Like, Protest, Subscribe
Maya Dharampal-Hornby considers what the commodification of social justice movements by social media companies means for online activism, with a particular focus on the protests of Just Stop Oil, Dream Defenders and Black Lives Matter.
Think of where you first went to express anger when you heard about deportation flights to Rwanda. Or the overturning of Roe v. Wade. Or the imprisonment of Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe. I bet, for most, it was the screen and not the streets. Increasingly, social media platforms are the forums in which we consume, understand, and share our social values and political interests. Before we continue assuming that social media platforms are adequate vehicles for social change, we must first understand how Big Tech companies profit from the expression of these values and interests.
The socio-technical reality of ‘global connectedness’ is that social media platforms turn clicks into coins. Our attention is monetised—our data, the currency of this attention economy, are harvested and sold. So, to bring about and exploit more datapoints between us, social media companies finetune their platforms’ automated operations to maximise their extractive potential.
These operations can be visible in the user’s interface. Consider the expansion of the ‘like’ button on Facebook— a ‘like’ would have felt an insensitive response to your grandpa’s status about the vandalism of his front garden, yet an angry face react feels like a fitting display of disapproval…click. Consider the newly-added attention metrics on Twitter that tell you how many people have seen your tweet, enabling you to calculate what features of your tweets correlate with virality—'trans’ seems to be a sure bet in the UK right now…click click click. It is logical, therefore, that Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk (and @Jack, despite their different PR strategies) see dollar signs in the events and discourses that bring people to their screens. So, if platforms are engineered to be equipped for discourses that incite high levels of emotion (the general rule: emotion = engagement), is it any surprise that social movements increasingly find themselves playing out online?
Click click click click click.
It is common practice for protests to be staged in such a way that their cause goes viral. Remember what two activists for Just Stop Oil did at the end of 2022: they threw soup over Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers at the National Gallery, took their jackets off to reveal t-shirts reading ‘Just Stop Oil’, and glued themselves to the wall beneath the artwork. This was designed to be recorded and shared online. The high recognition value of Gogh’s sunflowers—its memetic value, as art critic Caroline Busta identifies it—ensures that clips would gain algorithmic traction in the feeds, clips that draw attention to ‘Just Stop Oil’. With this T-Shirt graphic being both a simplification of their rallying cry for divestment and the group’s name, hits from the protest were redirected to the group’s profile. The protest was made to become a piece of shareable visual media. A successful one at that: in the first week after the protest, Just Stop Oil gained 19.9k and 14.4k followers on Twitter and Instagram, respectively.
Not only did the protests prompt thousands of reactions online, but both the initial protest and its subsequent meme were picked up across all legacy media. TV and radio clips could then be fed back into the feed. Similarly, over this last week, Just Stop Oil’s protests at the Snooker World Championship and the Grand National hijacked the televising of sports events to promote their cause which then gained virality on social media and coverage in headlines. For Just Stop Oil, then, the artful exploitation of the interconnected web of legacy media and social media platforms' attention economies is a small price to pay for the popularisation of their environmental and socio-economic ends. Even this creative use of social media, however, is shown to be counterproductive when turning to the systemic problems encountered by racial justice protests, like the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.
The BLM protests of the summer of 2020 played out on both the streets and tweets. With COVID-19 measures keeping many indoors, social media platforms became sites to upload and share recordings of police brutality with global audiences. The footage of four policemen’s murder of George Floyd, among others, populated feeds across the globe, and, in its mass circulation, enabled the contradiction of the Minneapolis police’s narratives. American institutional racism was exposed on an unprecedented scale online.
Yet when demonstrating against this institutional racism, protesters were made acutely aware of how their social media apps compromised their security. Third-party apps, like Dataminr, had been contracted by the police to collate and provide information about past, ongoing, and upcoming demonstrations. They did this, as Dataminr’s inventive name suggests, by mining social media posts for data. This particular app would, for instance, capture tweets about protests and extract their geolocations so that the police could turn up accordingly. While Twitter’s terms of service prevent software developers 'from tracking, alerting, or monitoring sensitive events (such as protests, rallies, or community organizing meetings)’, Twitter sells data licenses to official partners, which allows them to bypass these rules. Leveraging its status as an official partner, Dataminr could then sell this data to the police and other contractors. So, here, clicks turn into coins in two processes that took place concurrently: for Twitter (harnessing an attention economy), and for Dataminr (harnessing a big data economy). Why Twitter’s terms of service ban the surveillance of protests, therefore, can—and probably should—be understood cynically: it increases Twitter’s monopoly over the monetary opportunities in the policing of, in BLM’s case, predominantly Black bodies.
Mass demonstrations in support of BLM during the summer of 2020 were not just recorded by, but were also conducted on, social media platforms. The black squares on Instagram prove a memorable example of the limitations of social media platforms to function as sites of activism. You would ‘black out’ your feed in solidarity with #BLM by posting an image of a black square, most often accompanied by a call to arms, such as ‘#SilenceIsViolence’. On social media platforms, silence might well have been the less violent choice. This particular hashtag positions the platforms, and the social pressures that they are built to foster, as what Giles Deleuze identifies as ‘repressive forces’, which ‘don’t stop people from expressing themselves but force people to express themselves’. What’s more, in theory and in practice, the hashtag has dangerously homogenised what is not silence. When the voices of Black people should have been amplified, voices were equalised in a monotonous cacophony via the easily shareable image. A lead organiser in New York and founder of Freedom March NYC, Chelsea Miller, underlined this as she reflected on the social media blackout with NBC News: ‘ultimately […] it muted the conversation. And at a time when we are trying to amplify our voices, we were inherently silenced’. Censorship, in the era of social media, is not being de-platformed, but being drowned out by other platformed voices.
This phenomenon did facilitate acts of solidarity, though. With BLM being fought against online by ‘#WhiteLivesMatter’, K-Pop fans orchestrated a hijacking of the hashtag with support for #BLM. That is, K-pop fans would tweet ‘#WhiteLivesMatter’ yet include resources, information, and messages of support for the BLM movement. These tweets received engagement from fellow K-Pop/BLM tacticians, and so they were sent up the algorithm, further drowning out the voices of white supremacists.
Yet, if social media platforms are at odds with the interests of the protesting group, even this act of comradeship remains, at least in part, counterintuitive. All posts, comments, and likes increased the bonuses of predominantly white social media platform executives who were responsible for algorithms that have, time and time again, been proven to be anti-Black, and who were responsible for the surveillance of BLM via partnerships with apps like Dataminr. The black squares, moreover, exemplify Jonathan Crary’s provocation that social media ‘can circulate only the most easily packaged ideas’, which ‘dilutes and domesticates potentially radical or insurgent programmes, especially those […] which might require long term engagement’. It is impossible to disentangle activism and social media platforms when the latter benefit from, and so have vested interests in preserving, the very status quo that activists are trying to overthrow. In the context of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, it is difficult to be hopeful that the master’s tools can ever be used to dismantle the master’s house.
This reality was identified and acted upon by Dream Defenders five years before BLM came to receive widespread attention in the public domain. Dream Defenders, an anti-police and anti-prison activist group made up of people of colour, was founded in the aftermath of the murder of Trayvon Martin. After 2012, they suspended and then significantly reduced their social media presence, having found it to be detrimental to building substantial networks of solidarity. In an interview with Kate Aranoff in 2015, Dream Defenders’ Chief of Strategy, Rachel Gilmer, proposed that ‘[b]eing off social media is an opportunity for us to really understand how it’s impacting us, how it’s being used to manipulate us by our oppressor’, and warned that continued reliance on social media ‘could actually kill the movement’. Although BLM was not killed by social media, the platforms’ instrumentalisation for law enforcement’s surveillance tactics and for the dilution of messages to make them digestible to a disengaged mass of users shows how it realised Gilmer’s fear of manipulation; social media rendered BLM susceptible to Big Tech companies’ profit-orientated logics. This susceptibility is not at all exclusive to BLM; rather, Gilmer’s prophecies should be noted by those fighting against inequality in all its forms.
What is exclusive to BLM, however, is the violent afterlife of its visual media. Yes, the distribution of recordings of police brutality served as evidence that inspired resistance, yet this phenomenon can also be understood as the unsolicited circulation of the deaths of Black men and women who did not consent to their documentation and who, additionally, lost the agency to define how they would like to be remembered. In an interview with Slate, Allisa Richardson, the author of Bearing Witness While Black, compares the video of George Floyd’s death to ‘a new lynching photograph’ in which it became clear that ‘Everyone [was] not viewing this the same way’, evidenced by the memes she saw depicting ‘white men posed like George Floyd, with the knee on the neck and [other white men] pretending to be officer Chauvin’. Richardson draws attention to the racialisation of this: ‘When white people die violently, we don’t ask for a video’. It is (rightly) difficult to find a video of people falling out of the Twin Towers’ windows, for example. Even now, it is not difficult to find a video of George Floyd’s murder on Twitter. In death, he has become a high-attention commodity for the platform.
Even opposition to social media platforms occurs on them—case in point, where did you stumble upon this article? The feed. This phenomenon is neatly explained by the following observation from media theorist Tero Karppi:
everything from oppression to resistance, creation to destruction takes place within the system and never outside it.
Social media platforms have successfully crafted a social environment where complete abstinence from the system is increasingly an impossibility. So, we must understand social media usage for social justice as a natural impulse—even more understandable in the isolated logics of 2020. Yet, optimism about the creative exploitation of legacy and social media by Just Stop Oil and the hacking tactics of K-Pop fans must be tempered by an awareness of how these platforms can be used against us; their interests are too big, too structural, and too systemic. What we must do is imagine beyond the logic of the extractive algorithms, to new, decentralised systems that can foster solidarity. Whether this is a face-to-face system or a digital ecosystem in which clicks mean something entirely different from coins is a question that is pertinent for you and me and groups like Just Stop Oil. And an answer to such a question lies in the insight of organisers like Gilmer and Miller, away from the itching palms of Zuckerberg and Musk. This is an answer that must come soon.
Tick tick tick tick tick.
