Habermasian utopia or Sunstein's echo chamber? The ‘dark side’ of hashtag hijacking and feminist activism

Society thinks, talks, and communicates in ways which are inherently different now from the pre-Internet era. Hashtags in particular have transformed community formation around a particular topic, issue, or goal. A new and relatively under-studied phenomenon is that of ‘hashtag hijacking’, where ind...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Legal studies (Society of Legal Scholars) 2020-09, Vol.40 (3), p.507-526
Main Author: Dempsey Willis, Reilly Anne
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Activism
Application programming interface
Case studies
Causality
Debates
Fairy tales
Feminism
Human rights
Social networks
Womens rights
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Summary:Society thinks, talks, and communicates in ways which are inherently different now from the pre-Internet era. Hashtags in particular have transformed community formation around a particular topic, issue, or goal. A new and relatively under-studied phenomenon is that of ‘hashtag hijacking’, where individuals or groups use a particular hashtag to draw attention to arguments and narratives which undermine or oppose the hashtag's objective. Most of the current literature looks at hashtag hijacking as a positive outlet for counter-discourse/counter-narratives to challenge dominant groups. This study, however, looks at the ‘dark side’ of hashtag hijacking, where groups use trolling tactics similar to the Alt_Right to reinforce misogynistic views. The hijacking of three hashtags is explored in this study: #notacriminal, #women2drive, and #mydressmychoice, to explore feminist theories on the role of social media in a ‘public space’. Does Twitter function as one common public sphere where inequalities are so deeply embedded that minority voices have no hope of being heard? Or does Twitter function as a meeting place for multiple competing public spheres, thus allowing minority – and in this case feminist – voices to be heard?
ISSN:0261-3875
1748-121X
DOI:10.1017/lst.2020.16