Paxton Smith knows this juggle well and has taken a step back from social media and advocacy, in part due to backlash within her movement. She blew up on social media in 2021 for ditching her principal-approved valedictorian speech to speak out about the near-total ban on abortion in her state, Texas. This speech led her to organize and speak at rallies around the world — and to use her platform to make educational TikTok videos on topics such as self-managed abortion and reproductive justice. Soon, though, she began to face nasty comments and retaliation online, and not just from those who opposed abortion. “A lot of the backlash came from people who weren’t fully informed on the topic at hand, which led them to boldly make statements about the quality and truthfulness of the information I shared,” Smith says. “There were also times when informed individuals would nitpick at my videos, saying I failed to explain some things. That’s something that frustrated me about using TikTok as a platform because I had to make very short videos to share information, which made it difficult to be comprehensive.” She especially was troubled by a certain in-movement fighting about wording and semantics — all of which mattered, but also detracted from their larger cause and made people, including herself, afraid to speak up, for fear of saying the wrong thing. Dr. Gorski says this is a common example in action of “in-movement” burnout causes. “I’ve seen activists get into vicious,…
