A Response to Jackson et al's "#HashtagActivism"
theluddite.org
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.

  • @11111one11111
    1•2 months ago

    Didn’t read the book but in my opinion Twitter was/is a tool for connecting people to things they are interested in. Take sports for instance, Twitter revolutionized how media recieved and published breaking news. It was the sliced bread for sports fans, fantasy sports fans and sports gambling. Or look at the Arab Spring, or whatever it is known as, where the ability to use tools like social media and WhatsApp fueled the revolutions by giving means for previously unconnected people to unite and come together. I think that’s what they used, I’m going off memory tho so if I’m wrong on any of the Arab Spring shit I apologize and welcome the corrections.

    Iirc, the concept of Twitter was created as a means for academics to connect their fields by means of indexing by assigned topics, aka hashtags. I assume the hashtag was also used because of its prevalence for being the way to comment in different coding languages and was prolly being done in databases before the internet was readily available or capable of handling large servers.

    To this day the concept of the hashtag is as old as libraries themselves and still a very effective tool for cataloging. All Twitter is, is a platform for exchanging ideas using hashtags as a means of standardized cataloging for the information being put on the platform.

    A tool doesn’t have the capability to make a person or people better or worse, it’s up to them and how they choose to use the tool.

    With any advancement but social media platforms specifically, there are ways to use them in a healthy and purposeful manner.

    Facebook remains the best way to keep in touch with friends and family you dont see often. At the same time if you use Facebook as your means of geopolitical news and analysis, you are using the worst tool for the job.