It is 2016, and there has been a massive leakage of financial files by the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. The files contain 11.5 million confidential documents from 200 nations, and the names of politicians, world leaders and other categories of well-known figures have been exposed for avoiding paying tax. This massive leakage is today known as the Panama Papers.
The exposure of these confidential documents serves as evidence of how modern activism is taking place compared to traditional activism. Back in the day, traditional activism had people marching on the streets, singing, chanting and holding posters sending messages to their leaders or government. These people came together with the same purpose and became one voice and fought for what they wanted and what they believed was right, but today it has evolved from the streets to taking place on our screens. This just shows how technology is being integrated into activism as a way to address contemporary social and political challenges faced by people. This can then be referred to as the “new activism” taking place digitally and no longer in the streets.
Today, we have the youth using what we can refer to as ethical hacking, data visualisation, and social media campaigns to demand government transparency. What do these terms mean? Firstly, ethical hacking is the act of performing a security assessment with the involvement of hackers, but it is done with approval and authorisation from that specific company or organisation. In relation to the case of the Panama Papers, the case can be viewed as digital whistleblowing, as hidden information was exposed with the aim to enlighten the public about what their leaders are doing, as taxes affect all people, no matter the category. Data visualisation is the process of reducing complex information to a graphic representation using statistics, graphs, and charts. More like statistics that assist in showing the number of people affected by certain things; in this case, it could be how many people were affected by the rich people avoiding paying tax and to show how many times it has occurred. Social media campaigns are used to spread the word rapidly, enabling people with the same purpose from different parts of the world to come together as one voice online, and more people become easily informed about the movements happening across the world, whereas in traditional activism, a movement could be known by those closer and might have affected the results of the movements as more crowds tend to make more impact. This is how traditional activism is evolving towards the “new activism,” which is integrated with the use of technology.
Another impactful movement that used media and statistics to pressure the government or leaders to show that, as a world, we are facing a climate crisis is the #FridaysForFuture (FFF) movement, led by Greta Thunberg and other young activists who protested outside the Swedish parliament to fight the climate crisis. Although the movement started as the traditional activism in the streets, it grew more and had more impact when it was posted on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter), where it received significant attention and went viral. A lot of people commented on it and influenced others to join and to pressure their governments to do something about the climate crisis too. With visualisation to show how climate is affecting people and nature, people were able to understand how it is fit to be categorised as a crisis. Over 1,500 strikes were held in 150 countries, and this movement continues to this day. This shows how media is helpful in carrying out movements and pressuring the government to take action and how compressing complex information into statistics helps people to understand effects better.
Another perfect example is purple profile movement, which started in South Africa, where people had purple profile pictures on Instagram, TikTok, X and Facebook as an act to go against gender-based violence and to pressurise the president to declare femicide and GBV as a crisis, seeing how many women were sexually assaulted and murdered per day. People from other countries saw this, and for support, they joined in, along with celebrities who came together to honour the lives lost to gender violence. Over 5500 women and children were being murdered in a single recent annual reporting period, which represented a 33.8% increase from the previous year. The movement was impactful, as it resulted in the president declaring gender-based violence and femicide a national disaster. This shows that this movement was not just changing your profile to purple but calling for change and equal rights and protection for all.
We all have seen how impactful this new activism has been, but it can also be disadvantageous, as misinformation can spread and quickly so; the wrong people can be accused, people can pretend to support the movement while continuing to do what is against it, hiding behind screens, and people might get death threats, which compromises their safety, and it marginalises those who do not have access to the internet.
The Panama Papers case, the #FridaysForFuture movement and the Purple Profile Picture movement are evidence, amongst many, of how technology such as ethical hacking, data visualisation and social media can be used to challenge power dynamics by pressuring the government to do right by its people, as activism is being used to reshape the world and its systems, which is right for holding the right people accountable.