Why are the most popular feminist social media accounts owned by men?

It has come to my attention that two of the top feminist social media accounts for women are owned by men who use their platforms to represent millions of women’s voices. The Feminist social media account as well as the Women’s Rights News social media accounts, with a combination of more than 8 million followers, are both anonymously owned and operated by white men.

The Instagram account @Feminist now has a few younger women representing them publicly however, according to research done by Sam Sedlack, which has since been deleted yet cited many times, the most popular feminist instagram account in the world is one of several social justice brands owned and operated by two white men named Tanner Sweitzer and Jacob Castaldi.

These men do a great job of curating content from around the world that speaks to the 6.4 million followers in their audience. They also do a great job of cross referencing their other brand CHNGE to sell their clothes to an eager audience of women.

But @Feminist isn’t the only women centered social media platform that is actually operated by a white man, Women’s Rights News, with 340,000 followers on Instagram and 1.8 million followers on Facebook has the same strategy of finding the best content created by women and presenting it to their audience.

In addition to curating women’s content, Women’s Rights News also sells featured content partnerships and feminist themed apparel to women, monetizing their efforts without being transparent about the fact that this social media account’s directly profits a man.

These men have the attention of the majority of women on social media yet they will not show their faces because they don’t want us to know. These men choose to monetize the women’s content they find and anonymously speak to us and for us, which is consistent with our patriarchal history based around men leading the voices of women without our consent.