Effectiveness of Twitter as a Social Change Communication Tool for Marginalized Groups

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Effectiveness of Twitter as a Social Change Communication Tool for Marginalized Groups
Thesis Statement
Twitter is an effective communication platform for social and political change because of its global reach, ease of access, and freedom of speech policy.
Topic Rationale
Whenever the question of mass protests emerges in the current social sphere, conjured images of the Civil Rights Movement, the 1968 protests against the Vietnam War, and the 1989 toppling of the Berlin wall are bound to emerge. However, the past few years have seen an unprecedented drastic increase in political uprisings. In 2019 alone, there were on all the continents, distributed across 114 countries. On average, global protests have increased by 11.5% annually since 2009 (Brannen, Haig, and Schmidt). Several reasons can explain the rise of protests, including economic, leadership, ethnic, and religious tensions, police brutality, violence against women, and the continued marginalization of vulnerable groups. Underlying these forces is the effectiveness of communication across social groups through current technological tools that have made it possible for real-time global updates, organization, and planning. Social media platforms, and Twitter, in particular, have been instrumental as communication and mobilization tools for a majority of the protests. Therefore, there is a need to understand the effectiveness of Twitter as a communication tool for political and social change, especially among marginalized groups across the world.
Text of Analysis
The use of Twitter as a communication platform for social and political changes has attracted scholarly attention because of its ease of use, penetration, and policies that respect freedom of speech. Among the key of the text for the paper include Berridge (2020), Edrington and Lee (2020), Jenzen, Erhart, and Eslen-Ziya (2020), Kharroub and Bas (2015), van Haperen, Nicholls, and Uitermark (2018), Li, Turki and Izaguirre (2020), and HHRJ (2020). While current research attempts to explain the effectiveness of Twitter, contemporary research has focused mainly on social media platforms as political communication tools for politicians and political parties. Therefore, the paper will include the mentioned journal resources alongside recent books and statistical sources.
Approach
The paper will begin by defining key terms like marginalized groups, social change, and social change communication to narrow down the context. This will be followed by a historical overview of protests sparked on Twitter, including those that spilled into the streets and those that remained onlin...