Digital Feminist Movement

This page covers feminist organizing conducted through social media: hashtag campaigns, public testimony, and networked peer support.

The research

Mendes, Ringrose and Keller’s study is based on interviews with participants rather than on platform data, which is what makes it useful. Its subject is what the activism does for and to the people doing it — including the labour of moderating one’s own visibility and the costs of speaking publicly — rather than reach metrics.

The largest campaign in this territory has been measured directly. Pew counted more than 19 million uses of #MeToo on Twitter between October 15, 2017 and September 30, 2018, an average of 55,319 per day. That campaign has its own page at metoo, including the correction that the movement it belongs to was founded in 2006 rather than 2017.

The other half of the picture

Marwick and Caplan’s study of networked harassment is cited here deliberately. Sustained harassment is not an occasional side effect of this activism but a consistent accompaniment to it, organized through the communities documented on the manosphere and anti-sjw pages. A page describing hashtag campaigns and their reach without describing what happens to the people running them would be describing half of the phenomenon.

What was removed

The previous version carried a chronology from 2011 and asserted a set of impacts on workplace policy and public discourse. None was sourced. The founded field, which read 2011, has been removed: it dated feminism to Tumblr, which is not a defensible claim about a movement with a century and a half of American history behind it.