Social Groups and Intersectionality in Online Activism

Online activism is a powerful tool for social advocacy, as illustrated by widespread online campaigns against sexual misconduct (#MeToo; De Benedictis et al., 2019) and police violence (#BlackLivesMatter; Hoffman et al., 2016). However, within online activism, diverse experiences are often excluded (Boe et al., 2021; De Benedictis et al., 2019; Griffin, 2019; Labelle, 2021; Phipps, 2021). Leaving out marginalized identities related to gender, race, queerness, and more in online activism reproduces the systems of oppression it aims to dismantle (Trott, 2021), underlining the importance of exploring social groups and intersectionality in online activism. We explore feminism and antiracism discourse on TikTok—a platform particularly suited for online activism (Le Compte & Klug, 2021). Specifically, we investigate to what extent visible markers of content creators’ identities (gender expression and skin color) predict how often and how they include social groups in their content. Because arguments favoring the ingroup are consumed more often (Appiah et al., 2013) and are better remembered (Schaller, 1992), especially when a group is specifically primed (Rule et al., 2010), we expect content creators to discuss their ingroup disproportionally often. Intergroup solidarity theory proposes that marginalized groups might also tend to include other marginalized groups (Craig & Richeson, 2012). Finally, social norms in activist environments may incentivize dominant groups toward (performative) allyship (Grapin & Goldie, 2025), possibly leading white men to overperform compared to white women in feminism and Black men in antiracism discourse. These expectations are tested in an audiovisual quantitative content analysis of feminism and antiracism discourse on TikTok. A random sample of 2000 videos, stratified on Black women, Black men, white women and white men, is currently being coded manually on visible markers of identity, social group mentions, and intersectional arguments. As such, the study will contribute to the field of online social advocacy by investigating how identities might be related to activist discourse. Relating these codings to engagement indicators can also reveal practical implications for effective online activism.