Black Lives Matter: Social Media and a Social Movement, Pt. 4

Social Media: How Hashtags Help

Hashtags usage on social media, and most significantly on Twitter, allows commonalties among thoughts and expressions to be grouped together into categories. Anyone with internet access can create a hashtag at any time, and when a hashtag is used more than once, you can simply click the hashtag to see all of the other postings that have included that hashtag. This helps social movements because anyone can attain access to the internet. Whether it’s paying for your own at home, going to a place that offers a free connection, or using data on a mobile device, there are so many places that you can find and use the internet, so social movements founded on social media do not exclude people of lower socioeconomic status. Also, Social media is vastly popular with young adults, so it allows people to connect to others with similar interests. You can use social media to show images, words, and videos to SHOW more than tell a message. Because of its popularity and a generation of people who have grown up using social media, hashtags have been an important way to gain attention to different topics, educate people on them, and generate discussion. The #BlackLivesMatter movement was officially founded online, but online usage has also contributed to spreading messages of physical, in-person protests and kept many people up to date on different events throughout the United States.