Nugah Shrestha manages the Instagram account ‘Political Youth’
Source : Hans Stehower
Posting a statement, or liking a message or video: for many young people, online activism is the way to make their voices heard. “It encourages people to go to protests and talk to friends and family.”
“I try to activate young people by informing them about the daily and most important political developments,” says Nugah Shrestha. He has been running an online platform for years that wants to encourage young people to care about politics and to speak out about world events. But the label “activist,” he prefers not to wear. “I don’t see myself that way.”
Trump, Wilders and Brexit
Nugah (28) started the Instagram account ‘Political Youth’ during his studies 7 years ago. “I did a social study, so looked at the world with a critical eye. It was also a time with very interesting political developments, especially if you live in the Netherlands as a migrant of color.”
With the “political developments of that time,” Nugah is referring to the 2016 US election, in which Donald Trump was elected president. In the same year, the British people voted to leave the EU and the PVV and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands grew. “I started the account. I saw that social media didn’t have much political content yet, but that young people did use Instagram a lot.”
Discussion of important topics
So, Nugah saw an opportunity to reach as many young people as possible via the platform with his message that is politically important. “It wasn’t your goal to have a certain number of followers, but I just saw that there were possibilities. I then started posting on political issues that I found important,” he says.
Over the years, he said it has remained the same. “But now something more professional and with other insights of course, but always with the idea of arousing discussion on topics that are important.” He runs the account – which in the meantime has more than 170,000 followers – in his spare time, during the week he works at a housing corporation.
News via social media
“Many young people no longer read newspapers or watch television. What they do: they grab their phone, they’re on TikTok and Instagram,” Nugah concludes his experiences with young people and their use of social media.
“Of course, young people are only 25 percent of Dutch society at the moment,” he adds. “But if you were to research how young people’s opinions are influenced, I think social media certainly plays a big role in that right now.”
Welcome to various opinions
With his account and posts, where he often shows his own perspective and opinions, Nugah hopes to create an ‘online space’ where young people can have their say. Even if their own opinion does not match his or the majority of his followers.
“I often take a stand,” he explains. “I do that to start the discussion. You also see in the reactions that people are discussing with each other and that is important to me, that people keep talking to each other. It is good to see what different opinions there are.”
“Do not feel like activism.”
But to the questions whether he does online activism and whether he is an activist at all, Nugah certainly answers ‘no’. “I don’t see myself as an activist, but I do think that social media can very well serve to achieve activist goals.”
“I don’t like a label,” he continued. “Politics isn’t just about activism. It’s also about informing and making people think. So for me it doesn’t really feel like activism, but also just as something I like to do, where I’m doing meaning.”
Threw gets lower
“Image you would call me an activist,” he continues, “and you would say that my goal is to convince people of certain themes. Then you might ask: can you only achieve that via social media?”
“I think it’s very double, because on the one hand you make sure that the threshold to be activists is very low,” Nugah says. “Through social media, so with one click of the button, actually show you what you agree or disagree with. And then your activism is done for the day. That is of course a very strong criticism that you can have of ‘my activism’, which I certainly agree with.”
Criticism of “Slacktivism”
What mentions Nugah, posting a political statement and then carefree continuing to the order of the day, is called ‘Slacktivism’. And that is indeed the criticism that is mentioned in discussions about the importance of online activism. Opponents find that this form of activism does not (enoughly) incites to change in the real, offline world.
Assistant professor Sander van Haperen, who researched how social media has been used to spread the Black Lives Matter movement, disagrees with this. “It’s often thought that online and offline activism are different things, but actually my research statement is that it interferes. So it is not something very fundamentally different from what we had in activism before.”
Identify structural problems
Van Haperen, like Nugah, also believes that online activism helps to bring social problems quickly and large-scale among the public. With such platforms you can show that certain problems are not personal, but a large group of people engage.
“You better explain the scale of a problem,” he explains. “On an individual level, it helps because you can see that something that has happened to you is a structural or systemic problem. You have more information from more places at your disposal. And so you also see a more inference, for example that more attention is paid to a diversity policy in all kinds of places.”
“Reflecting in a few years”
Yet, despite the positive results of his work, Nugah wants to remain critical about the effect of the messages he posts online and shares with his followers. This is mainly because social media generates popularity by devising, sharing and (again fast) downing new trends. “If you look at the online Black Lives Matter movement in 2020: okay, social media has ensured that it received a lot of attention worldwide in one go.”
“But where are we now, about 4 years later, with the rights for black people,” Nugah asks. “Social media can give the feeling of an accelerating effect. There is certainly a danger in that, so we really need to reflect in a few years (about the actual results).”
