Last week, a group of celebrities took part in an Instagram and Facebook "freeze" to protest fake news and online hate. Boycotting is not a new idea - but how does it actually work?

What is a boycott? A boycott is a kind of non-violent protest. The name comes from a demonstration in 19th-century Ireland. Captain Charles Boycott was a land agent who refused to lower tenants' rent so that they could pay it. They fought back. Boycott's employees stopped working, local businesses rejected his money and the postman refused to deliver his letters. Captain Boycott was eventually forced to move away.

Today, the name is used to describe a situation where protesters refuse to use a service, buy a product - or deal with a person, organisation or country - to bring about change.

Who organises them? Anyone can call a boycott merely by refusing to contribute to a product and enlisting other consumers to do the same. One major boycott of this type affected Amazon. The boycott was organised in 2014 with consumers urged to to buy their Christmas presents there. Some boycotts are prearranged and called by organisations - and even governments. In 1980, to protest the USSRThe United Socialist Soviet Republic, the USA's main rival in the Cold War before it collapsed and broke up into a number of smaller states in 1991. invasion of Afghanistan, the American government proposed a boycott of the Olympics, due to take place in Moscow. A further 64 countries then also refused to take part, and the games saw the most significant boycott in their history.

Do they inflict financial damage? It depends. Most of the time, a boycott aims to damage a company financially by encouraging enough people to stop supporting it. In some cases, this does not work. The ongoing Amazon boycott has had virtually no impact on the company.

On the other hand, a boycott that put pressure on Nestle for marketing baby food unethically resulted in the company losing about 93 billion in its first two months. Nevertheless, most experts agree that boycotts fail to inflict long-term damage, as active participation decreases over time.

So, how do they bring about change? Boycotts ultimately aim to bring about reform. Such change might not happen directly - for example putting a company out of business - but they are consistently successful when in raising public awareness. Attention grows, adding to calls for change from different quarters.

A very recent example of this phenomenon is the call to boycott Disney's Mulan. While it has done little to affect the film or its makers, it did bring accentuate concerns about the Chinese repressionThe act of subsiding something by force. Repressive is usually used negatively, often to describe the activities of authoritarian states. of Uighurs.

Do they change people's minds? Yes! Perhaps the most significant example is the Montgomery Bus Boycott. In 1955, segregationA racist policy separating White and Black Americans. It was used in the southern United States from 1877 to 1968. was still in place in many parts of the US, including Montgomery, AlabamaA state in the southern USA. It had one of the largest slave populations before the Civil War, and afterwards, it imposed harsh Jim Crow laws to disenfranchise Black Americans.. One day, a 15-year-old girl was dragged off a bus for sitting in a whites-only section. Nine months later, Rosa Parks refused to leave her seat on a bus.

Parks's actions caught the public imagination. Other activists arranged a boycott of the bus service that lasted for 381 days. The protest kickstarted the Civil Rights Movement in the US, resulting in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Are they becoming more popular? It looks like it. In a 2017 study, three-quarters of Americans said they would refuse to purchase a product if they found out a company supported an issue contrary to their beliefs. This newfound awareness runs parallel to the rise of technology and the ability to go viral with your intentions to stand against an organisation.

Similarly, boycotting individuals has become increasingly common online, even gaining its own name -
cancel culture. In this form of protest, celebrities snd other public figures are being called out on social media and "cancelled" with increasing frequency.