Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-2019

Department

Department of Psychology

Abstract

We argue that the often-used critique of social media activism as merely a ‘feel-good’ mechanism can be countered by conceptualizing social media activism as a necessary type of collective action (i.e., consensus mobilization), incorporating theory on the benefits of positive feelings for activism, and by examining how power may affect these relationships. Women from two different samples (MTurk and university) were randomly assigned to recall a high- versus low-power experience, view real-world events of sexism, and then complete questionnaires assessing endorsement of social media activism, positive affect, and collective action intentions. A dual moderated mediation analyses at the second stage of mediation showed equivalency across two samples, at which point the single moderated mediation model was tested on the combined sample. The model was significant, such that among those in the high-power condition, endorsing social media activism was associated with greater positive affect, which in turn predicted greater collective action intentions. Among those in the low-power condition, however, this indirect effect was not significant. This study provides counter-evidence to the ‘slacktivism’ critique, contributes to theories of collective action, power and their integration, and identifies a possible intervention to enhance the effectiveness of social media activism.

Comments

Copyright © 2011 Foster, Hennessy, Blankenship, and Stewart. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited.

This article was originally published in Cyberpsychology: Journal of Psychosocial Research on Cyberspace, 13(4), https://doi.org/10.5817/CP2019-4-6

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