In the thirteen years since Twitter’s inception, users from every political stripe have launched countless campaigns, many of which have subsequently been covered or even adopted by traditional media and become household names. In #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, authors Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles propose that Twitter has become an important tool for activists to “advocate, mobilize and communicate.” They say the platform itself has become a powerful counterpublic for marginalized groups, who use Twitter’s hashtag function to facilitate political coalitions and networks. More specifically, the book investigates one particular corner of Twitter activism, defined by a distinct political culture that is liberal, social-justice oriented, consciousness focused, identitarian, intersectionalist, minoritarian, and moralist.

Even reducing the scope of their study to this particular online culture, it would be impossible for the authors to cover their subject in thorough detail. To their credit, the book is focused and provides an honest and dutiful record of the major campaigns of social justice hashtag activism, outlining a history, a trajectory, and a digital landscape. Curiously, though, the authors’ accounts of these campaigns only serve to thoroughly — almost relentlessly — contradict the book’s techno-optimist thesis, page after page, from the very beginning.

The authors have utilized an “interdisciplinary mixed methods approach” in their research, even delving into a sort of Twitter ethnography to include statements from the online activists they’re studying. They acknowledge the friction that can arise when the anecdotal is situated alongside the empirical — “focusing on importance and influence is, of course, a normative choice” — but conclude that standpoint theory need not preclude quantitative rigor, categorizing their subjects as “collaborators” and “researchers themselves.”

Among such collaborators is Genie Lauren, hashtag activist and author of the book’s foreword. Lauren delivers a thoughtful, if all too familiar, account of millennial malaise. After graduating from college just after the 2008 financial crisis, she was working two jobs to pay off her student loans, one in retail and another at a twenty-four-hour call center, where she had plenty of time to blog and tweet on the clock. Initially, Twitter provided her with the company of her fellow “under- or unemployed insomniacs,” but her engagement online turned political around the 2009 Iranian election, or, rather the #IranElection. Like many politically minded people her age, Lauren marveled at the speed at which information traveled on Twitter, and she was excited to receive real-time dispatches from Iranians on the ground. The platform felt even more legitimate to her when CNN began using tweets as sources, a move that seemed to credential social media as an authentic revolutionary pulpit. This did not prevent the Iranian government from blocking Twitter for a month during the election.