What is Hashtag Activism

Social movements have been transformed in the last decade by social networks, where the dynamics of the social protests have evolved and have been structured and viralized through social media. They are no longer just conversations between activists that stay on social platforms. The cyberactivism that takes place on Twitter or Instagram can also play a significant role in general society by influencing government decision making or shaping the relationships between citizens. In this chapter, the authors explore the main activist movements that took place in social media in the last decade: Occupy, BlackLivesMatter, and MeToo. The proposed approach used in this study facilitates the comparison of each movement while focusing on the user-generated content in social media. This study suggests the presence of four major categories to frame the content generated by the activists. The chapter concludes with the identification of three different approaches to the research of a future research agenda that should be considered for the study of the social movements from the UGC theory framework.