quiet for about a year and a half, before the founders announced that two of them would appear in a TV documentary about the metoo movement in Sweden. While the initial period of activity took place mostly within the hunting community, the second and much later act of publicity brought the initiative to the attention of the broader public.

In addition to direct effects, one initiative can also inspire more activism, like when Slutavverkat inspired and actively encouraged the creation of patron.ur. Consider inspiring or supporting other initiatives as part of your activism.

6. Consider how your strategy relates to values.

Any strategy will involve a trade-off or balancing of values: Anonymity may affect transparency; telling a focused story may require a less flexible or inclusive approach to selecting content.

Plan your activism and consider what values your plan emphasizes and which ones it prioritizes less. Along the way, you may find that it’s necessary or appropriate to change your strategy and what values you prioritize — and that’s okay. In the beginning, patron.ur prioritized anonymity highly, which meant they had to decline interviews with some traditional media outlets that had policies against working with anonymous sources. Later in the initiative’s lifecycle, they accepted the invitation to be part of a TV documentary, which meant that two of the founders revealed their names and faces to the public.

#vigörpatronur