Over the last year, the social media platforms that dominate the web have made fools out of anyone who believed in their fundamental goodness. Neo-Nazis used Facebook groups to organize a hate rally in Charlottesville; Russian trolls used digital ads to drive a wedge through the American electorate. A man livestreamed a murder on Facebook, and the President of the United States used his Twitter account to spread misleading propaganda about Muslims, and levy threats against both the free press and private citizens.
But if there was one bright spot in all this darkness—one series of moments when the web actually did live up to the most optimistic expectations—it was that in the year 2017, women took back the very platforms that have been used to torment and troll them for so long, and built a new-wave women’s movement on top of them.
The first glimpse of just how powerful this movement would become came just three weeks into the New Year, as stuffed Metro cars and fully loaded busses made their way toward the National Mall in Washington DC the day after President Trump's inauguration. Miles across the river, on the Virginia side of the Potomac, you could see a trail of women making their way toward the march, dressed in pink knit hats, carrying signs that read, “Keep your tiny hands off my rights,” and “Grab him by the tax return.” It was obvious that the Women’s March would be a historic event before it even started, one that united millions of women around the world not just in protest of Trump, but in protest of a society that allows powerful men to become even more so despite alleged crimes against women.
That chapter in the history books might never have been written, though, if a woman named Teresa Shook hadn’t created a Facebook event on election night 2016, calling for women to march on Washington. The event took off in a way entirely unique to this digital age; by the next morning, Shook had amassed 10,000 RSVPs. As Jenna Arnold, an advisor to the Women’s March, told WIRED days before the event, "It would be hard to say that we would have had this kind of success without an existing platform like Facebook.”
With their voices echoing through the streets of Washington, DC that day, women started the year by promising a reckoning. As the weeks passed, they quickly delivered. Within a month, a woman named Susan Fowler wrote the blog post heard 'round the tech world: "Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber." It laid bare the toxic culture at Uber, in which Fowler says she was regularly sexually harassed, punished for reporting her manager to human resources, and ignored when she asked how Uber planned to address massive departures of women from the company. For once, Fowler's voice was actually heard.
Her blog post inspired other women at Uber to tell their own stories of harassment on platforms like Medium. With each viral post, pressure on Uber mounted, until the company finally hired former attorney general Eric Holder to investigate the rideshare giant's sexist culture. That investigation led to the firing of 20 staffers, and contributed to founder Travis Kalanick's resignation as CEO. And when board member David Bonderman made a sexist comment during a board meeting about sexism, he too was forced to resign.
As the year went on, traditional media, of course, played a crucial role in outing the despicable behavior of men in virtually every industry. The fastidious and fearless reporting at The New York Times and The New Yorker toppled Harvey Weinstein's alleged tower of lies and intimidation, creating a domino effect that brought down dozens of household names, from Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer to Russell Simmons and Kevin Spacey. But it was a two-word hashtag, #MeToo, that created the space for millions of women to come together and tell their own stories. Not every revelation can make the front page of the paper of record, but they all deserve to be told.
Tarana Burke, considered the founder of the Me Too movement, officially coined the term in reference to sexual predation back in 2006. But it wasn't until October 2017, when actress Alyssa Milano urged women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted to reply to her tweet with the words "me too," that the true power of that simple phrase was realized. Overnight, the words "me too" took over timelines and news feeds, showing men that these incidents aren't as isolated as they might have believed, and reminding women that they're not even remotely as alone as they might have thought.
Since that day in October, the hashtag has been shared 4.3 million times in countries all over the world. This women's movement may have been decades or centuries in the making, but once it began, it achieved national scale on the kind of accelerated timeline that early 20th century suffragettes and feminists of the 1960s couldn't have imagined, thanks to the new tools at women's fingertips.
The fundamental issues with social media—the divisiveness, the echo chambers, the lack of nuance, the bots—still plague it, in many cases more than ever. Women who dare to speak up about harassment still risk a backlash online. And in the developing world, research suggests women are still 50 percent less likely to have internet access than men. In 2018, the tech leaders who run those platforms will, no doubt, continue to face calls from their customers, and from Congress, to quit playing naive and start recognizing and exorcizing their demons.
But in 2017, women also reminded us all of the upside of connecting online. Joining together around the world, they used these platforms the way the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world had originally hoped; they were able to find and support one another, despite geography and circumstance, and to subvert the power structures that have silenced them for so long.
In 2017, women made the most of a deeply flawed system. Then again, what else is new?
