Internet Activism and Social Media

INTERNET ACTIVISM AND SOCIAL MEDIA. The internet has played a contradictory role for the Left. Early utopian discourses associated with the internet’s revolutionary potential quickly receded. Like preceding media regimes, the online sphere became dominated by several large firms and driven by a commercial logic. Subsumed by this capitalist power structure, online spaces were increasingly marred by mass surveillance and coordinated disinformation campaigns, making them less hospitable to progressive politics. Digital media outlets, once celebrated for enabling oppositional politics from the Arab Spring to the Occupy Wall Street movement, were increasingly used to amplify fascistic forces—even as the Right complained about being de-platformed and censored.

Yet, although the overall landscape became highly commercialized and privatized throughout the 1990s and 2000s, digital media continued to provide a critical terrain for political struggle, creating new possibilities for organizing and activism. While earlier proclamations of technology-enabled democratizing events such as the “Twitter revolution” seemed absurdly overblown, digital media could still be deployed to advance progressive projects, and the internet continued to offer opportunities for left politics, especially within social movements.

New digital technologies yielded a wide range of socio-political formations defined by open internet strategies, participatory practices, and decentralized network social structures. Indymedia and social media outlets were a key site of politics. Three exemplars noteworthy for their digital media activism occurred during the Global Justice, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter movements.

A major type of internet activism during the Global Justice Movement (sometimes referred to as the anti-globalization movement) of the early 2000s was “Indymedia” (also referred to as the Independent Media Center, or IMC). With roots going back at least as far as the 1990s media democracy movement, Indymedia first emerged during the “Battle of Seattle” protests against the World Trade Organization in November 1999. Seeking to provide a “people’s newsroom” to circumvent mainstream commercial media coverage, Indymedia was guided by a “be the media” ethic. Predating the blogosphere, Indymedia was a proto-social media platform defined by open-publishing, user-driven news production, collective editing via wikis, open-source technology, grassroots community journalism, and an interactive news web site, Indymedia’s radical democratic model remained a significant milestone in the history of Internet activism. It was both part of a global network and a radical anarcho-democratic organization. Remarkably, despite each IMC reflecting a unique local context, the IMC global network reflected a great degree of uniformity and cohesion, symbolized by a common website architecture, a commitment to consensus-based decision-making, and other radical democratic practices codified in a universal “principles of unity.” Replicated in more than 150 sites across six continents in some thirty languages, Indymedia’s “open publishing” software distinguished it as a radical democratic experiment, allowing anyone with internet access to post news stories for immediate upload onto an IMC web site’s newswire. However, Indymedia’s most remarkable feature arguably was its commitment to consensus-based decision-making, which it applied at both the local and global network levels.

Many of Indymedia’s distinctive features lost their revolutionary aura after being eclipsed by social media and various forms of user-generated content. Nonetheless, Indymedia activists struggled to prefigure a more democratic society through consensus-based decision-making, providing media access to disadvantaged communities, coordinating protests, and creating narratives that gave coherence to the Global Justice Movement. While few sites in the global Indymedia network continued to maintain active websites two decades later, some other experiments persisted. One compelling example, the Urbana-Champaign IMC, in 2005 launched an extensive membership fundraising campaign to purchase the downtown Urbana Post Office building as a space for a wide array of progressive community projects. The UC-IMC continued to produce various forms of vibrant community journalism.

Similar strategies that figured prominently during the Global Justice Movement re-emerged a decade later to define the Occupy Wall Street movement (referred to as OWS, or simply “Occupy”). Following a call by Kalle Lasn and other activists connected to the culture-jamming Adbusters magazine, OWS broke out dramatically in New York City in September 2011. Rising up against growing economic inequality and corporate power, OWS first appeared in Zuccotti Park and was soon followed by similar encampments springing up in many locations across the United States and around the world.

Occupy relied on a wide range of anarchic practices, including the General Assembly and a People’s Library. Although endless meetings proved problematic, the decentralized structure could, in theory, provide strategic advantages over organizations with a more bureaucratic chain of command. OWS activists, like their Indymedia counterparts, found both value and constraints in such practices. For example, these tactics encouraged inclusiveness, solidarity, and shared leadership. While larger memberships could strain the consensus-based participatory model, other forms of communication, such as a print newspaper called The Occupied Wall Street Journal, were very effective.

OWS also was successful in deploying various kinds of digital media activism, including what later would become known as “hashtag activism.” Indeed, the initial call for the event was marked by the hashtag #OccupyWallStreet, which was amplified online and circulated through various social media platforms. Popular hashtags such as #OWS served as important organizing tools for Occupy activists. Even as the Occupy movement began to fizzle out within its first year and effected few concrete policy changes or lasting electoral shifts, it left in its wake an important new vocabulary for describing economic disparities, including “We are the 99%” (vs. the “1%”). Occupy also helped socialize a new generation of activists and fueled new participatory activist projects such as Occupy Sandy, Strike Debt, and other campaigns that continued a decade later.

Following the rise and fall of Occupy, hashtag activism would continue to play a key role in advancing leftist politics. In particular, the social media platform Twitter developed into an important tool for disenfranchised groups, especially around movements for gender and racial justice. Hashtag activism on Twitter became popularized during the Black Lives Matter and MeToo movements and was instrumental in the early days of their campaigns. Indeed, successful activist campaigns and social movements were often synonymous with their hashtags: #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #SayHerName, and many others. Scholars such as Sarah Jackson argued that these tactics helped foster online “counterpublics” in which marginalized groups could forge new shared identities and politics. Despite the conventional criticism that such activism amounted to little more than “clicktivism,” these strategies helped move activist issues from the margins to the mainstream—not only for the purposes of raising awareness but to mobilize for substantive change for long-oppressed groups.

The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, which first launched its hashtag in the summer 2013 after the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s killer, made significant use of social media. In 2014, Yes! Magazine chose #BlackLivesMatter as one of the twelve hashtags that changed the world. Social media would continue to figure prominently in the BLM movement, which came back to the center of public discourse in the spring and summer 2020 following George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police. This latest uprising witnessed tens of millions of protestors, comprising one of the largest movements in the nation’s history.

The international scope of digital activist projects within global social movements became vast, with countless examples of tech-enabled organizing that advanced leftist politics around the world. In the United States, the so-called “Netroots” emerging from the blogosphere in the mid-2000s was another key manifestation in progressive politics, as was the media reform movement, which harnessed the internet’s activist potential to change the media system itself, including campaigns for net neutrality and media diversity. The internet in general and social media in particular will continued to play key roles in leftist politics. As internet activist strategies evolved over time, the Left increasingly needed to reckon with the limitations of a commercially driven, monopoly-dominated media landscape. Despite such caveats, rising social and political protest movements and campaign could no longer go forward without a strong, vital social media component.

Jackson, S.J. #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020.

Pickard, V. “United yet autonomous: Indymedia and the struggle to sustain a radical democratic network.” Media, Culture & Society 28:3 (2006), pp. 315–36.

Pickard, V. & Yang, G. Media Activism in the Digital Age. London: Routledge, 2007.

On the Media, with Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield. WNCStudios. New York Public Radio. https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm