Listening to Social Media as an Alternative Legality

In this article I argue that social media does not merely provide commentary about law, nor function only as a catalyst for institutional reform. Rather, social media can operate as an alternative form of legality: a site in which normative meaning about justice, responsibility, credibility, and institutional obligation is performatively constructed through narrative. Using the Australian hashtag #March4Justice as a case study within the context of violence against women, I offer an account of how the hashtag operates as a performative frame that aggregates experiences into a communal claim for justice. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of tweets posted between late February and April 2021, the article demonstrates the affective power of a hashtag for interrogating the cultural conditions that shape not only our perceptions of law but also the very composition of law itself. It argues that social media platforms can function as a co-produced normative register in which legality is felt, contested, and re-authored through collective narration and emotion. The narratives co-created through a hashtag do jurisprudential work: they articulate standards for responsible listening, diagnose institutional failure, and circulate demands for ‘real change’. As such, social media can be treated as an alternative legality that both critiques formal legal institutions and generates rival procedures of audibility, recognition, and judgement.