Social Media Activism Quotes

The Tunisian blogger and activist Sami Ben Gharbia has written passionately about how U.S. government involvement in grassroots digital spaces can endanger those who are already vulnerable to accusations by nasty regimes of acting as foreign agents.

Governments do not care about your Facebook-assembled opinion. Incompetent politicians don't read your tweets; there are reasons for them being out of touch. Change does not come about for 'likes' on a page, though the ideas for it may start there.

I was 24 when I was embroiled in a high-profile lawsuit. This was 2014, long before, en masse and on social media, we said #MeToo and #TimesUp. At the time, I felt completely alone. Visceral, hateful online harassment from strangers left me paranoid and anxious for years afterward.

I think that social media platforms and technology have been the accelerator for the push for the populist-style administrations in democratically elected presidents.

Trump represented a movement of dissatisfaction, the dissent, unhappiness, division cultivated by years of identity politics and the bullying of arrogant, insufferable, intolerant social justice warriors who used the last two terms to punish anyone who reminded them of Daddy.

If you just look at the fact that a woman was central in twittering the Cairo revolution, and women were central to the Tunisian uprising. Women are at the center of everything right now and moving everything forward. And I do think in the next year or two, we are going to see such a woman spring, such a rising.

Shaming is powerful and useful. I'm living in New York, and my instinct is that, after the Black Lives Matter protests, which were organized on social media, the chance of there being another Eric Garner, choked to death in New York by an NYPD officer, has diminished.

You know, as a child of Palestinian immigrants, again, every corner of my district is a reminder of the civil rights movement, and I bring that lens, and I try to - you know, many of the Palestinians, they have called me, reached out to me via social media.

I don't play videogames and generally think that online activism is a giant waste of time.

Some day, when I'm done triggering special snow flakes on campus, when I'm tired of all this, I might quite like a little Milo.

I'll say that technology will make revolutions start happening faster, but it'll make them harder to finish. Technology can't create leaders and cause institutions to appear.

While social media can play an important role in spreading messages and democratizing access to ideas, hashtags without organization end up fizzling out.

Governments can no longer control 100 percent of the story. Time and geographical boundaries disappear. In places like China and all over the Middle East, social-media outlets are being used to expose and hold accountable public officials that don't want to be held accountable for corruption and human rights abuses.

The rules have changed as information and technology evolve, but it's essential that people stay in the streets, stay visible in their communities, on the news, on the Internet, and in this crucial public discussion. There are a million people just like you (or me), sharing the same doubts, fears, and insecurities that keep us from speaking out. Finding each other in our neighborhoods, online, in the streets - this is what keeps us from believing we're alone, from giving in to hopelessness.

It's fitting that an insult largely aimed at youth has made children of those who use it. 'Snowflake' reminds us how much we need climate change... in politics.

I think social media has reinvigorated people's enthusiasm to be active and to engage.

Almost every week, there are stories in the press or on Chinese social media about what even the official Chinese media call 'hot online topics:' stories about how people in a particular village or town used Weibo to expose malfeasance by local or regional authorities.

We have to be the media when media is silent

I've realised that as long as the youth has the ability to use social media and their voice is there, people can actually cut through the nonsense and see what's really going on. People are live streaming from the ground, so everyone's starting to become more aware. When you pull back from this playground of duality, where someone is right and someone is wrong, you recognise that this is the way things have played out for years and years. And as long as the youth culture can see the madness that's going on in the world, there will eventually be a revolution.

GamerGate-promoted outlets fail at grown-up journalistic ethics, and they also fail at the cheap knockoff brand of GamerGate brand ethics, too.

If you really want to make a difference you don't do it via Tweet, via Facebook, via Instagram - you get down, you understand what the facts are and then you offer a path forward.

I feel like, if you have a big platform, please use it for great... just like me, just like a bunch of people are. It takes two seconds. It's not gonna mess up your Instagram feed, you can do it.

There's more outrage on Twitter about a One Direction split or about what one band member said to another than there is about institutionalized racism and something huge.

When I wake up, I'll read something and I'll feel angry. And then I'll calm down a little bit. I'll think about it. And then I'll tweet something that talks about the issue, and if I can inject some satire and humor, I'll try to do that.

We see leaders in social media starting fights. I'm on the other team who likes to inspire, to leave a positive message.