When Social Media Activism Feels Performative and What Actually Works
It usually starts with a notification. A crisis somewhere in the world breaks, the news cycle shifts, and within minutes my feed is flooded with infographics, raised fists, and the same handful of hashtags multiplied a thousand times. I want to be part of something. I want my silence not to read as indifference. So I repost, I add a caption, I share a story, and then I close the app and feel strangely empty. The post is up, but nothing in me has actually moved.
That gap between posting and participating is what I have come to think of as performative online activism. It is not that social media is useless, or that anyone using it cares too little. Most of us posting genuinely want to help. The problem is that the platforms themselves reward speed, spectacle, and self-presentation, and those incentives quietly reshape our politics. A like is mistaken for solidarity. A share is mistaken for sacrifice. The work, the slow and unsexy work, gets pushed to tomorrow.
The performance trap we all fall into
Performative activism is rarely cynical. Most of the people I know who fall into it are deeply empathetic and often exhausted. The trap is structural. A platform like Instagram gives us a finished product for our values: a square frame, a colour palette, a caption that signals we are on the right side of history. Once the post is published, the algorithm confirms we have done our bit. The brain gets the same reward it would from volunteering, minus the inconvenience of putting on shoes.
Australian creators face an extra layer of pressure here because our country is small enough that niche conversations happen in the same feeds as mainstream ones. A Melbourne-based writer might find themselves tagged into a Brisbane-based argument about trans healthcare one afternoon and a Perth-based fundraiser the next, all while their own DMs are overflowing. The constant context-switching wears the nervous system down. We start to mistake visibility for vulnerability, and visibility for victory.
Hashtag fatigue and the attention economy
Hashtags are useful, but they have also been hollowed out by volume. When every brand, every influencer, and every news outlet uses the same handful of tags during a crisis, the signal dissolves into noise. Researchers in Australia and overseas have been saying for years that hashtag campaigns can flatten complex situations into a single week of online mood. The issue is not that we care too much. It is that we care in bursts.
This is partly a design problem. Tech companies have built systems that track time-on-screen, not depth of thought. The eSafety Commissioner has been pushing back on parts of this through initiatives like the Basic Online Safety Expectations, but the bigger fix has to come from us as users. Recognising that the platform's reward loop is shaping our political habits is the first step. Naming it out loud, even just to ourselves, loosens its grip.
Why local context changes everything
One of the clearest signs that activism has drifted into performance is when it travels without context. Take the annual flood of posts that arrive around Australia Day, for instance. Many non-Indigenous Australians share slogans they have not paused to interrogate, while First Nations readers watch from the margins of the same conversation. Genuine engagement with issues affecting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people means reading beyond the hashtag, supporting Blak-led organisations, and accepting that a Sydney-based audience might need a completely different entry point than a remote community in the Northern Territory.
The same applies to migrant justice, queer safety, and disability rights. The Online Safety Act 2021 gave the eSafety Commissioner new powers to address image-based abuse and serious online harm, which is a meaningful structural shift, but laws cannot replace the day-to-day work of showing up. Real engagement looks like turning up to a Mardi Gras pre-parade fundraiser in Adelaide, writing to a local MP about housing policy, or spending a Saturday at a NAIDOC event in your own town instead of posting about it from the couch. The geography of care matters more than the reach of a hashtag.
Slow engagement as a form of resistance
There is a quiet rebellion available to anyone tired of performing. It is the practice of slow engagement, which trades virality for consistency. Instead of posting about a cause once and moving on, you commit to learning about it for a season. You subscribe to a newsletter, you read the longform journalism, you listen to the affected communities themselves rather than the commentators who summarise them. The result is not a spike of attention but a steadier, more useful base of knowledge.
I have found that the weekly newsletter as a digital anchor works especially well for this. A regular email cuts through the noise of the feed because it arrives on my terms, in my own time, and it tends to point me toward writers and organisers I would never have stumbled across through an algorithm. Over time, those writers become less like content and more like correspondents. I look forward to hearing from them.
Slow engagement also involves being wrong in public, gracefully. Posting a take, reading the replies, sitting with the discomfort, and then updating your view is one of the more honest things a person can do online. It is uncomfortable, it does not perform well, and that is exactly why it matters.
Solidarity beyond the screen
Solidarity is a relationship, not a broadcast. Treating it like a broadcast is how we end up with activist accounts that look like megaphones and feel like echo chambers. Real solidarity is quieter. It is replying to the friend who has just disclosed something painful instead of liking their post. It is showing up, week after week, for the local mutual aid group in your suburb. It is donating to grassroots organisations like the Aboriginal Legal Service or the Asylum Seekers Resource Centre, which do the slow case-by-case work that no hashtag can do.
For survivors in particular, the difference between performance and presence can be the difference between harm and healing. If you have survived something and want to support others, the work is often less about declarations and more about how I practice solidarity with other survivors online. It usually looks like private messages, shared resources, and the unglamorous labour of believing someone's story the first time they tell it. Online spaces can carry that weight when we let them, but they cannot carry it alone.
Refilling your own cup before you pour out
Any honest conversation about activism has to include the body. Burnout among young activists in Australia is real, and it has been documented in everything from university climate groups to mental-health advocacy circles. Sydney's headspace centres, Melbourne's Orygen, and countless local psychologists are seeing the same cohort of overcommitted, under-rested young people who ran out of fuel somewhere between the protest and the essay deadline.
The feminist framework I keep coming back to is the one that asks us to tend to ourselves so we can keep tending to the world. That looks like therapy, paid if you can afford it and free if you cannot, through services like Head to Health. It looks like boundaries with the apps, including scheduled times when your phone is in another room. It looks like remembering that rest is not laziness, it is infrastructure.
A practical starting place if you have been feeling the hollowness described at the start of this piece:
- Pick one cause for a season instead of reacting to all of them in a weekend.
- Donate directly to a small, community-led organisation rather than retweeting a celebrity fundraiser.
- Audit your feed and mute the accounts that turn tragedy into content without offering resources.
- Show up in person at least once a quarter, even if it is a local council meeting or a community clean-up.
- Replace one doom-scroll session a week with a long-form read or a podcast episode.
- Practice active listening in your own circles before broadcasting opinions outward.
The point of these shifts is not to shame anyone who has ever posted a black square. We have all done it. The point is to notice when our activism has become a product we are selling, and to remember that the actual world, the one with the people in it, is still waiting on the other side of the screen. Tonight, before you close your laptop, choose one cause that genuinely matters to you, find one grassroots Australian organisation doing that work, and send them a small recurring donation rather than a one-off story share. That single act, repeated by enough of us, would do more than a year of hashtags.
