Social Media Activism promoted at Oscars

The omnipresence of social media has been proven once again at the 82th Academy Awards. One of the men responsible for The Cove, the 2010 Oscar winner for Best Documentary, used the Academy Awards stage to promote a web and mobile-based activism. The film describes the annual killing of dolphins in a National Park in Japan from an anti-dolphin hunting campaigner’s point of view. During the accepting speech, Ric O’Barry held up a small black board with the words “Text DOLPHIN to 44144” on it.

Viewers who followed the sign’s instructions were subscribed to text updates and plugged into the larger social media campaign for the film’s cause. The campaign is rooted in a Takepart.com page that links to several ways people can get involved, including a letter-writing campaign and a Facebook Cause application page with more than 500.000 supporters. The latter has also been used to organize live-streaming Q&A events with Ric O’Barry.

Activist O’Barry has made a clever use of social media in order to reach people who had never heard about the movie before, and to inform them about the slaughter of dolphins. It seems like text messages and the web increasingly pay a significant part in activism lately: the American Red Cross, for example, ran a very successful text message donation campaign for relief efforts in Haiti, while Twitter was used by protesters in Iran to make voices heard and to organize events. The film itself has caused a major uproar, but the impact of the social media campaign of The Cove cannot be measured just yet. Nevertheless, this example illustrates how social media can function as an important weapon for activists.

Source:
http://mashable.com/2010/03/08/the-cove-movie-oscars/