In class we discussed hashtivism pretty in depth and also
had an online discussion of it for a lab, but what we didn’t discuss was the
negative side to hashtags. Hashtags can be a great way to get your message out
to the public and several campaigns, like #Kony2012 and #BringBackOurGirls,
raised awareness to millions of people. With that being said, there are sadly
many people out there abusing the power of the hashtag. For instance #rapeface.
In 2008 a meme surfaced that was intended to label the expression on the face
of a man before he is about to rape a woman, meant to be a joke you can find thousands
of photos and videos all over social media with the hashtag “rapeface”. After
the meme the hashtag evolved into people taking pictures of themselves with an awkward
smile and then hashtagging “rapeface”. The hashtag was most common among junior
high aged kids where most of them were not old enough to really understand what
they were exactly making fun of or the consequences of what they were doing. In
November of 2013 RAINN launched an online campaign to get #rapeface taken down
from Instagram (Yes it took five years for any progress to be made). Within 48 hours the hashtag was removed from Instagram,
but when I was doing my research for this blog post I saw that people are still
using the hashtag on Twitter and YouTube. Just as I was writing this someone tweeted this:
Another example of the dark side of social media is the
hashtag “jadapose”. A 16 year old girl named Jada went to a party, drank punch
that was offered to her and passed out. Later, after seeing pictures of herself
circulating on social media she realized that she was sexually assaulted. The
pictures of her passed out and naked inspired the awful hashtag, #jadapose,
where people would take a picture of themselves mimicking Jada sprawled out on
the ground. Thankfully though, when you search #jadapose, the idiots who were
cruel enough to mock a rape victim have overwhelmingly been drowned out by
supporters of Jada.
While researching this topic the majority of the negative
hashtag “campaigns” I found were somehow related to slut shaming and rape
culture, which I was not entirely expecting. When I started this blog post I
had no idea that it was going to turn into a post about rape culture. I knew
that with the rise in social media there has also been a rise in slut shaming
and rape culture, but I had no idea just how prevalent it was. When I typed in hateful
hashtags into google I was expecting to find articles on cyberbullying and
people’s responses to it. While what I did find was a form of cyberbullying, I was
shocked at what people were actually saying. The three most common hateful
hashtags used on twitter were #BecauseOfChrisBrown, #ThatsWhatSlutsDo, and
#ItsNotRapeIf. I’m really just astonished at how strong the rape-supportive
culture is.
No comments:
Post a Comment