6 Social Media Activism

Social Media Activism

Researchers who study the role of social media in creating social change tend to fall into one of two camps: people who believe social media helps to build and maintain social relationships, and people who believe social media promotes idle talk. Let’s think about these:

Phatic Communication

Phatic communication is the philosophy that assumes the role of communication that happens in social media spaces helps to build and maintain meaningful social relationships, which has the potential to lead to increased social harmony. These social media relationships increase our ability to connect across lines of difference (race, class, gender, ability, nationality, etc.), making it more likely we’ll have close friends who experience the world different from ourselves, which leads to increased awareness of injustices our friends face and increased motivation to help our friends fix these issues.

For example, we can look at the current discussions around racial (in)justice. Phatic communication would say that social media increases the chances you have of being friends with someone from a marginalized group who is fearful that what happened to George Floyd or Trayvon Martin or Tamir Rice could happen to them. The theory posits that because we maintain social relationships with people across racial categories, we are more likely to empathize with victims and with people who feel secondary trauma from witnessing these events, and we are then also more likely to use our empathy to raise awareness about injustices and motivate other people to action.

Phatic Communion:

Phatic communion argues that social media communication amounts to little more than idle talk, making it difficult to have real dialogue because social media spaces are polluted by meaningless chatter between people who don’t generally care about each other on a deep, personal level. So, phatic communion argues that social media decreases the potential for using social media for social change because our forms of expression are limited by the certain channels and algorithms.

So, using the example above of racial (in)justice, phatic communion would state that social media algorithms tend to highlight posts from those who already agree with our perspective, so our news feeds are a mixture of preaching to the choir, ads, and mindless chatter. People in this camp would argue that social media is not a good avenue for social change because it is difficult to attract new people to the movement and because our interactions on social media are limited to likes, shares, and short commentaries of 140 characters or less.

Astroturf Campaigns

One issue that has come up in the news time and time again is the concept of an ASTROTURF CAMPAIGN. An astroturf campaign is when a group of seemingly like-minded people seem to all be coordinating a grassroots, bottom-up campaign around a particular idea, but in reality, the campaign is funded by a corporate or top-down organization pretending to be grassroots organizers.

So, what does this look like in practice? Well, here’s a recent example that highlights the issue.

The Reopen America campaign that launched during the early days of the pandemic and lockdown included protests at state capitol buildings around the USA to reopen parts of the economy, and it first, these protests seemed at first to be a grassroots campaign started by people passionate about returning to their everyday activities. The early days of the campaign were marked by a large number of new sites and Facebook groups who all seemed to want the same things: to reopen the economy and to do so right away.

However, when reporters started looking into the groups, they found evidence that it was actually an Astroturf campaign. According to one article:

A report from DNS-focused cybersecurity firm DomainTools concludes that over 500 new domains related to the protests have been registered in the past month. Many of them are linked to only a few groups. By gathering domain names that include the same words, and by analysing the domains for other similarities, DomainTools was able to determine that many of them “redirect to a state-based firearms coalition group.” And according to its senior security researcher, Chad Anderson, these groups tie back to Aaron Dorr, a registered lobbyist for the state of Iowa.

Anderson goes on to explain that the “reopen” websites linked to Aaron Dorr bear various similarities, including the fact that they were built using nonpartisan advocacy platform One Click Politics and also WordPress. By looking at one of them, the Iowa Gun Owners website, DomainTools was able to find Dorr’s telephone number.

DomainTools then examined the historical SSL certificates used for each of the firearms advocacy domains, finding Mr. Dorr’s personal domain and also numerous other domains associated with other firearm’s coalitions elsewhere in the US. For Chad Anderson and his colleagues, this “raised the likelihood for us that Mr. Dorr was the one running these campaigns.”

In other words, a batch of the “reopen America” domains are the work of a single gun advocacy network.”

That doesn’t mean people weren’t genuinely attracted to the campaign. Obviously when more and more people heard about it they were motivated enough to actually attend the protests. The reopen protest in Michigan was actually so popular and aggressive that it shut down state business for the day. But, corporations paid a lot of money to make it look like there were many times the number of supporters than what actually existed, and making it seem like this was a grassroots effort instead of one driven by political parties.

This is certainly not the only example, and there are plenty of examples of this happening across the political spectrum. In fact, the practice is so popular that successful businesses have sprung up offering crowds of people to cheer on your idea for a fee. For example, Crowds On Demand offers just that: paid groups of people who will show up at your protests, rallies, PR stunts and political events to make it seem like an idea is more popular than it actually is.

One of the benefits of using social media to create astroturf campaigns is that this genre is relatively unregulated. While formal lobbyists have to disclose money entering and leaving their campaign finances, grassroots movements do not. So, the more an astroturf campaign can look similar to a grassroots movement, the fewer regulations that group will face.

Social Media Activism Strengths and Weaknesses  

Social media petitions alone do not change the world order as we know it. But that doesn’t mean social media is ineffective. Let’s explore what social media campaigns do well and not well:

Strengths:

• Social media campaigns are good at increasing national or international media attention and political pressure toward a particular example or case, and it does so very quickly. Organizing that used to take months and years now happens in the span of minutes and hours online. The cost of this form of organizing is also much lower than for traditional campaigns.
• Social media campaigns are most successful when they encourage short, immediate awareness for a single issue, and they encourage people to take a singular action that is relatively simple.
• People who sign onto online petitions are more likely to give money and time to related causes in real life as well. They are also more likely to have more civic skills and increased rates of other “in real life” forms of political participation. These suggest that online activism is often not limited to just things that happen online; there are often several components that happen in the real world as well. And online activism is also associated with positive impacts on one’s ability to engage in public political expression.
• For example, a soccer fan created a change.org petition to ask EA sports to create a soccer video game with women soccer players (because the Women’s World Cup wins everything all the time). The idea was simple, and all people had to do was sign the petition and share it with others. In a similar example, someone used a petition to get M&Ms to stop using artificial dyes in their products.In a more political example, part of the reason we heard about Trayvon Martin’s murder was because of a change.org petition asking people to sign to support the DA pressing charges against Michael Zimmerman. The petition was relatively unknown until a few celebrities shared it, and support grew and grew. The petition was signed by over 2 million people, and of course, Zimmerman was charged but ultimately acquitted.

Weaknesses

Social media activism campaigns are often ridiculed for being “slacktivist” campaigns. Slacktivism is the idea people engage in feel-good online activities in support of a social cause that leads to little/no practical change. Slacktivist campaigns are characterized by:

• Minimal personal effort to be involved
• The low involvement activity (for example, liking or sharing something) substitutes instead of compliments more meaningful actions.
• You can think of this as the “Livestrong bracelets” of activism. Remember those yellow bracelets everyone wore. Hang on, I’m googling what year people wore those to see if you were alive then. Okay, Google tells me it was in 2004, so maybe you were too young? In that case, people wore yellow bracelets to show support for people impacted by cancer. The effort people put in was very minimal – they purchased a bracelet for maybe a dollar or two. And this allowed them to brand themselves as someone who cares deeply about the issue without having to really do much else. Minimal effort, makes us feel good, does very little to promote meaningful change.
  
• There is also evidence that people who participate in slacktivist campaigns do so more for personal reasons than they do for actual care about social change. In other words, they want to be seen as the “type of person” who cares about a particular issue, but not necessarily be the type of person who actually shows up to create change around that issue.

Social media campaigns are also bad at creating social change around complex issues. To avoid this, we can ask two big questions:

1. What is the end goal of the campaign?
2. How do you achieve that end goal?

Let’s assess this using some examples:

1. Steven Colbert had a long-running game where he would get his viewers to vote for him in petty contests for naming rights to things, etc. People often pointed to these campaigns as slacktivist campaigns: they directed a lot of feel-good attention toward minor and petty issues, and created very little social change. But they were effective, including this campaign to get Colbert’s portrait hung in the Smithsonian (they hung it by the bathroom doors).
   
   What is the end goal of this campaign: to get Colbert’s portrait hung in the Smithsonian.
   How do you achieve that end goal: You vote for it in an online poll and share the poll with friends to do the same.

   Yes, social media will be good at that (and it was).

2. In 2014, a militant group in Nigeria kidnapped hundreds of school girls and sold them into sex slavery (which they called marriage, but was obviously not consensual marriage). People started a social media campaign to get the government to do something to bring back the girls.What is the end goal of the campaign: To get a foreign government to engage in a military intervention against an armed militia group to free a group of hundreds of girls who were sold off and now lived in dispersed military camps deep in the forest.

   How do you achieve that end goal: Probably not social media. This would be a good example of a slacktivist campaign because it directed feel-good attention (we felt good for sharing images of ourselves holding #BringBackOurGirls signs) toward a social cause and raised international attention toward the issue, but it did very little to encourage any form of social change because the issue was much more complex than could be handled by Twitter.
   

3. When Jon Stewart was still the host of The Daily Show, he hosted an entire episode devoted to a healthcare bill for September 11 first responders. The issue was that the money set aside to help first responders with health concerns after their work around the World Trade Center was running out, leaving first responders who risked their lives in the bombing and aftermath without much needed healthcare. Why did they need healthcare? Well, because asbestos and other carcinogens were released when the buildings fell, first responders inhaled dangerous chemicals and many ended up with late stage cancer and other very serious and deadly health issues. Congress didn’t want to take up the bill because they wanted to go home for the Christmas holiday. So, Stewart invited first responders onto the show to talk about their health concerns, and then used social media to encourage people to call their congress people to demand they vote on the 9/11 first responders healthcare bill before leaving for the Christmas recess. The campaign was successful. Congress passed the bill the next day.What is the end goal: Get Congress to stay in Washington to pass a relatively uncontroversial bill.

   How do you achieve that end goal: Air a TV episode and share information online encouraging people to make a phone call.

   Yes, this is something social media is good at doing. It worked.