“Fight like hell!” An online forum listening exercise revealing how people talk about poverty online
In 2023, Demos and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation collaborated on an exploratory pilot project to investigate:
- What can we learn from social media about people’s experiences of poverty and hardship in the UK?
- How can these learnings be scaled or tested in the future?
Following a successful trial, we have extended this work into a year long programme consisting of four ‘waves’. Over the course of 2024, we are taking periodic samples of the online conversation to track how people are talking about their experiences, and what insights social media listening can support for better policy development which puts people’s needs and lived experience at its heart.
In March 2024, we launched our findings from Wave One of this programme: ‘The system is rigged’, as well as updates to our methodology for gathering social media insights in this area.
In this deck, we present findings from Wave Two of our extended investigation, which cover the following areas:
- Challenges facing disabled people
- Advocacy and mutual aid via forums
- Navigating government support services
- Impact of financial hardship on relationships
- Political engagement in an election year