When Movements Get Hijacked

Jun 16, 2025

When Movements Get Hijacked

⏱️ 4 min read

“The very success of protest movements can contribute to their decline by making their leaders acceptable to elites, who co-opt them, while the protest base disperses.”
— Frances Fox Piven, in Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail (1977)

TL;DR

Movements often begin with fire and focus. But over time, they can be derailed from within and from outside. When causes become slogans, and when slogans get monetized, movements lose their teeth. LiveImpact.io is being built to keep the focus on action, not performance or purity.

How Hijacking Happens

Movements usually start with purpose: a clear injustice, a shared goal, a call for change. But as they gain visibility and supporters, other forces take notice political actors, brands, influencers.

Suddenly, everyone wants a piece of the movement... for their own ends.

Political hijacking reframes the narrative to serve elections.
Brand hijacking turns activism into marketing.
Internal hijacking demands purity over progress.

Each shifts the movement away from real change and toward image management.

The Cost of Co-Opting

When movements get hijacked, impact gets blurred. The energy that fueled real-world change gets redirected:

into symbolic gestures,
into social sniping over who’s "doing it right,"
into carefully curated messaging designed not to offend sponsors.

People disengage. Momentum dies. Cynicism grows.

Why LiveImpact.io Pushes Back

LiveImpact.io is a platform designed to keep movements grounded. Instead of focusing on how loud or visible something is, we focus on whether people are actually doing something that matters: