#Hashtags: Activism or Slacktivism?

6 min readMay 3, 2021

For my final project, I took a look at the “What’s Behind Door Number 10101?” resource page that gave some inspiration for project ideas. I immediately became interested in the topics related to Twitter, especially the concepts of “The Twitter Essay” and hashtag activism. Upon seeing the term hashtag activism for the first time, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what it meant. However, deeper research on the topic revealed its complexity. Hashtag activism is loosely defined as posting a viral hashtag on social media to spread awareness about an issue or show support for a cause. Every day on my social media feeds, especially Twitter, I see viral hashtags emerging about current events or causes. For the time that I have used Twitter I can recall hashtags such as these that deal with serious social issues, such as the #MeToo movement, #TrayvonMartin, #BlackLivesMatter, as well as hashtags that dealt more with pop-culture happenings such as #OscarsSoWhite, and finally hashtags that accompanied viral trends such as the #ALSicebucketchallenge. In their own ways, all of these hashtags are calling attention to issues and provide a means by which the message of the issue can be quickly and easily understood and disseminated. A sharp, concise, and catchy hashtag is key to its facilitation.

After conducting further research on the topic, there seems to be some debate about the merits of hashtag activism. Is hashtag activism just an excuse for people to be lazy and a means by which they can bypass actual physical protest? Or is hashtag activism an emerging form of protest that allows issues to be known far beyond one area, and gathers the power of many voices together to bring attention to a cause that it may not receive otherwise? I think the answer is a little bit of both. However, I am definitely one of those with the view that hashtag activism does more good than it does harm, and I’ll explain with a quick example from my readings on the topic.

In a New York Times article I read on hashtag activism, I came across a story about a movie called “Bully” that was released in 2001. This movie was about youth bullying and the harsh consequences that can result. The Motion Picture Association of American gave the movie an R rating, effectively rendering it unwatchable to the audience that could most benefit from viewing it — young people. For one young woman who had suffered from bullying herself, Katy Butler, this rating would not stand. Katy spoke out against the rating, even creating an online petition to change the rating that she asked people to sign in support. With the help of Twitter, Katy’s message and petition went viral allowing her to garner over 500,000 signatures and even gain celebrity support of her cause. Here, I think that hashtag activism did help play a crucial role in the success of Katy’s petition. Would she have gotten that support without her story going viral? I don’t think so. But the key is that Katy didn’t simply draft a tweet with a hashtag that said #LetUsSeeBully or something of that nature. She actually did something with the attention she raised through creating that petition. A viral hashtag can only go so far, and it must be followed by action in order to realize change.

So, with this all in mind, I decided to write a Twitter Essay about a time when I unwittingly acted as a “slacktivist”. I learned the term “slacktivism” from an article I will link here, and it basically describes a category of hashtag activism that many people today fall in to. If someone with a social media account posts a hashtag on their account one time, but does nothing further to actually help the issue, they might be committing hashtag slacktivism. This is where concerns arise with hashtag activism. Some argue that people simply post about an issue just to appear a certain way to others instead of actually caring about what is happening. And speaking from experience, this is definitely going on today. After doing research on this topic, I am glad to be more aware of myself and what I post on social media. I don’t want to be a slacktivist — as I have grown, I realized that it is a privilege for me to have the ability to exist outside of a lot of social issues going on in the world today. And although I might not be able to change the world myself, I can at least make sure that I try to follow up my hashtag activism with real action.

**Format for this section was borrowed from Professor Stommel’s article “The Twitter Essay” — go read it!
**Note: Since the publication of “The Twitter Essay” article, the tweet character count has doubled from 140 to 280.

Prompt: Write a Twitter essay about #hashtagactivism. In 280 characters, describe an instance in which you engaged with an online viral hashtag, trend, or challenge and reflect on it in regards to hashtag activism.

Above is the #TwitterEssay I completed on this topic. I thought that this example provided an opportunity to further analyze the debate on the merits of hashtag activism. So let’s unpack a few things here. Firstly, I was 15 years old in 2014, so I’ll cut myself some slack for my slacktivism (haha) with the knowledge that I have learned and grown a lot in the 7 years since this happened. At the time, everyone in my online social circle was completing the #ALSicebucketchallenge and tagging 3 friends to do the same, in a sort of chain message-esque loop of engagement. So I completed the challenge, but didn’t actually donate any money to ALS research. I wanted to participate in the viral trend but wasn’t actually concerned with the issue the trend was created to help, and would soon forget about it completely as the next viral moment caught my eye. Textbook slacktivism! However, let’s take a closer look at that aforementioned loop of engagement. The virality of the #ALSicebucketchallenge hashtag helped spread awareness and participation among millions on the issue of ALS. The ALS Association reported that the Ice Bucket Challenge helped raise $115 million for the ALS Association itself as well as $220 million worldwide for ALS research. That loop of engagement — created through the online sharing and subsequent perpetuation of the trend — is therefore something of value. The intangible connective tissue that is social networking helped facilitate real results here. This reality then begs the question: was it enough that I simply reposted the hashtag, thereby continuing the loop?

The answer to that question is not simple, and is one of the main points of contention regarding hashtag activism today. After completing this project, my answer to that question would be no. It is not enough to just repost a viral hashtag and move on. While I concede that spreading the word helps to a degree in perpetuating awareness and engagement, real change only happens when action takes place beyond the screen. The virality of the #ALSicebucketchallenge hashtag was good in itself, but what made it truly successful were the people that actually donated after they saw it. Imagine if I, and every other person who interacted with the hashtag but didn’t donate, had done so as well. Perhaps those final numbers could have doubled.

Hashtag activism is and will continue to be an important aspect of online discourse about relevant social topics. Ultimately, it is up to individual users to understand their motives behind posting a hashtag, and distinguish their purpose between genuine concern and slacktivism.

Sources:

#Hashtags: Activism or Slacktivism?

Written by Lindsay Knierbein