Recontextualising Viral Justice: Social Media, Feminist Connective Action and the 2021 Injection Spiking Incidents.

Abstract

Given the absence of attention to online virality within digital activism scholarship, this MPhil research project interrogates what it means for a social justice issue to “go viral” through the case study of the 2021 injection spiking phenomenon. In doing so, this work reconciles a novel appraisal of the participatory process through which social justice content spreads online with Ruha Benjamin’s (2022) Viral Justice, exploring whether Benjamin’s biological model for social change holds when applied to a social media context. Reports of the spiking incidents, and subsequent discussions of the pervasive rape culture in the UK, dominated online discourse for several months before largely disappearing, in what I term a viral social justice event. Through an adaptive digital ethnographic approach, conducted in the face of increasing restrictions on academic access to social media data, this work retrospectively reconstructed this viral event by collecting cross-platform multimedia corpora of posts made to Twitter and Instagram at the time, alongside in-depth interviews with young female social media users reflecting on the event and its impact on attitudes towards women’s safety. This method allowed this work to develop a framework of the sociality within virality, in which three interrelated dimensions of participation, connective witnessing and affect converge to co-constitute a phenomenon which, despite containing the potential for transformative change, falls short of becoming a sustained movement. Despite its fleetingness, this research suggests that viral social justice events may have an aggregative effect in the drive towards justice, particularly when they are viewed as an opportunity for activists to recast transient affective participation into durable solidarity, carving out a role for digital virality within Viral Justice.