Social media activism, from the #BlackLivesMatter movement to the #MeToo movement, has become exponentially impactful due to recent events.

“A hashtag is not helping. Hashtags are very pretty on Twitter. I love them. I will hashtag myself into next week,” activist and television producer Shonda Rhimes said during a speech at Dartmouth College in 2014. “But a hashtag is not a movement. A
hashtag does not make you Dr. King. A hashtag does not change anything.”

But Monterey high school junior Simone Brown believes differently.

“The best thing I think I can do is educate people and empower people,” Brown said. “My goal is just to spread these ideas to as many people as I can.”

The internet often provides an opportunity for anonymous cyberbullies, and this can extend impactfully to social media activists. The best approach, according to Brown? “Live and let go.”

“When I first started my account,” she says, “I tried to respond to every hate comment I got,” Brown said. “What I found was that when someone comes to an account, and they really try and attack you, they’re not trying to have their minds changed. They have their opinion, which is, for them, set in stone. I don’t want to spend my time working with bullies and trolls; I’d rather spend my time educating and empowering people.”

16-year-old Emma Tang views social media as a tool that can be used to redefine feminism and share impactful posts with her nearly twenty thousand followers. Those who run the accounts understand and have seen firsthand the impact social media activism can have.

“I think [social media] has a huge potential to change the minds of the youth because that’s where a lot of teenagers and kids get their ideas and get their impressions,” Brown said.

Tang has seen this firsthand: “I’ve gotten messages from followers saying that I’ve changed how they see feminism or how they see the world. To me, that really inspires me to continue.”

Tang was inspired by a desire to redefine feminism. “I used to follow a lot of accounts, and a lot of them weren’t what I thought feminism was,” Tang said. “I figured I would make my own account.”

But the online medium and the fast-paced nature of social media do have their shortcomings.

“When I post, sometimes a lot of people don’t read the captions and there are a lot of misunderstandings or I can’t make the captions short enough because a lot of people don’t want to read several paragraphs, so I have to get my point across in one or two sentences,” Tang says.

With the advent of fear surrounding “fake news”, activism accounts are keeping tabs on their sources.

“Usually, when it comes to news, I put it through Google and check on my sources. I have posted things I’ve gotten outrage to. I have put out false information before, and usually I’ll get a DM that tells me that this is false, and I’ll take it down and put an apology on my [Instagram] story,” Tang said.

Running an account provides an opportunity both for followers and the manager of the account to grow as activists.

“The more people I get to connect with, the more my knowledge expands on these issues. I want to keep educating myself, because there’s always space to learn more.”

This piece was originally published in the pages of The Winged Post on March 6, 2018.