Hashtag activism: tactical maneuvering in an online anti-mandatory hijab movement

Abstract This article focuses on the My Stealthy Freedom movement, an anti-mandatory hijab movement in Iran that is organized as an online movement. We explore the utility of a tactical approach for explaining the movement’s pace of insurgency. We employ a conceptual repertoire focused upon the political process model’s core concepts of tactical innovation and tactical adaptations. We supplement these older concepts with the recently proposed concept of tactical freeze and propose an additional concept of tactical hashtags. We gather as a dataset through text-mining techniques the Instagram posts of the movement’s founder and the reactions of people to those posts. The data include the number of posts, “likes,” and comments in response to movement hashtags created between 2015 and 2019. We conclude that the movement’s emergence and early growth were enhanced by its tactical innovations, which heavily relied on hashtag activism. We discover that a specific type of hashtag—tactical hashtags—was of particular importance. The movement was unsuccessful, however, in changing the government’s pro-hijab policy. In its tactical adaptations, the government passed more hijab regulations and stiffened penalties for resistance. The movement was undercut by these tactical adaptations and by a tactical freeze wherein it failed to develop tactical innovations capable of surmounting government repression.