Students

The Social Media Activist's Handbook

With her zine, Natalie Willoughby ’21 hopes to help her peers become better advocates.

When Natalie Willoughby ’21 decided to publish a zine featuring her work on intersectionality in online activism, she was adding her voice to a rich legacy of self-published, underground magazines going back nearly a century. Like those zines, Willoughby’s project aims to spark a dialogue about a controversial topic. Taking inspiration from those publications, Willoughby is examining a new medium: online activism. It’s the culmination of a three-month summer research project, which Willoughby hopes will help her fellow students be better advocates for social justice.

Natalie Willoughby ’21

“If I can help one person decide not to post something problematic, then that's a win."

“I plan to create a user's guide for online activists to think about intersectionality and think about the best way to be online activists,” Willoughby says. “There's going to be articles in it about things like how to use Twitter to engage with Black creators, how to highlight people of color and other marginalized people, and also when you need to step back.”

In recent years, more and more public discourse has moved from in-person interactions to online—a trend hastened by the pandemic. As protests and political arguments roiled social media platforms, Willoughby noticed a lot of people engaging in online activism were posting things that could cause more harm than good for marginalized groups. Willoughby realized a lot of people were jumping into performative activism through social media because it was an easy way to show support, but they lacked a basic understanding of how to be an effective advocate for their cause. That’s where the zine comes in.

“If I can help one person decide not to post something problematic, then that's a win,” she says, “especially in moments like this. When we're all talking about Black Lives Matter and why there is injustice ingrained within our systems, it's really important for us to think about our interpersonal responsibility to each other.”

Willoughby, who is also captain of the debate team and an intramural student-athlete, is one of a hundred Puget Sound students who got to participate in a summer research project this year. Working closely with her faculty advisor, Derek Buescher, Willoughby spent the summer bookmarking tweets, screenshotting posts, and saving TikTok videos, adding them to an enormous spreadsheet, then using quantitative analysis to see how overlapping identities are invoked online. She hopes her findings will help others steps into the arena while avoiding some common pitfalls.

“I think people, especially white students, are very afraid of putting themselves out there and then being checked by someone else,” Willoughby says. “So that's kind of the goal, to make people more cognizant about the things that they post, so that they're more productive and on track toward justice.”