As it was shown with the Women’s March on Washington the Saturday after the inauguration, the protest gained immediate attention via the Internet, as did the growth in the number of supporters worldwide for the Standing Rock Sioux protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline.
According to the Associated Press, when the president issued his temporary travel ban on travel to the U.S. from seven Muslim-majority countries, social activist Dex Torricke-Barton took to his Facebook account, posting, “I’m thinking of organizing a rally.”
It only took a few hours before he had over a thousand people expressing interest, and a week later, the result was a huge protest with more than 9,000 people participating in front of San Francisco’s City Hall.
But Torricke-Barton is not alone in this revolution. It makes no difference if it’s organizing a protest or raising money for refugee and immigrants groups, social media has been fueling the whole resistance movement against Trump and using truly imaginative ways.
Roots of a sustainable resistance
Unlike the resistance movement against the Vietnam war in the 60s where it took months of planning and getting individual people and scattered organizations together, the Internet has made it relatively easy to join up with contacts all over the country and the world in a matter of minutes.
The “pussy hats” worn by demonstrators during the Women’s March became a symbol of the protests against Trump after members on Ravelry, the social network for knitters and crocheters, angry at Trump’s lewd remarks in a video began trading advice and patterns for the pink “pussy hats.”
“This is an incredible project because it’s mixed between digital and physical,” says Jayna Zweiman, one of the founders of the Pussyhat Project, according to Salon. “We harnessed social media for good.”
Christopher Huff is a Beacon College professor who has focused on social movements of the 1960s. In discussing the differences in protests in the 60s and today’s movement, he said, “The women’s march was achieved at a much larger scale at a fraction of the time.”
And the big question surrounding the protest movement today is this – Will it be sustainable? While social media helps people rally quickly around a cause, Huff says, it doesn’t always help people grasp the “long-term effort” required to sustain a movement.
And it’s not just individual groups or organizations getting involved in the resistance movement. Silicon Valley has mobilized, raising funds for the Asian Law Caucus, the California Chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the National Immigration Law Center on one rainy night last week.
From CEOs to employees across the tech industry, the resistance is growing on a scale not seen in other industries. And this is driven by social networking via the Internet. One could say that our social media sites have become our greatest weapon in any kind of movement, and not just here in the U.S. but around the world.
