#hashtag narrative abolition now!

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Week 5: How Hashtag Activism Backfires

One day, we saw a movement is trending on the internet. The next? It’s buried under the latest meme. While hashtags have the power to amplify voices and bring attention to social issues, they also come with a catch: virality doesn’t always mean impact.

When Activism Feels More Like a Trend

Let’s talk about #BlackoutTuesday. The idea was simple: post a black square to show solidarity with Black Lives Matter. People promise not to post anything else that day and instead reflect on how non-Black Americans benefit from structural racism. But instead of boosting important conversations, it clogged social media feeds, drowning out actual resources and activism. The choice to go silent was flawed. Movements should amplify voices, not silence them (Noman 2020). Brands and influencers participated, but many treated it as a one-time performance rather than a commitment to real action (Spielmann et al. 2022). This is where hashtag activism struggles. Good intentions often get lost in performative gestures.

The Problem with Oversimplified Activism

The internet loves a catchy slogan, but real-world issues are never that simple. #Kony2012 blew up as a viral campaign against Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, but it quickly became a case study in Western-centric activism. It framed the crisis as something international intervention could fix. The movement overlooked local voices and real solutions, ignoring the complex political reality. It made people feel like they were part of something big, but once the hype died down, Uganda was left to deal with the aftermath of a movement that didn’t actually understand what it was trying to fix (Faloyin 2022). And that’s the problem with a lot of hashtag activism; it makes change feel instant, but real progress is slow, messy, and can’t be wrapped up in a neat, shareable post.

The Danger of Misleading Messaging

Words matter. #DefundThePolice was meant to advocate for shifting police funding toward social services like mental health support, housing, and education. But "defund" was a loaded term. It gave critics an easy way to misrepresent the movement as advocating for total police abolition, which wasn’t the goal for many activists (Bates 2021). The backlash was immediate, with politicians and media figures spinning the phrase into a fear-driven narrative (Cillizza 2021). Some cities experimented with budget shifts, but the movement struggled to maintain traction as the debate shifted from policy solutions to justifying the slogan itself.

At the end of the day, a viral hashtag is just the beginning. It can start conversations, but real change takes strategy, policy work, and actual activism. Without that, even the loudest movements fade into digital noise. So before jumping on the next trending hashtag, ask: is this just an online moment, or is it part of something bigger?

References

Bates, J 2021, How Are Activists Managing Dissension Within the ‘Defund the Police’ Movement?, Time.

Cillizza, C 2021, Even Democrats are now admitting ‘Defund the Police’ was a massive mistake | CNN Politics, CNN.

Faloyin, D 2022, Remember #Kony2012? We’re still living in its offensive, outdated view of Africa | Dipo Faloyin, the Guardian.

Noman, N 2020, What I learned about being a real ally after the #BlackoutTuesday disaster, NBC News.

Spielmann, N, Dobscha, S & Shrum, LJ 2022, ‘Brands and Social Justice Movements: The Effects of True vs. Performative Allyship on Brand Evaluation’, Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, vol. 8, no. 1.

[olreid]

i know i am a broken record on this point but like. no, not unless by "we" you mean literally every single character and creature in the entire neverafter. not that i can even begin to imagine how that would work. but otherwise this would just be the pc's getting authorial powers because they're the main characters, first of their respective stories and now of this show, and therefore becoming authors in their own right with all the horror that entails. these six specific characters might gain power over their lives, but the side and background characters who have fleshed out this world from the beginning will continue to be shuffled around against their will in whatever way best suits those with more narrative weight.