Rachel Brown was sitting in her New York University dorm room last week when she decided to make a Facebook event for a party—a resignation party for Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel and Cook County state’s attorney Anita Alvarez. It was a joke, she said.
But Brown says she never expected her virtual resignation party to “become a physical thing,” adding that making fake Facebook events and memes are a humorous pastime for her.
Rousemary Vega, a 35-year-old Humboldt Park resident who has previously protested Chicago school closures, volunteered to become an admin on the event page after Brown asked if anyone else wanted to get involved. (Vega says she doesn’t personally know Brown either.)
Beltran remembers taking part in a protest in Chicago in March 2003, a little less than a year before Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard roommates founded Facebook. Still in high school, Beltran was one of more than 15,000 protesters who marched on Lake Shore Drive to peacefully demonstrate against the U.S. invasion of Iraq. More than 800 people were arrested during that demonstration.
Like Beltran, she also believes in the power of social media and its usefulness as a tool to affect positive change, while also acknowledging the limitations of virtual activism.
