The Soactivist New Media Activism and Development

By Lidia Naskova

“You can send a press release, and it’s maybe not something media outlets will pursue as a story. But when six million people have seen it, they’ll cover it”

(Travis Nichols, Arctic communications manager at Greenpeace in The Columbia Journalism Review, November, 2014).

The benefits of using media activism online are many nowadays and I found two very interesting examples of where smart online media strategies may help social movement organizations to get messages rapidly out to the public, alter the public opinion about a matter or raise awareness, and consequently changing decisions with the help from the pressure from consumers.

In 2014, the environmental organization Greenpeace launched a YouTube video that was part of a campaign set out to pressure the company Lego to dissociate them from a partnership with the oil-company Shell that had been going on since the 1960s. Greenpeace targeted Lego as a part of a viral protest against Shell’s plans to drill after oil in the Arctic, and in the video, Lego characters were demonstratively placed in a Lego-built Arctic getting slowly covered with oil, along with the slogan that “Lego: everything is NOT awesome”. Continue reading →