I played around with a few blog-like mediums, like WordPress and Medium, but ultimately I found that the formatting on this blog site allowed me to include the most diverse set of media the most easily.

To listen to while you read:

Gil Scott Heron famously told us in 1971 that the revolution will not be televised, but almost fifty years later, it seems as though mass media and social movements are inevitably tied together. With the onset of the George Floyd protests in early June, there also came a flood of social media posts both promoting and detracting the Black Lives Matter movement and the actions of the protesters (or rioters, depending on who you ask).

With this flood of social media activism and political framing came a number of interesting phenomena. Different people of different political affiliations would post about the same exact event or video with perfectly opposite interpretations of what that piece of media signified. This is hardly surprising, but what was especially interesting was observing the way that the users of social media contested their opponents’ interpretations of an event.

The below is a classic, clear-cut example of the extremely different frames through which Twitter users viewed the same event. While the first poster is inspired by the movement to remove the image of Columbus, the other one is concerned for the safety of the police officers guarding the statue.

Similarly, one can see the way in which Twitter users employ videos from different perspectives to prove opposite points. In the first Tweet below, the poster has isolated a video of actions by protesters against law enforcement officers in order to prove his point of “violent extremists”. On the other hand, many Twitter users shared videos of violence from the protesters’ perspective, like the second one that posit protesters’ actions as self-defense or retaliation. Most of the Tweets I observed took the side of the protesters, and posts like this and this seemed fairly excellent responses to the various social media users who demanded to know why protesters needed shields and helmets. (Check out the comments on this one!)

One of the other major features of the social media activism blitz this summer has been the incredible number of people posting about the political and social issues of the police on their personal accounts.

                                    

This move was accompanied by both a demand for others to do the same, but also a skepticism towards the genuineness of the short-term activist’s commitment. I interviewed an Instagram-savvy friend of mine about her perspective on people she knew posting about political topics.

A: I don’t really post about going to protests cuz I feel like that feels kinda performative but like I don’t like super care if people do it, I just wouldn’t want to.

S: Yeah. Do a lot of people you’re friends with post about stuff like that?

A: No, cuz I feel like most of the people I’m friends with have similar views on that stuff, but I do think a lot of people post those things. It’s like whatever (laughs) I dunno. Sometimes it can be annoying if you know they’ve only gone to like one or two and they’re doing it because it’s…

S: Trendy?

A: Yeah, which is so crazy.

What stands out to me here is the labelling of certain posters as “true” activists versus “untrue” ones. Though my friend was unwilling to truly criticize those who posted then moved on, she nonetheless questions the sincerity of their motives. Were they simply posting as part of a fad? Does a disingenuous post count for less?

Another point of discussion was also the ways in which the commonly used media of Instagram could obscure a situation, or simplify a complex reality. My friend talked about the way in which infographs can offer a rosy summation of a problem while obscuring a more complex reality.

A: Well, one that I remember because it was like a very good example of how social media can be like a source of misinformation was there was this thing called like “The Great Eight” or something, I dunno if you saw this. It was like this reformist infographic that like was from a new social m— like from a new Instagram page that was like, oh, was something like, “wait, don’t wait on these eight” and it was just like these random reforms that these police departments could implement. Like body cameras, or like, you know, illegal, or make illegal uh whatever they call that for— unlawful force or like no neck-holds, and it was like, “if every police department implemented all of these policies, like bruta— police brutality, or police death would go down, or death, you know what I mean, would go down, like 45%” or something, but… So, like, all these fancy statistics, but like, and like so many people reposted it. And then, I saw this really good, long story from this guy who graduated a couple of years ago who know goes to a public policy masters at Berkeley, and he, like, totally dissected it, and was like, like, called it out for all this misleading stuff that was in it, about how these reforms won’t work, because, like so many police departments have already implemented them, and it’s been shown that they don’t um, they aren’t effective, and also he talked about the founder of the movement, and how she was just really problematic. It was just, yeah, it was just really good that he actually researched it, because so many people had posted about it, because they were just like, “this so great!”

S: Right.

A: “We can do it! Stats are the answer!” (laughs)

https://www.facebook.com/DuleHill/posts/3372453072766802

A: I think there’s not a lot of total misinformation, but I think there’s a lot of like, misleading graphics, a lot. And there’s also a lot of like, oversimplification. Which is the danger of having, like, infographics so much a part of social media. Like, I think it gets people involved a little bit, because they’re like, scrolling through their Insta, and they see a cute graphic about like, redlining, and they’re like, “oh, yeah, now I get it!” (laughs)

https://www.facebook.com/BremertonPD/posts/1195408614130129

The 8Can’tWait campaign claims to be capable of reducing police violence by a significant degree, however, most police forces across the United States are already compliant with the plan laid out in the campaign. This became especially clear when I searched the hashtag on Facebook, and found it was mostly police department Facebook pages advertising their compliance with these guidelines. To the campaign’s credit, there is information about the philosophy behind police abolition on their website, as well as a promotion of defunding the NYPD of $1 billion. However, the niftiness of their graphics makes their campaign seem more promising than it really should be.

Ultimately, social media is an at times exciting, at times frightening reflection of the political state of the country. With the online struggle to properly frame the nature of the protests as either peaceful protests or rampant hooligans as well as the fraught world of everyday online activism, there is an enormous and interesting online world unfolding on social media. It’s important also to recognize the interconnection here of the online with the real world. The images and videos that are posted on the internet are obviously products of the real world, but the way in which the online facilitates protest events, and also has the potential to shape individual users’ opinions is important to note as well. This is quite obviously a powerful interplay between the virtual and the physical.