Why Social Media Activism Inevitably Disadvantages Black People
BY CHERYL THOMPSON
In 2020, the social justice hashtag was everywhere. Some of the most circulated hashtags on social media at the time were: #georgefloyd #blacklivesmatter #blm #justiceforgeorgefloyd #breonnataylor #icantbreathe #policebrutality #nojusticenopeace #ahmaudarbery. These specific hashtags accompanied posts about police brutality against Black people in the US: namely, the tragic death of 26-year-old Breonna Taylor, an African American woman killed on March 13, 2020, in her Louisville, Kentucky home by police who entered the premises on a no-knock warrant; George Floyd, an unarmed 46-year-old killed by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020; and Ahmaud Arbery, an unarmed 25-year-old African American man who was pursued and fatally shot by three white men while jogging near Brunswick in Glynn County, Georgia on February 23, 2020. The deaths of these African Americans lingered in public consciousness throughout 2020 and 2021.
It is hard to believe these events happened just two years ago. Not only has the tragedy of these deaths faded into historical memory, so too have the related hashtags. As an avid social media user, I am also part of what is euphemistically known as “Black Twitter,” a space on Twitter that offers an outlet for Black people to express their ideas and opinions publicly. Black intellectuals, trendsetters, and talking heads dominate this space, giving voice to issues that, prior to social media, would not have garnered the attention of mainstream media (Williams, 2015). While individuals on Black Twitter can invoke hashtags to galvanize their followers around social issues at a remarkable pace, marketers can develop ways to monetize those hashtags at the same ferocious pace. Today, websites like Top-Hashtags cull the hashtags popularized on Black Twitter into categories like, “Best Popular Hashtag to use with #floyd,” offering the helpful tip: “You should try these good hashtags in your Instagram or Tiktok post to get popular and boost your view.”
The hypervisibility of social justice hashtags, and websites built around them that serve no purpose other than to help social media users build their follower count, illustrate the tensions of social media activism. On the one hand, posting a hashtag or meme helps to create forms of intentional in-group solidarity and cohesion during times of heightened crisis and loss; on the other hand, it enables out-group forms of appropriation. One example of such out-group appropriation is slacktivism, a term coined by Dwight Ozard and Fred Clark who, at the 1995 Cornerstone Festival, created the portmanteau of “slacker” and “activism” to refer to bottom up actions taken by young people to affect society on a small, personal scale. In their usage, the term had a positive connotation. Later, the term was used to explain individuals’ willingness to perform a relatively costless, token display of support for a social cause which they are not connected to, accompanied by a lack of willingness to devote significant effort to enacting meaningful change related to that social cause (Davis, 2011; Morozov, 2009).
During the summer of 2020, I was obsessed with Black Twitter, checking my feed on the social media platform multiple times each hour, especially in the wake of Floyd’s murder. I remember seeing numerous videos on my social media feed with hashtags that I liked or shared with my followers, hoping to spread awareness about police brutality; I was also sent memes and GIFs showing the deaths of Taylor, Floyd and Arbery. My engagement with their deaths was not just through an interface, like people might have experienced via televised news reports of the 1960s civil rights movements, but rather as a willing digital participant. I circulated information to Facebook and Twitter about Taylor, Floyd, and Arbery, offering micro commentaries, interjections, and clarifications. With each post, I positioned and repositioned myself appropriately as a wilful participant in what Jannette L. Dates and Mia Moody Ramirez call the “sharing culture on Black Twitter” which enables “collective dialogue based on a diversity of Black experiences” (128). I believed that by sharing and reposting hashtags while adding my own micro-commentaries, I was doing my part to create “meaningful impact on how issues of race and identity play out in society” (Dates & Ramirez, 2018, 128). I thought I was using my intellectual knowledge to put the moment into historical context, challenge racist narratives about supposed Black criminality, and help engender conversations around healing.
I was so passionate about my use of social justice hashtags during the summer of 2020 that I wrote an article for Room Magazine where I called #hashtags and memes the new Black power salute. There, I argued that they “empowered Black and Indigenous people to crash the normative system that is whiteness.” As I look back on the past two years, what I realize is that we need to be cautious when drawing direct correlation between online social justice activism and real social change. In moments of crisis, social media can connect disparate people together around a common social cause; it can help to remind people of what might not be reported in mainstream news. But what happens when the hashtags are co-opted by corporate interests?
According to the Pew Research Center’s analysis of publicly available tweets, #BlackLivesMatter surged on Twitter after Floyd’s murder. #BlackLivesMatter was used roughly 47.8 million times on the social media site – an average of just under 3.7 million times per day – from May 26, 2020 to June 7, 2020. On May 28, 2020, 3 days after Floyd’s death, nearly 8.8 million tweets contained the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, “making this the highest number of uses for this hashtag in a single day since the Center started tracking its use” (Anderson, et. al, 2020). This data reveals that people were engaged in the social media discourse around not only Floyd’s death, but also the hashtags that circulated via Black Twitter.
At the same time, however, slacktivist clothing companies seized on the opportunity to turn the social justice hashtags that helped community-building efforts on Black Twitter into profit-generating commodities. In their 2021 study of #BlackLivesMatter, Stephanie L. Mahin and Victoria Smith Ekstrand found that while requests for trademarks for Black Lives Matter were denied outright, primarily on the basis that such marks were considered political and/or informational slogans that do not indicate a sole source, a number of registered trademarks “have relied on the social capital from Black Lives Matter by using the ‘lives matter’ portion. As a result, these marks are now allowed to take credit and financially profit from marks that resemble the Black Lives Matter name” (30). Examples of this hashtag appropriation include Fat Lives Matter (clothing/hats), Blue Lives Matter (clothing) and #Christian Lives Matter (accessories).
Or, in the case of Irish Lives Matter (clothing), a group of Irish-American political and cultural leaders released a public statement on Twitter urging Irish-Americans to boycott the sale of Irish Lives Matter T-shirts at Walmart and Amazon. In it, they said of these shirts: “We believe at best that they are tone deaf and insensitive, and at worst a deliberate, cynical attempt to trivialize, diminish or denigrate the BLM.”
In Taylor’s case, slacktivism took the form of a social media statement rather than a hashtag. As posts like “arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor” or “it’s a great day to arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor” started to gain traction online in June 2020 – only after the death of Floyd, I might add – the catchphrases and memes based around Taylor’s name started to eclipse discussion of the alarming and disturbing circumstances surrounding her death (Romano, 2020). As in the case of Black Lives Matter, an “Arrest the Cops Who Killed Breonna Taylor” T-shirt soon found its way onto Etsy at a retail price of CA$33.20, plus tax.
Actress Lili Reinhart, who is white, made her infamous “sideboob” Instagram post, supposedly in support of further investigation into Taylor’s death. After Reinhart was “called out” for the meme-post (of herself), the post was removed from her feed and Reinhart apologized for posting it. However, the meme still circulated on social media. I learned about it on Twitter when it showed up on my feed, for example.
When rapper 50 Cent posted an image on his Twitter of a Jeopardy playboard spelling “ARREST THE COPS THAT KILLED BREONNA TA_LOR,” a post that garnered over 4,000 likes and 1,000 reshares, many Black women, in particular, began to step back and question the impact of social media activism on real Black lives.
In an article for Jezebel, Cate Young (2020) wrote, “what began as sincere tweets and photos, urging people to remember to show up for Taylor’s case, quickly morphed into a distasteful meme genre of its own. Absent any specific call to actions, ‘arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor’ became a clarion call, divorced from Taylor’s life and image – the newest virtue signal of choice, one that defies the current conversation around the abolition of police and prisons” (para. 3).
Importantly, “Twitter as a digital space and the hashtag itself become sites of powers that cannot be understood without intersectional frameworks,” write Tynes, Schuschke & Noble (2016), adding “social media is not the movement itself, but it certainly amplifies and clarifies the work of organizers and offers a means of disrupting the silences and erasures” (37). Since #BlackLivesMatter, created in 2014 following the 2013 death of Trayvon Martin, hashtags have become social justice tools that not only engender in-group solidarity but raise questions about who has the right to join the movement and who does not. For example, is a white person’s use of a hashtag of an unarmed Black person’s death by police always slacktivism? Black Twitter activism is real in that it can raise incredible awareness in a short time frame, and has helped to draw in previously unimaginable support for victims of police violence, such as #JusticeforTrayvon, which was the fastest-growing petition to run on Change.org (Jackson, Bailey & Foucault Welles, 2020). However, in my current research I still grapple with the fact that the algorithm that underpins where and how we find these hashtags has not changed.
Hashtags, memes, and catchphrases make a lot of money for a lot of people. While white people who are popular on social media do very well financially, studies continue to find that Black people on social media do not. But what is most alarming is how marketers’ views on social justice activism online have shifted since posts about Black deaths have been proven to swiftly go viral. According to a 2021 report in Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek, “For years, marketers viewed racial messages, and especially the Black Lives Matter movement, as divisive. They inserted provisions into contracts that specifically prohibited influencers from talking about police or using the #BLM hashtag.” However, following 2020, as folks of all races took to the streets to protest the police killing of Floyd, “corporate brand managers, motivated by genuine enthusiasm – and the awareness that being tied to a popular civil rights movement would be great marketing – joined a chorus of calls for racial equality” (Frier, para. 8; 9). In other words, in the world of social media, marketers now realize that Black deaths matter more than Black lives when it comes to hits, likes, and reshares – and that is not right.
Just as the loudest voices take up all the air in the room in person, when it comes to social media, we need to start asking more questions about whose voices are loudest, what the technology itself enables them to say about others, and the ways they have used these privileges to also profit off other people’s tragedies.
Works Cited
Anderson, Monica, et al. “#BlackLivesMatter surges on Twitter after George Floyd’s death,” Pew Research Center, June 10, 2020. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/06/10/blacklivesmatter-surges-on-twitter-after-george-floyds-death/.
Dates, Jannette L. & Ramirez, Mia Moody. From Blackface to Black Twitter: Reflections on Black Humor, Race, Politics, & Gender (New York: Peter Lang, 2018).
Davis, Jesse. “Cause marketing: Moving beyond corporate slacktivism,” 2011. http://evidencebasedmarketing.net/cause-marketing-moving-beyond-corporate-slacktivism/.
Frier, Sarah. “Marketers Are Underpaying Black Influencers While Pushing Black Lives Matter.” Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek, March 11, 2021. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2021-03-11/marketers-are-underpaying-black-influencers-while-pushing-black-lives-matter.
Mahin, Stephanie L. & Ekstrand, Victoria Smith. “Old Law, New Tech, and Citizen-Created Hashtags: #BlackLivesMatter and the Case for Provisional Hashtag Marks.” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly. 98.1, 13-36 (2021).
Morozov, Evgeny. “The Brave New World of Slacktivism,” Foreign Policy, May 19, 2009. https://foreignpolicy.com/2009/05/19/the-brave-new-world-of-slacktivism/.
Noble, Safiya Umoja. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018).
Jackson, Sarah J., Bailey, Moya & Welles, Brooke Foucault. #Hashtag Activism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020).
Romano, Aja. “‘Arrest the cops who killed Breonna Taylor’: The power and the peril of a catchphrase.” VOX, August 10, 2020. https://www.vox.com/21327268/breonna-taylor-say-her-name-meme-hashtag.
Williams, Stereo. “The Power of Black Twitter.” The Daily Beast, July 6, 2015. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-power-of-black-twitter.
Young, Cate. “Memes Are Robbing Breonna Taylor of Her Story.” Jezebel, July 7, 2020. https://jezebel.com/memes-are-robbing-breonna-taylor-of-her-story-1844264196.
Cheryl Thompson is an Assistant Professor in Performance at The Creative School, X University. She was previously faculty in Creative Industries (2018-2021). Her research engages with historical and contemporary examinations of media, visual culture, and the production of race and nation. She is author of Uncle: Race, Nostalgia, and the Politics of Loyalty (2021) and Beauty in a Box: Detangling the Roots of Canada’s Black Beauty Culture (2019).
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