JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

In the past decade, “hashtag feminism” has emerged in Mexico as a prevalent strategy to build social movements against gender-based violence (GBV). For example, during the global ‘16 Days of Activism Against GBV’ campaign held between November 25 and December 10 each year, Mexican-based non-governmental organizations (NGOs) turn to X (formerly Twitter) to share messages. However, there is limited research on the type of information shared by these NGO activists on social media and on the public’s engagement with these messages.

Objective:

In response to this gap, the aims of this study are to explore the themes covered by Mexican non-governmental organizations (NGOs) on X and to examine what types of messages related to GBV potentially resonated more with the public.

Methods:

We collated and reviewed tweets published in Spanish on the platform X by Mexican-based NGOs between November 25 and December 10 in 2020-2022, a period of time when digital interactions increased under the COVID-19 pandemic. We then extracted tweets using the following four hashtags: #16días/#16DiasdeActivismo/#16DíasdeActivismo, #25N/#25Noviembre, #DiaNaranja/#DíaNaranja, and #PintaElMundoDeNaranja. We subsequently assessed the number of likes that each tweet had and retained the top 200 tweets from each year with the highest number of likes. We used the 6-step qualitative thematic analysis method in NVivo software to code and analyze the final 600 tweets.

Results:

Five themes emerged from the 16 Days of Activism Against GBV campaigns, covering both knowledge-sharing and activism-generating messages: 1) activism and how to be an activist; 2) types of GBV most commonly highlighted in tweets; 3) changing public discourse surrounding GBV; 4) GBV as a violation of human rights; and 5) the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on GBV. Most of the messages on these tweets exclusively mentioned women and younger girls, while few included adolescents. Gaps in the representation of vulnerable populations were also found.

Conclusions:

The tweets from this campaign that were frequently liked by the public reflect some of the most significant societal issues currently present in the country. Our results could help guide further GBV campaigns. Still, further research related to hashtag feminism by Mexican-based NGOs on GBV is needed to understand the population that NGOs reach and how the messages shared on these campaigns translate into activism in online and offline social media platforms.