Activism vs. Slacktivism #SCSUCOM135

Twitter is one of the largest platforms that people use to get their word out and possibly heard. Activism lives within twitter and more than 271 million Twitter users send 500 million tweets into the online world, creating a huge collection of public commentary.  Hashtag campaigns are now being created to bring people that all have emotions for a certain topic or event and is allowing them to tweet about it by including the hashtag. This only has the ability to raise awareness but there is always a slim chance that the event or topic can be changed by these hashtag campaigns. Hashtags had blown up when Michael Brown was shot by a white police officer who suspected Michael to be dangerous. The hashtag Ferguson has gained more that 7.8 users for a whole week. Form this online activism a group of youths created a civil movement, Hands Up United. This group put demands together which they hope could address racial actions in the United States. Since everyone feels that hashtags can help situations there are instances where it doesn’t do anything. For example the 300 girls that were kidnapped and there was a hashtag #bringbackourgirls well, many of the girls remain under Boko Haram’s control. A Human Rights Watch report claims that the organization has kidnapped as many as 500 girls since the beginning of last year. Since this hashtag was unable to create any good it was dropped and has barely been talked about since. Even though this is such a huge topic and families have lost their daughters it's not right that people have dropped it but because nothing good has come out of it people are giving up. On the other hand a movement that has had a major positive outcome is the ALS ice bucket challenge. More than a million people took part in this challenge and had raised over $115 million and $96 million had gone to research. Although there has been good that has come out of the twitter activism with the #ferguson and #handsupdontshoot hashtags there are still hashtags that are unable to change events such as the #bringbackourgirls hashtags people will just drop such events that are unable to make progress.