How do activists operate in a digital age?
How do activists operate in a digital age?
A football fan almost convinced the NFL to let Donna Kelce flip the Super Bowl coin this year. Well, sort of. Donna’s sons (Taylor Swift’s boyfriend and the other one) faced each other in the 2023 Super Bowl. Tank Brocklehurst is a fan and dutiful citizen who started a Change.org petition that gathered 215,960 signatures on Donna’s behalf. Although she didn’t flip the coin, it was a valiant effort to honor “a woman that raised two elite athletes,” in Tank’s own words. “It has to be done!” one supporter said. “It’s the right thing to do,” said another. “U know I am with the football,” a girl after my own heart commented.
While looking into this story, I discovered that Change.org is still a shockingly active platform. Morrisey fans, for example, are petitioning Capitol Records to uncage the singer’s unreleased album. The label is allegedly holding the album “because they see Morrissey as a threat for being genuine,” petitioners say. “With the world going down the plugholes, we need as much Moz as we can get!” one fan commented. Does Betty White’s broken star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame trouble you? It troubles Cindy from Pennsylvania, which is why she petitioned the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce to have it replaced — “Repairing it just isn’t good enough for our Betty!”
Do online petitions work? “The truth is,” Change.org says, “they do.” Digital activism is a popular venture.
Theresa Klenk made change in 2018 with a petition that convinced the Teamsters to provide UPS drivers with air-conditioning. Theresa’s husband is a UPS driver who in 2016 suffered severe heatstroke. “UPS: We know you care about your service, now show us that you also care about your people,” Theresa posted. More than 1.3 million people signed the petition and spurred a pressure campaign that attracted national attention. Christopher Dodson launched his campaign to be a third-party candidate for president of the United States on Change.org (no donations required). “I’m another disconnected individual wanting to run for office, and need 2500 signatures to get on the ballot,” Dodson said.
Alongside the football fans and third-party hopefuls, however, lurks a more insidious crowd of petitioners: the social-justice activists. The Black Lives Matter movement was significantly fueled by online discourse, and the “Justice for George Floyd” gathered more signatures than any other Change.org petition in the U.S. in 2020, with almost 20 million supporters. Youth climate activists are the loudest of them all, and many climate-centric petitions succeed in gaining international attention annually.
As Israel’s just war against Hamas rages, the effectiveness of online discourse is once again on full display. Much of the world’s antisemitic response to October 7 has played out online: College students spew antisemitism on LinkedIn, youth-led groups promote social-media campaigns to boycott Israel, and many activists use online platforms to organize mass pro-Palestinian protests. Since October 7, some organizations have launched petitions on Change.org to call for a cease-fire in Gaza and an end to the “Israeli occupation.”
Change.org was founded for social activism. Stanford students Ben Rattray and Mark Dimas built the platform in 2007 to bring attention to the widespread practice of “corrective rape” in South Africa — rape that men claimed would turn lesbians straight. Change.org today has more than 500 million users who have started hundreds of petitions.
Most people’s intentions behind digital activism seem healthy enough. Online connectivity helps citizens be active in their communities, politically or otherwise. Digital activism’s danger lies in its contagion and in the outsize sense of impact it offers individuals.
“You have to remember, if people don’t post on social-media platforms, they’re just empty,” Max Fisher, author of The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story Of How Social Media Rewired Our Mind And Our World, observed on an NPR podcast. “So [social media] are designed to make you feel a compulsion to [post] and to have a very emotional experience when you post and when you get those responses from other people on the platform — likes, shares, retweets.” “And that is something,” he added, “because it taps into your social instincts that — in any other context — we would call it a form of training.”
Social affirmation, Fisher continued, polarizes the opinions of those who post on social media but doesn’t necessarily change the opinion of those who only view social media. Online interactions, negative or not, can generate unrelenting emotional connection to an argument, which spurs a brand of radicalism. Fisher explains: “Not only does posting on social media push our own views to the extremes . . . it will make your ability to empathize with people who have the other opinion drop down to a zero.”
The images of pro-Palestinian protesters in many American cities and on American campuses who were ripping down posters of Israeli hostages reveal the indifference to real-life, real-world problems — and the numbness to real human emotion — that results from living in a social-media vacuum. Their harrowing facial expressions disclose their disgust at anyone who would dare question their convictions. This game of online activism is most dangerous for besotted young people, the likes of whom tend to lead social-media campaigns.
In some cases, online activism might have its place. Much of Israel’s social-media campaign has highlighted the names and faces of hostages to whom we might not otherwise have felt a personal connection. Regardless of intentions, however, online activists tend to have a heightened sense of urgency — urgency that doesn’t necessitate reason. The political moment might, in an online activist’s view, demand a response. Social media provide that sense of immediacy as well as a sense of solidarity among fringe groups that wouldn’t exist in the real world.
Take, for example, one of Hamas’s most unlikely allies: Students Against Starbucks. Georgetown students created the group this year to convince the university to divest its Starbucks shares. The coffee company has a permanent shop on Georgetown’s main campus and violates union laws, students say. On October 7, they found a new purpose for their Starbucks boycott: Palestinian liberation. How does the Palestinian cause relate to underpaid Starbucks workers in Washington, D.C.? Students in the throes of Marxism are beholden to the broad principle of “liberation,” whether it applies to baristas or Palestinians. Most important, though, the social-media spiderweb is what unites and connects “liberation” activists. “Palestinian liberation 🤝 class liberation,” Georgetown Students for Justice in Palestine commented on an Instagram post by Students Against Starbuck. “Collective liberation ❤️🔥❤️🔥❤️🔥,” the Georgetown Coalition for Workers Rights commented in turn.
Affixed to the bottom of every petition on Change.org is an appeal to visitors: “Will you stand with us to protect the power of everyday people to make a difference?” Platforms like Change.org have given activists ways to amplify any opinion as if it’s the most pressing of social causes and to link it to a host of dissimilar social movements. If you’re curious how groupthink can eclipse reason and drive people to so freely throw their weight behind absurd causes, just scroll through any social-media website and observe the self-importance — no matter how well intentioned it may appear.