From Tweets to Streets- #YESALLWOMEN by Ashley Martinez-Munoz
Social movements have been a part of our history for multiple decades. We have read about them within our history books. We have viewed them being covered on the news. And we have perhaps discussed about them with our peers. The purpose of social movements has remained the same over the years, which is to spread awareness about a specific political or social issue from a certain group, and to undo a social change. The way that social movements are spread, however, have changed abundantly. In the past, people were brought together physically with their picket signs and flyers spread across town including information on their social movement. Although people are still united physically for a social movement, those picket signs have changed to hashtags and the flyers have changed to social media pages. Today social movements engage with new media such as social media websites, blog posts, online newspapers, and much more. Along with new media comes the digital participation that takes place between different races.
Such a social movement that exemplifies the new relationship between social movements and new media, is the #Yesallwomen social media movement. According to The Wall Street Journal #Yesallwomen is said to be one of the top five social media movements in 2014. The main source used to spread the hashtag and popularize it, was the well-known social media website, Twitter.
#Yesallwomen is not just a popular hashtag on a widely used social media website, but it is instead a part of the feminism and women's right movement. The hashtag got over one million "re-tweets" from a diverse population of users on Twitter, all of which were of different genders, ages, and races. The #Yesallwomen campaign is one of many that has contributed to the way that social movements are utilizing the new media of the 21st century.
