ABSTRACT

Shade discusses the Stop the Meter campaign, where young women used YouTube to speak out against user-based billing and encourage others to sign the Stop the Meter petition. The chapter illustrates how young women can engage with policies and practices that shape the online environment in thoughtful and creative ways. This provides an important counterpoint, to the type of self branding discussed by Kanai, and confirms concerns raised by many of the authors in this book about the commercialization of the digital spaces girls inhabit. As Shade concludes, “In a converged media culture that encourages the commodification of sexuality, recent research exploring how young women are taking to social media for civic and political participation is encouraging.”