Social media like YouTube provides flexible venue for online activism: Study

Washington: Social media sites like YouTube videos provide a popular and flexible venue for online activism, a new study has revealed.

YouTube helped initiate social protest movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Proposition 8. According to the study carried out by Emily Vraga and colleagues from the US universities, the most important advantage of YouTube videos for the purpose of social and political activism is that they can be shared easily, quickly and effectively through a variety of mechanisms. The study titled, `The Rules of Engagement: Comparing Two Social Protest Movements on YouTube`, compares how two disparate political movements used YouTube to define and advance their goals. It was found that social media activism resulted in differing degrees of popularity and engagement, perhaps related to the content of the videos and to the different online environments in which they appear. Editor-in-Chief of Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, from the Interactive Media Institute, San Diego, Brenda K. Wiederhold said that as YouTube matures, and additional social networking tools evolve, it is interesting to note how these tools may be used by individual citizens as well as political activists to advance their goals.