Social Movements, Platforms, and In/Visibility

Social movements are collectives that aim to bring about their chosen social goals (Tilly & Wood, 2015).
Presently, the in/visibility and, thus, power and societal impact, of social movements are shaped by digital
platforms (e.g., Instagram, X, Telegram, TikTok): platform specific features and content moderation practices
co-create social movements’ in/visibility in the public sphere. As social movements’ in/visibility on digital
platforms matters for their societal impact, managing in/visibility on (multiple) digital platforms is key for
social movements to emerge and strive. This project aims to understand in/visibility trajectories of social
movements that result from the interplay between activists’ practices and platforms’ aggregation and filtering
properties. How and in what manners the trajectories of in/visibility on digital platforms constitute the
mobilization and organization of social movements continue to be a blind spot across the social sciences
(Brighenti, 2022). Therefore, this project has both academic and social anticipated effects through generating
a novel understanding of how in/visibility trajectories in platforms transform the ability of social movements
to mobilize and drive social change.
Aiming to analyze the interplay between in/visibility, platforms, and social movements, this project asks the
following research question: How do trajectories of in/visibility in platforms transform social movements’
emergence and organization? The empirical examination of two sub-questions contributes to answering this
question. The first sub-question focuses on social movements, asking: How do activists manage in/visibility
on platforms? The second sub-question examines the role of platforms and their content moderation policies:
How do platforms co-create trajectories of in/visibility? By answering these questions, VISIMOVE will
provide a novel interdisciplinary understanding of not only the transformative power of platforms (what
platforms do to activists) but also their active platform users (what activists do with platforms). Empirically,
VISIMOVE explores two opposing movements through mixed methods: the tradwife movement and the 4B
movement. Tradwives are traditional housewives advocating for returning to conservative values and roles
from the past century. 4B is a South-Korean movement that started about 2015 but recently gained traction in
the US-American context. Activists of 4B radically advocate against patriarchy by rejecting “marriage,
childbirth, dating and sex” (Rashid, 2024). Against the backdrop of current political developments and an
increasing polarization of public discourses, we are convinced that comparing these two radical and contrary
movements is extremely revelatory for answering the research questions. However, this research endeavor
comes with risks: We cannot foresee changes in the political landscape that potentially infleunce the activists’
posting and platforms’ moderating practices. More importantly, though, a netnographic immersion into these
two movements can very subtlety influence researchers’ perspective on feminism and politics. While we
expect this project to challenge us personally, we are convinced that it allows us to shed light on the yet under
researched phenomenon of in/visibilitiy trajectories of social movements and – considering the political
situation – potentially contributes to better understand polarizing dynamics of public discourses through social
movements on/and digital platforms.