Introduction
How can direct action campaigners use social media? Here are 2 case studies from Australia – Blockade Australia and Disrupt Burrup Hub. This article is the second installment in a two-part series focussing on the role of media in the strategies of Australian direct action climate groups. Read part one on traditional media here.
In the 21st century, social media has been utilised for political ends by a diverse range of actors. For example, progressive activists used Twitter to organise and network during the Arab Spring uprisings and Occupy protests of the early 2010s.
More than a decade later, tech billionaire Elon Musk bought the same platform and renamed it as X. He transformed it into a key component of a right-wing online media ecosystem that was a key contributor to Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection. Clearly, social media platforms can be both powerful and volatile.
Research from the University of Canberra’s News and Research Media Centre has found that 60% of Gen Z Australians rely on social media as their primary source of news. As the influence of traditional media declines, social media increasingly becomes an important political battleground and presents opportunities for activists.
In Australia, climate activists who utilise nonviolent direct action use social media platforms as key tools for mobilising and gaining publicity. These platforms allow campaigners to frame their activism on their own terms, without their narratives being filtered through an often hostile mainstream media.
However, using social media presents its own challenges. Popular platforms are owned by corporate interests that can be hostile to climate activists.
The social media landscape can change quickly and unpredictably, and campaigners often find themselves at the mercy of opaque algorithms. It can be difficult for activist groups, often made of volunteers, to keep up to date with these changes while creating regular content across multiple platforms.
I spoke to members of two direct action climate activist groups, Blockade Australia and Disrupt Burrup Hub, to find out what role social media plays in their strategies, how important social media is for achieving their goals, and how they have adapted to a changing online world.
Case Studies
Blockade Australia Aims to Educate and Mobilise Online
Blockade Australia attempts to disrupt and draw attention to the systemic forces that have created the climate crisis.
The group began its activities in November 2021 with a series of blockades aimed at the world’s largest coal port in Newcastle, New South Wales. Since then, they have organized multiple “mobilisations”, targeting sites across Australia including the Sydney CBD and several ports.
Kloda, who preferred to be referred to by her first name, has been involved with Blockade Australia in various media-related roles, including posting to social media and working on the campaign’s website.
She said there were three main points Blockade Australia tries to convey through their actions and communications: “The climate crisis is really serious and we need to do something about it. The system is the problem, and we can’t just look at reforms – we need to challenge the system. And we need to build this culture of resistance.”
“[We’re] trying to get that narrative out there to gain support and politically educate people to get people to realise [that] you can participate in protests. That can be powerful, and that’s a tool we have that can try to do something meaningful in the face of this crisis,” she said.
Blockade Australia focuses on using disruptive direct action to build political power and take on the system.
The group’s website says: “A climate response can only be made possible when Australia’s foundational principles and operating systems are substantially challenged by an organised and determined political resistance movement.
“Disrupting the movement of resources, goods and labour through roads, ports and rail is a legitimate and appropriate response to Australian expansionism.”
Kloda said using social media was key to achieving the campaign’s strategy – even more so than engaging with traditional media.
“You’re actually talking to people who are choosing to follow what you do [on social media], and we actually have an opportunity to explain our messaging in a lot more depth and link it to current events,” she said.
“It’s an educational tool, and can also be a tool to invite people to info talks and actually bring them into things.”
Kloda’s fellow Blockade Australia campaigner Matt, who is part of the group’s media team and also preferred to go by his first name, agreed that social media was a useful tool.
He said Blockade Australia could easily reach its primary audience – people who were already concerned about the climate crisis and ready to be mobilised – through its social media channels.
“We probably would reach more people through trad media, but we can speak to people who have gone out of the way to follow us with our socials.”
Disrupt Burrup Hub Narrows the Focus to Inspire a Movement
The Disrupt Burrup Hub campaign – which I have been involved in – focusses on stopping particular fossil fuel projects in order to reduce carbon emissions, create political change, and inspire a broader mass movement.
Disrupt Burrup Hub formed in 2023 to oppose the expansion of industrial activity at Murujuga on Western Australia’s Burrup Peninsula, home to Woodside’s gas facilities since the 1980s. Campaigners are concerned about industrial impacts on both the climate and Murujuga’s Aboriginal cultural heritage.
Tahlia Stolarski, who is a member of the Disrupt Burrup Hub media team and has created social media content for the campaign, said the campaign uses direct action to grab the public’s attention, erode Woodside’s social license, and encourage others to use similar tactics by showing their effectiveness.
“There wasn’t much direct action happening in WA in general [before Disrupt Burrup Hub started], so being able to create space for that [was important].”
Like Blockade Australia, Disrupt Burrup Hub attempts to connect with sympathetic members of the public through its social media presence.
“The social media aspect is about bringing people in and also generating awareness,” Tahlia said.
She said social media was “a bit more subtle” than traditional media coverage in gaining political cut-through for particular messages, but nonetheless could be used to seed important ideas.
“We can obviously say what we want; we’re not relying on journalists to interpret our key messages.
“Getting it out to the right people, they then have their own conversations and share with their own audiences.”
She said social media was also useful in a practical sense for “getting people along to our event, getting donations in, [and] selling our merchandise.”
A Constantly Shifting Landscape
While both activist groups had made use of a wide range of social media platforms, both seemed to focus most of their energy on the same ones: Instagram, Facebook, and X/Twitter.
Tahlia said that each platform had its own particular uses for Disrupt Burrup Hub. “Instagram is good for the branding side of things [and] giving us social credibility,” she said. “Facebook is more for recruitment and community building, and then Twitter is more targeted at media and journalists.”
Blockade Australia, having been around for longer than Disrupt Burrup Hub, has weathered more changes in the social media landscape.
“The level of success we’ve had with social media has really changed,” said Matt.
“The first couple of mobilisations we were really getting a lot of traction on social media. That’s really gone down.”
Matt said Blockade Australia had previously been able to spread their messages widely by livestreaming protest actions to social media – a tactic pioneered by Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and widely adopted in following years. Matt said livestreaming had allowed Blockade Australia to build a “connection that viewers could have with the person who was taking action.”
“We were able to give a snippet of what it was like to be part of the mobilisation, but much more of a snippet than what you’d see on the news,” he said.
“The reach of that social media, particularly on Facebook, the platform we were hoping to build because you could publicise events and stuff like that, has really dropped off.
“We’ve tried to diversify the platforms we use in response to that getting worse, but we haven’t really cracked it at the moment.”
In 2024, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, took various steps to limit the reach of news and political content across its platforms. It seems likely that activist groups like Blockade Australia have had their accounts impacted by these changes.
According to Meltwater, in 2024, Facebook remained the most popular social media platform in Australia, with around 78% of internet users aged 16 to 64 using it monthly.
The most popular platform not owned by Meta was TikTok, used by around 40%. But active TikTok users spend about twice as much time on the app as users of any other platform. TikTok users averaged around 42 hours on the app per month. Facebook users spent an average of around 20 hours per month engaged.
Campaigners from both groups said they’d attempted to use TikTok due to its increasing popularity, but had limited success on the platform.
“[Disrupt Burrup Hub] never really came up with a strategy specific to TikTok,” said Tahlia.
“Because the campaign was mostly people [who were] 30-odd, we didn’t necessarily feel comfortable with TikTok.”
Tahlia said it would have been good for younger members of the campaign to be empowered and encouraged to lead a TikTok-specific strategy.
Matt said TikTok presented an opportunity to connect with a younger demographic, but the Blockade Australia media team lacked familiarity with the platform and hasn’t used it much.
“We have had former school strikers come and make little videos that go quite well on TikTok,” he said.
“The demographic of people in the media team are not using TikTok very much and don’t really get it.”
Social media develops continuously and rapidly, and it can be challenging for activists to adapt to new platforms and norms.
Activists can Build and Control their Own Online Spaces
Both Blockade Australia and Disrupt Burrup Hub also communicate online through their own websites and email newsletters.
In marketing terms, tools like these are sometimes referred to as “owned media”, because their creators control both the content and the distribution mechanism. On the other hand, social media platforms are sometimes referred to as “rented media”.
While creators control the content, they do not control the platforms, which ultimately have the power to determine how content is distributed and whether it reaches an audience. Platforms can unexpectedly restrict or moderate content and even ban accounts.
Kloda and Matt said they believed that Blockade Australia accounts on Facebook and Instagram received “shadowbans” (where an account’s visibility and reach are reduced without the user being informed) in 2024. This points to some of the dangers of relying on rented media.
Building up and utilising owned media can be a way for campaign groups to build more direct and reliable relationships with their audiences.
Matt said that Blockade Australia were “trying to shift people” from social media to the campaign’s website due to the unpredictability of social media and declining reach on existing platforms. “We can see that social media is not so fruitful,” he said.
Kloda said that uploading content directly to Blockade Australia’s website was “kind of a backup plan” to ensure the campaign didn’t “become invisible”. She added that the website was also useful for gathering donations and newsletter sign ups.
Both Blockade Australia and Disrupt Burrup Hub also publish press releases on their websites, meaning that these owned media spaces also become tools for interfacing with traditional media.
A key challenge of utilising owned media is that it can be harder to distribute content widely than on ‘rented’ social platforms, as well as harder to be discovered by new audiences.
Some campaign groups have tried to overcome these challenges by using social media posts to direct audiences to visit their websites or sign up to their newsletters.
However, in recent years social media platforms seem to have adjusted their algorithms to restrict the reach of content containing links, making this approach less effective than it may have been in the past.
Paying for Reach
Disrupt Burrup Hub has used paid social media advertising, particularly to help with fundraising and event promotion. Much of this social media advertising has been outsourced: Disrupt Burrup Hub is part of crowdfunding platform Chuffed’s Amplify program.
Chuffed creates and posts social media advertisements that direct users to a Disrupt Burrup Hub crowdfunder, in exchange for a fixed percentage of donations received. This enables Disrupt Burrup Hub to raise funds essential for executing their strategy.
Tahlia says paying for social media advertising was beneficial to the campaign. She would have liked the campaign to have had the capacity to experiment more with ads themselves, to develop skills and receive donations directly.
“It would have been great to have the resources, mostly time resources, to be able to put more into that and test it out a bit more,” she said.
Challenges and Opportunities Online
Direct action strategies for climate groups often rely on connecting with sympathetic segments of the public. Social media can enable campaigns to do this without relying on traditional media as intermediary.
After the 2024 US presidential election, many analysts said the outcome had been heavily influenced by ‘new’ online media, including ‘owned’ media like podcasts, and ‘loaned’ media like social platforms.
It’s clear that online media has become increasingly powerful, but progressives across the world, including those in the climate movement, seem less adept at harnessing that power than the political right. This can be partially attributed to the ownership, agendas, and profit-seeking nature of social media platforms. But it’s clear right-wing creators have also been imaginative and strategic in the way they’ve approached digital media.
They’ve adapted quickly to new platforms, created engaging and relatable online personas for users to build parasocial relationships with, and utilised emotive communication styles that are rewarded by algorithms.
For direct action campaigners, using social media has become increasingly fraught with difficulty, and yet most seem to agree it is a useful tool that should not be abandoned.
To meet challenges, activist groups can focus on developing skills and capacity for using social media, exploring new platforms and approaches, and working to build owned media not controlled by large corporations. If they do so, there may be opportunities online for building political movements.
About the Author
Gerard Mazza has worked as a campaigner, writer, school teacher, radio producer, and bartender. He writes about power and politics in Western Australia for the newsletter The Last Place on Earth.
Movement Monitor Fellows Project
This resource was produced as part of the Movement Monitor Fellows project. Three climate activists were given support to produce resources that promote knowledge and understanding of the Australian climate movement, its practices and its impacts.
Explore the resources:
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