User:MaxenGL/Internet activism

Lead
The Internet is widely accessible by everyone and as a result, it has since its beginning increasingly become a place where various opinions are expressed and not seldom are those opinions ones from some very far end of the spectrum. Extremists of different sorts have come to heavily rely on the Internet, to the point where it is no longer just a means amongst others to achieve a certain objective, but more than often it is where the main part of a movement takes place. Activities such as the conveyance of, perceivably extreme, bureaucratic ideas, or even the outlining of strategic acts of violence or destruction, are ones nowadays likely to occur online. This type of "online extremism" could, though difficult to precisely define, in other words be described as the subcategory of Internet activism that is brought forward by, or connected with, stand alone persons or bodies of persons, that posses what are generally viewed to be extreme opinions. However, while it is indeed problematic to interpret exactly what to define it as, online extremism can be traced back to as far as the 1980s, and despite the tendency and appearance of it continuously and quickly changing, it is expected to remain frequently utilized be extremists for the future to come.

Hashtag activism is the use of hashtags for fighting or supporting a cause through the usage of social media outlets. The term "hashtag activism" first started circulating within journalism in 2011. Since then, its use has been associated with movements such as #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, #SayHerName, and many more.

One example of the powerful rise of hashtag activism can be seen in the black feminist movement's use of hashtags to convey their cause. The famous hashtag "IamJada" was an internet backlash to the mocking "#Jadapose" that went viral, ensuing after sixteen-year-old girl Jada Smith was photographed following her gang rape  In this instance, a hashtag was employed to convey a powerful anti-rape message.

Yet another instance of where this type of activism was utilized for the matter of feminism and women's right, occured in China in relation to the outbreak of COVID-19. While the rule of the country put efforts into trying to hide and downplay the start of what would develop into the pandemic, pressured hospitals were in need of supplies in form of menstrual protection and related products. Supplies which they, despite the fact that the vast majority of the medical workers is made up of females, were not given access to. Amongst others, hashtags such as #RefusePeriodShame, circulated in protest to the ongoing situation and the Wuhan hospital authorities, who were considered responsible for it. Soon to follow on the same thread, one of the VTubers of the Chinese Communist Youth Party League (CYL), known as Jiangshanjiao, an avatar displayed as a youthful female, gave rise to #JiangshanjiaoDoYouGetYourPeriod. The hashtag initially sparked from a post on Weibo where a user sarcastically wrote that exact question, to point out the absurdness in the societal denial of women's biological functions and needs. #JiangshanjiaoDoYouGetYourPeriod, while, like the previous hashtag mentioned, being censored and taken down by the government, had time to spread and catch a lot more attention than what #RefusePeriodShame did, and up until 15 March 2020, it accumulated over 89,200,000 views.

Other notable instances in which marginalized groups have used hashtags as organizing tools for social justice include responses to racial violence and police profiling, as in the case of #BlackLivesMatter and #JusticeForTrayvon, along with misogyny and gendered violence, such as #MeToo and #YesAllWomen.

Environmental activism
One of the earliest books on activism was Don Rittner's Ecolinking: Everyone's Guide to Online Environmental Information, published by Peachpit Press in 1992. Rittner, an environmental activist from upstate New York, spent more than 20 years researching and saving the Albany Pine Barrens. He was a beta tester for America Online and ran their Environmental Forum for the company from 1988 to when it launched in 1990. He took his early environmental knowledge and computer savvy and wrote what was called the bible of the online environmental community. It showed new Net users how to get online, find environmental information, connect to environmentalists around the world, and how to use those resources to save the planet.

(my contribution)

In August 2018, a movement of environmental activism was initiated in Sweden, by now widely known climate activist Greta Thunberg. It all started with Greta, 15 years of age at the time and influenced by the creation of #MarchForOurLives, giving her opinion on the ongoing climate change, by displaying a large sign in front of the Swedish Riksdag (parliament) in protest. This act would start the "School Strike for Climate" (SSC) (Swedish: Skolstrejk för klimatet), a movement that would eventually spread, largely through attention in media, across the globe and develop into something that came to be internationally named "Fridays for Future" (FFF). Through having children miss classes on Fridays to participate in the strike, it has from the moment it started until today, reached and affected leading governments of the world by raising environmental awareness.

Hacktivism

Denial-of-Service attacks, the taking over and vandalizing of a website, uploading Trojan horses, and sending out e-mail bombs (mass e-mailings) are also examples of Internet activism. While the concept is difficult to exactly pinpoint, the phrase "hacktivism" summarizes the act of somehow utilizing hacking capabilities as a means to achieve some type of political goal, and the expression is occasionally also referred to as a variation of "cyberterrorism". The varieties of different routes groups of hacktivists choose to approach the organization, website or forum that they are taking on, can be categorized into different tactics. Some examples of those tactics or strategies are "DDoS attacks", "Doxing", and "Webdefacemen t", all of which are slightly different ways of reaching an often similar end goal. For additional understanding and explanation, as well as for more specific examples of these types of subversive actions, see hacktivism.

Sexual assault activism

The Me Too movement is a similar movement that started in Hollywood. Initially, the activist Tarana Burke created the phrase back in 2006 to "empower women through empathy", but first over a decade later, the actress Alyssa Milano gave birth to the usage of the saying that would lead to the eventual spread of it, after using it in a post on twitter, in which she acknowledged several accusations of sexual assault against film producer Harvey Weinstein. It would from there on not be long until it stretched and attached on various online plattforms, and in no more than a day after Milano's tweet, the #MeToo hashtag had been reused over 500,000 times on that same media, as well as 4.7 million times on Facebook. The phrase w as first used to demonstrate the amount of sexual assault that happens to young actresses and actors in Hollywood, and it was largely due to the early involvement of ceveral well known individuals from the entertainment industry, who used the hashtag in their own posts, that the movement achieved the spread that it did. It soon expanded to apply to all forms of sexual assault, especially in the work place, and with time it also came to move from concerning mainly white heterosexual women, to eventually being used by both men and women with different sexualities and ethnicity.

These movements were intended to create an outlet for men and women to share their experiences with those with similar views without blame or guilt. They brought widespread attention to sexual assault and caused much controversy about changes that should be made accordingly. Criticism around movements such as these centers on concerns about whether or not participants are being dishonest for their own gain or are misinterpreting acts of kindness. However, the same Me Too movement, which also reached Egypt showed the adverse side of the activism where witness detention in one of the high-profile rape cases highlighted the prioritisation of traditional social morality by the government over women's rights in the country.