I remember an interview with Rachel Maddow where someone asked her if she felt doing her TV show was activism, and she said absolutely not. She had worked as an activist focused on getting better conditions and treatment for HIV positive people in prison earlier in her career and was very clear on the fact that taking in information, aggregating it, and sharing it with others is NOT activism.
When asked for an example of what she did consider to be activism, she talked about how they were once trying to improve the situation for people with HIV in a specific prison, so they were trying to figure out how to persuade the guy running the prison to meet with them. So they found out where his wife went to church, and who the pastor was, and then they figured out where he golfed, and that there was another member of that country club who was a lawyer that one of them had gone to law school with, so they asked the lawyer to golf with the pastor and talk him into doing a sermon on treating all people with dignity, with an emphasis on treating people with HIV fairly, and to talk about the issues at the prison with the wife of the guy who ran the prison, and they ended up getting that meeting and convincing the guy to take the necessary steps to improve conditions for people with HIV in his prison.
She emphasized that they had a concrete goal, and they developed a strategy made up of concrete steps that they could take and had a shot of working, and then took those concrete steps to reach it. That’s activism. Scrolling online is not and never will be activism.
Conflating taking in information online from unvetted sources with righteous activism and focusing on that instead of taking concrete steps to improve the world is probably a pretty good recipe for ending up as a fringe conspiracy theorist who is scared of 5G and chemtrails.
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