 Social media have become like an integral part of many people's everyday life. It's estimated that people spend about more than two hours a day on social media. Social media and smartphones have certainly accelerated the digitalization of societies around the world. Me, too, and Black Lives Matter, for instance, are social movements that have tackled two important sources of injustice and inequality and that is sexist and racist. These are both issues that have existed for years or decades but they've only really captured the public attention because of these hashtags and these social media campaigns when people saw how evasive these issues were. The problem is that people who don't experience these problems don't appreciate how serious, how evasive they are in the people's lives of those who are suffering until a campaign like Black Lives Matter because obviously Black people have been cured at the hands of the police for decades. So for us, I would say the benefits to Twitter are that it helps us engage with so many more people than our website alone if it could. It also helps us build relationships internationally. We've only really been campaigning, per se, for just over a year. Our major successes when it comes to campaigning was our hashtag Trust Me campaign, which was all about trying to stop proposed rollbacks to the rights of trans people, to write directly to Prime Minister Boris Johnson and have those proposed changes upended and stalled. Why social media has been such an important tool for organisations like mine and campaigners like myself is because we no longer have to go through the gatekeepers of the media so we can go directly to our audience now. So going back to the Black Lives Matter movement and let's compare that to say 40 years ago when you had an event like the New Cross Fire. So there were a number of Black teenagers caught in a house that caught fire supposedly arson and they died. It wasn't really reported that widely in the mainstream media despite the fact that this was a national tragedy and it got very little attention nowadays that couldn't happen because of social media. The hashtag in itself offers a creative use of words to highlight different issues and therefore making these issues visible. Hashtags are short. The message is of course condensed which can be problematic and since attention spans on social media are short the hashtag may or may not have a lasting impact. Twitter does have a habit of taking really important discussions by its very nature and trying to reduce into key talking points. It's sloughing away any any nuance there. I certainly believe that social media can be very powerful and positive force for human rights and has proven to be so. But it's not a given. So on the one hand you get progressive movements like Me Too and Black Lives Matter that have gained a lot of force and made an impact thanks to social media. But at the same time we also see the growth of anti-democratic forces online such as hate speech and various extremist movements. There's obviously the hate speech the abuse but then there's also the smaller the microaggressions a term that I've just come across recently sea lioning which is people questioning asking you to justify or give examples of the discrimination that you're facing. There are definitely mobs of very opinionated people who organise very quickly to express the sense of literally anything that we say is an organisation. One of the main drawbacks for us is how the platform can be not necessarily is but can be and particularly vitriolic and how there's no robust safety measures there and in place the stop onslaughts of abuse towards us. It's definitely the worst platform when it comes to how much violence can be sent our way and just how quickly and organised it is. There's two celebrity examples to show us how important and how significant Twitter is now to gaining support to your cause and one that we might term as a negative example is Donald Trump the first social media president somebody who managed to win the election and very came very close to winning the second is to re-election because of the grassroots supports he had and he managed to cultivate that through social media but we've seen it in a more positive way with the footballer Marcus Rashford and his campaigning for free school meals so Marcus Rashford wrote to the prime minister and was ignored didn't receive a reply at all but through taking his campaign onto social media gaining so much support on social media it then forced the government to act it shows us what can be done and how social media can be a lot more effective than the mainstream media in drawing attention to your cause. It's just um comes down to empathy really and it's just realising and understanding that the people managing accounts the people who own these accounts are at least by and large and notwithstanding you know bots and real human beings and we should just be treating these people as though we were speaking to them in real life so we just need to be more empathetic really with with people online. If you're talking about something like police brutality having to see these video images and photos of people getting murdered is not pleasant it's traumatising so I think people do have to be aware of that do need to guard and protect themselves against the trauma that they might face. I think it's important that the filters and barriers are put in place as well and people who are campaigning and using those kind of disturbing images to get their message across should be aware of that and should be putting warnings, viewers discretion advised. I think experience has clearly shown that online activists can be very powerful and social media can be very powerful too but for greater impact online activists needs to be combined with offline action. In this year's Black Lives Matter movement we have seen how thousands of people have defied COVID-19 restrictions and put themselves at considerable health risks by taking to the streets to protest against racism and to express their commitment to social justice. It shows that they both need to go together.