Hashtivism- Jacqueline Walker

Hashtivism. What is it? What’s a hashtag? Where did it come from? Many people are asking the same questions. A hashtag is something used on social media to identify a certain message or subject and make it easily searchable. When you hashtag something, you make it easy for it to be found on websites like Twitter because of features that allow you to see what is trending. Twitter allows you to go to the trending section and see the most popular hashtags at that time. This is why hashtags are becoming “influential”. For instance, a few months ago the ice bucket challenge was trending on twitter. The hashtag that was used on Twitter for the ice bucket challenge was #ALSIceBucketChallenge. People would use this hashtag to post their video and anyone could see it. The only problem is Hashtivism is supposed to be hashtag activism.

            Activism is any action of intense campaigning to bring about social or political change. Hashtivism is activism through hashtagging. It is supposed to bring attention to a particular subject to try to make a change. The #ALSIceBucketChallenge hashtag was partially hashtivism, but not really at the same time. It did help raise money for ALS research, but people didn’t do the challenge the way it was supposed to. The hashtag itself didn’t bring about change. People still don’t know what ALS is, and some people just ignored the hashtag. The point of the hashtag was to raise awareness about ALS and raise money for research, but people took it as a funny challenge where you dumped ice water on your friends’ heads so you didn’t have to donate money. You were supposed to only dump water on your head after you donated money to the research foundation. Even people who dumped water on their heads have no idea what ALS is. People may think they know what ALS is but that is just their opinion and their self-fulfilling bias. They think they know what it is and that makes them feel better about themselves.

            People feel that just because they donate money or dump water on their heads to spread the word about ALS that they are doing enough. That is an attribution error called the self-serving bias. People think that because they dump water on their head that justifies them not donating to ALS research or justifies them not knowing what ALS is, when really it doesn’t.