This article challenges the perception of feminist activism on social media as impulsive, emotional, and necessarily underpinned by neoliberal substructures. Instead, it reveals deliberate and strategic approaches employed by interviewed Swedish feminist organizations and activists that navigate commercialized so-cial media spaces while subverting online norms and platform constraints in subtle and ingenious ways. By operating within and going along with some log-ics of the economy of visibility that dominate online spaces, activists use “soft” feminist resistance practices to destabilize popularized versions of feminism and threats of online misogyny. Examples include reappropriating popular hashtags to gain reach, employing a voice of reason in heated online debates, and using silence to deter trolling. These practices represent creative forms of feminist resistance against oppressive online structures and polarized cultures. By employing “soft” feminist resistance, activists carve out spaces on socialmedia where they can disseminate knowledge and envision feminist futures strategically and safely. In this way, the article suggests a hopeful approach to feminist possibilities granted by social media, while emphasizing the labor re-quired by activists to challenge and resist threats of online violence, thus high-lighting the need for platforms to enhance their safety measures.

When #MeToo reached Sweden in the fall of 2017, it gave rise to nearly 80 industry-specific petitions that demanded a stop to sexual misconduct in the workplace, some with their own hashtags. This article examines the discourse of #MeToo on Twitter in Sweden in relation to these petition hashtags. Focusing on how #MeToo, petition hashtags, and other hashtags are co-articulated in Tweets, it maps the emergent network of hashtags using SNA and explores the resulting interpretative frames using discourse analysis. By co-articulating the MeToo and petition hashtags with hashtags related to Swedish politics and feminism, and by utilising the @-mention function to call out responsible politicians and industry executives, Twitter users extended the initial #MeToo frame beyond individualised problems and solutions common in connective action networks. We suggest that Twitter users utilise platform affordances to perform framing work in relation to political hashtags, not unlike framing work performed in traditional social movements.

In autumn 2017 in Sweden, the #MeToo movement and sexual assault became a focus of broad debate. Swedish media coverage of the movement was centered around the many petitions made by anonymous groups of women to illuminate the extent of the problem of sexual assault, as well as a few cases of accusations against well-known and powerful men in both the culture and media industries. In order to elicit common representations of men and their female accusers, this study applies critical discourse analysis (CDA) to news media coverage and Facebook comments of three of those accused men: TV personality Martin Timell, journalist Fredrik Virtanen and culture personality Jean-Claude Arnault. The results indicate that representations of women as both witnesses and heroines work to reinforce notions of female responsibility as a means to halt sexual assault, while representations of men as sexual predators build on demarcations of illegal and mere misogynistic or “bad” behavior, which in turn reinforce notions of male victimhood. These representations point to legal discourse as hegemonic, as it seems to limit the discussion and only present individual solutions, such as women bearing witness, to the structural problem of sexual assault. Simultaneously, the results indicate that the #MeToo movement and other feminist discourse have also had an effect on news media representations of sexual assault by broadening the concept beyond the consent/rape dichotomy.

Entertainment and imitation are central to TikTok’s expressive culture. As the platform has taken a “serious turn” in recent years, playful memetic activism has emerged. This paper examines the 2024 iteration of #WomenInMaleFields, which humorously exposes sexist behavior in intimate relationships through a flipped gender script, to show how this feminist meme articulates harm through absurdity in the Swedish context. Since Sweden saw a broad uptake of #MeToo in 2017, a consent clause has been added to sexual crime legislation, while gender-based violence remains a key site of feminist mobilization.

Through a multimodal discourse analysis of 62 TikTok posts and their comment sections, this paper asks how local feminist politics are articulated through a structured meme template. The results demonstrate how the meme format facilitates incongruence, rendering posts readable as structured feminist exposure of sexism through absurdity. Comments reinforce this humorous absurdity through laughter and the narration of similar experiences. These expressions of alignment appear alongside confusion about the gender role reversal, demonstrating how the meme relies on a particular form of platform-native literacy.

Overall, the paper shows how TikTok’s collaborative affordances and platform-native feminist literacy render harmful experiences absurd, enabling their circulation as exposure of sexist behavior. Posts and comment sections negotiate meanings around consent and gender-based violence, redirecting harm into shared, networked laughter at sexism.

Hashtag use in online protest is widespread and well-researched. Yet scholarship largely privileges viral moments and large-scale mobilisations, leaving everyday, small-scale, and sustained practices comparatively underexamined. These routine forms of tagging can subtly intervene in the commercial, engagement-driven sorting logics that shape visibility online and contribute to gradual forms of consciousness-raising among unexpected audiences. This study explores everyday use of hashtags through the Swedish feminist initiative #Kvinnostrejk (women’s strike), mobilised continuously since 2021. It examines how routine tagging practices push feminist content into otherwise unrelated streams, assemble newsfeeds into collective narratives of gendered violence, and travel across online and offline contexts as recognisable political symbols. By introducing the concept of techno-rhetorical strategies, the article contributes in two ways: it shows how small-scale tagging practices shape visibility without relying on virality, and it extends sociotechnical accounts by foregrounding the inseparability of technical operations and rhetorical effects.