ABSTRACT
Femicide in Turkey is so common that women are murdered at the rate of one per day. In 2020, feminists in Turkey began using #ChallengeAccepted and #IstanbulConventionSavesLives to raise consciousness around violence against women in Turkey, generate solidarity, and trigger global support for pressuring the government to respect the Istanbul Convention. In this chapter, we map the successes and challenges of hashtag activism through a close reading of 3,361 English language tweets, 22,998 Turkish language tweets, and semi-structured interviews of 26 women using the hashtags on Instagram. By connecting this case to others and scholarly literature around digital organizing, digital activism, and digital feminisms, we identified structural aspects that suggest these hashtags operated as an ecosystem, which included complex networks of power and mediation. We also found that the greatest value lay beyond legislative, policy, and/or legal changes and instead resided in how it empowered individuals and the collective movement.
