Social media platforms as complex and contradictory spaces for feminisms: Visibility, opportunity, power, resistance and activism

Abstract

This special issue on feminisms and social media is published at a unique point in time, namely when social media platforms are routinely utilised for communication from the mundane to the extraordinary, to offer support and solidarity, and to blame and victimise.Collectively, social media are online technologies that provide the ability for community building and interaction (Boyd & Ellison, 2007), allowing people to interact, share, create and consume online content (Lyons, McCreanor, Goodwin, & Moewaka Barnes, 2017).They include such platforms as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Tinder, and Snapchat among others.These technologies have been conceptually described as social, participatory, locative, algorithmic, interactive, affective and entangled with bodies (Carah, 2017).Social media platforms have proliferated in recent years, alongside technological advances that have seen the development and affordability of mobile devices that allow almost ubiquitous online connection for many people in Global North societies, and growing online connection in the Global South.However, there remains a ''digital divide'' in terms of uneven access to the internet and, also importantly, in terms of uneven ways in which the internet is used by different groups of people

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