Page 7 - Tina Morlock - How to Avoid Slacktivism

Activism in 240 Characters or Less.

Another powerful social media outlet for your activism efforts is Twitter. While it doesn’t have
as many tools as Facebook does, activists on Twitter have proven it can be much more powerful
within the confines of a low character limit. If you have used social media in the past several
years, you have more than likely heard of the Occupy movement that gained popularity in 2011
on Twitter. What’s interesting about this case study is that social media created this movement,
rather than just complementing it. An academic article in Social Science Research explains the
beginnings of this movement – “the Twitter post summoned a few hundred people to Zuccotti
Park on September 17, 2011, and within two weeks, the movement quickly spread from New
York to other major cities, including Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, and Los Angeles” (Suh et
al. 283).

Their message can be seen below in Figure 2:

Fig. 2: “Occupy Wall Street Protester demonstrate in New York on Tuesday,” via CNN.

And, this is only one of many protests that took place around the world that was initiated by that
Twitter post. But, it’s important to realize that it wasn’t just activists’ efforts on Twitter or other
social media outlets that made the Occupy movement possible. There were many other elements
and strategies that took place. Suh’s article goes on to talk about how the opposition played a
powerful role in this movement as well. He goes on to propose that “an increase in the number of
repression events at protest sites is positively associated with the likelihood of future protests in