An Online Occupation of the University Hashtag: Exploring How Student Activists Use Social Media to Engage in Protest

Abstract

Today’s student activists leverage social media to bring campus-based protests to a wider audience and create a counterspace for discussing racism on campus. In this article, the authors present a novel case of social media activism in which students occupied an official university hashtag to raise awareness of racism on campus (i.e., an online occupation). The authors examined 776 tweets posted after a fatal hate crime to understand how student activists organized the occupation of the institutional hashtag and how students, faculty, alumni, and the media participated in the movement. Findings shed light on the potential disruptive power of social media activism.

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