Did Twitter Make Us Better? A Critical Review of the Book "#HashtagActivism"
Did Twitter Make Us Better? A Critical Review of the Book "#HashtagActivism"
An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.
#HashtagActivism is a robust and thorough defense of its namesake practice. It argues that Twitter disintermediated public discourse, analyzing networks of user interactions in that context, but its analysis overlooks that Twitter is actually a heavy-handed intermediary. It imposes strict requirements on content, like a character limit, and controls who sees what and in what context. Reintroducing Twitter as the medium and reinterpreting the analysis exposes serious flaws. Similarly, their defense of hashtag activism relies almost exclusively on Twitter engagement data, but offers no theory of change stemming from that engagement. By reexamining their evidence, I argue that hashtag activism is not just ineffective, but its institutional dynamics are structurally conservative and inherently anti-democratic.
I read another book along similar lines called If We Burn, which was a broader look at the 2010s protest movements that sprung up from online activism. What I took away from it is that most of that activism was hollow and didn't have a political vision or party program, it was just the masses shouting "No!" at their shitty governments. It was also easily put down once people in power got used to it.
I actually also reviewed that one, except my review of it was extremely favorable. I'm so glad that you read it and I'd welcome your thoughts on my very friendly amendment to his analysis if you end up reading that post.
Oh I absolutely loved it, don't get me wrong. I lived through that decade as my own political awakening, so every single event described was something I watched super closely and posted about and participated in as part of the online activist space (and sometimes in person!)
Your observation that the social media companies can leverage and benefit from these protest movements (and perhaps even create them) is important, I think. It's probably why Musk bought Twitter, he wanted to wield that kind of power over the masses and their ability to organize. It seems to have worked, too. We don't see anything like what we saw in the 2010s these days.