Beyond Slacktivism

Social Justice Activists on Twitter

Timeline for the first week of Letters for Black Lives, a social media campaigned created and disseminated using crowdsourced work.

This is an ongoing mixed methods study of social justice activism on Twitter conducted with Jessica Hammer and Jodi Forlizzi at the Human Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. All findings described here are preliminary and, thus far, unpublished.

Social justice activism — taking collective action to effect social or organizational change toward a more equitable society — can take many forms. With the advent of computing technology, activists have taken advantage of computing and social media platforms to extend activist practices that formerly took place only in physical contexts.

In response to movements such as #Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter, recent discussions of social media activist movements frames them as “leaderful” [1,2]. In leaderful movements, leadership is distributed among a group of highly engaged activists and influencers who work concurrently and sometimes collaboratively to mobilize and inform their base. These leaders emerge organically from within activist communities, hence are understood as “crowdsourced elites” [3,4].

This study investigates how these leaders uniquely use Twitter to accomplish their goals. We have conducted qualitative interviews with 12 activist leaders and scraped over 1 million associated tweets. Our findings show that these activists build credibility through performing authenticity, leveraging offline expertise, and curating community .

They use their credibility to disseminate information related to their causes, to counter existing media narratives, and to mobilize their base through both individualistic and collective actions.

We describe “crowdsourced campaigns,” which integrate traditional organizing techniques with the affordances of social media. These actions result in social change, and help cement the activist’s credibility for future action.

“Crowdsourced campaigns” are not without challenges. We are working on designing tools to support activists in two areas: helping activist leaders to express and maintain their credibility, and supporting the development of crowdsourced campaigns.

1. Demby, G. 2014. The Birth of a New Civil Rights Movement. Retrieved March 13, 2016: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/12/ferguson-new-civil-rights-movement-113906.
2. Freelon, D., McIlwain, C.D., and Clark, M.D. 2016. Beyond The Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the online struggle for offline justice, 5–92.
3. Postmes, T., & Brunsting, S. 2002. Collective action in the age of the Internet mass communication and online mobilization. Social Science Computer Review, 20(3), 290–301.
4. Jackson, S.J. and Foucault Welles, B. 2016. #Ferguson is everywhere: initiators in emerging counterpublic networks. Information, Communication & Society 19, 3: 397–418.