The Problem With Hashtag Activism

In the thirteen years since Twitter’s inception, users from every political stripe have launched countless campaigns, many of which have subsequently been covered or even adopted by traditional media and become household names. In #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice, authors Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles propose that Twitter has become an important tool for activists to “advocate, mobilize and communicate.” They say the platform itself has become a powerful counterpublic for marginalized groups, who use Twitter’s hashtag function to facilitate political coalitions and networks. More specifically, the book investigates one particular corner of Twitter activism, defined by a distinct political culture that is liberal, social-justice oriented, consciousness focused, identitarian, intersectionalist, minoritarian, and moralist.

Even reducing the scope of their study to this particular online culture, it would be impossible for the authors to cover their subject in thorough detail. To their credit, the book is focused and provides an honest and dutiful record of the major campaigns of social justice hashtag activism, outlining a history, a trajectory, and a digital landscape. Curiously, though, the authors’ accounts of these campaigns only serve to thoroughly — almost relentlessly — contradict the book’s techno-optimist thesis, page after page, from the very beginning. (...)

In the larger world, it is difficult to spot a victory or any lasting legacy of power among even hugely popular campaigns like #OccupyWallStreet, #ArabSpring, #BlackLivesMatter, #YesAllWomen, and #MeToo. Occupy Wall Street fizzled, the Arab Spring flopped, George Zimmerman walks free, and police murders of black people have not decreased. While it’s true that a few of the high-profile voices of #MeToo managed to punish and even lock up a few of their higher-profile predators (and publicly censure a few more harmless perverts), no meaningful legislation has been passed to protect or empower ordinary women in the workplace. The campaigns featured in #HashtagActivism have given us little more than the prosecution of Harvey Weinstein, the cancellation of a TV cooking show, and the forestalling of a few tawdry book deals.

Who Runs Twitter Town?

In the introduction to #HashtagActivism, the authors are quick to reference academic and “techno-sociologist” Zeynep Tufekci, who observes that Twitter activism “looks very different from traditional, institutional-based politics — a kind of democratic participation that is inclined toward a horizontal, identity-based movement-building that arrives out of grievances and claims.” Like the authors, I would agree with Tufekci’s characterization.

It comes as no surprise, however, that they don’t engage further with Tufekci’s work, or even mention the title of her 2017 book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. As one of the first academics writing on technology and movement-building, Tufekci has been openly and consistently skeptical of social media’s “transformative” potential since at least 2014. Unlike Jackson, Bailey, and Foucault Welles, she engages with the history of progressive online activism as a series of failures that she subjects to critical analysis and comparative-historical investigation.

Tufekci does not regard social media as a poison tree capable of bearing only poison fruit, per se, but she is not naive about the digital means of production. In talks and in print, she has illustrated that governments and capital have far more power than the masses over social media, which they often use to spy, censor, and misinform with impunity. (...)

The free and easy voluntarism of posting and content creation obscures an essential fact: the internet is deceptively vulnerable to corporate manipulation — in many ways, far more so than print, radio, or television. Consider TV: the owners create content, the audience consumes it and judges its value, and the government regulates programming, sometimes ever so slightly, even if only under massive public pressure. With the internet, the audience is invited to create their own content (generally for free), and the owners are largely rentiers or digital landlords that remain totally unaccountable for anything that happens on their preserve. Meanwhile, in the United States, the government and its attendant regulatory bodies are either in bed with big tech or can’t even remember their email passwords.

It is difficult to determine whether the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is uninterested in or merely incapable of regulating the internet, and while advocates of free speech or even basic democracy should regard any attempt to do so with a healthy skepticism, it is significant that you can’t sue a tech company for abuse, harassment, stalking, libel, slander, or defamation that occurs on their platform. What little regulation is adopted is largely designed by the tech companies themselves, and it’s easily sidestepped when convenient. In the United States, the internet operates unlike any other form of media in that it is not subject to the rules that are, at least theoretically, imposed by representatives of the people. With all this in mind, it is difficult to imagine online activity as a revolutionary home base. The omnipotent rulers of these companies yield no transparency, accountability, or democratic control to users, the majority of whom do not display the dedicated platform loyalty of the activists in #HashtagActivism.

Twitter Is on Its Way Out

Even if the public gained some sort of democratic control over Twitter, we would be extremely late to the party. Internet users tend to cycle through social media platforms as they emerge, particularly as new platforms target youth markets with the promise of a parent-free online experience. At this point, Twitter is distinctly millennial, with younger users initially defecting to Instagram, then Snapchat, and now TikTok. Social media platforms also produce their own self-selecting demographics, which are never a particularly representative cross-section of anything. Since online activism is entirely voluntarist, and therefore siloed (“networks” work for the Right as well), mediums for communication will always be a moving target. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok — as our options expand, the crowds disperse.

Twitter users are not only more insular and itinerant than the authors seem to imagine, there are actually very few of them, relatively speaking. A 2019 Pew Research Center study found that only about 22 percent of American adults use Twitter, and they tend to be younger and more progressive than the average American. Moreover, about 80 percent of tweets are produced by 20 percent of accounts, meaning the majority of activity on Twitter comes from a very small (and ever shrinking) number of highly active users. In February 2019, Twitter publicly announced their active user numbers for the first time; previously, the company only publicized their user “growth,” a percentage that was said to be padded with bots and dead accounts. After their grand reveal indicated a much smaller and still shrinking user base, they decided to no longer inform the public about their platform’s numbers.

Even without an accurate inventory of users, the material account of hashtag activism’s record to date exposes it as a midwife to impotent movements that grow and die far too quickly on undemocratic platforms that are corporate-controlled and fleetingly faddish. But what if we could fix all of that? What if we had a social media platform of our very own, one that corrected the aforementioned flaws? Could there be a platform of the people, a publicly controlled fixture that would attract a critical mass of users, with an architecture that patiently fosters the specialization of talents and skills that would herd all the cats of social justice, laying the groundwork for a deft, unified, and democratic organization? Assuming for a moment that such a thing is possible, would it even be desirable?

Can Social Media Be Social?

Once again in clear opposition to the conclusions of #HashtagActivism, Tufekci argues that the rapidity of the growth and spread of online-borne movements may be a potentially intractable obstacle, rather than an advantage, as the speed of horizontalism only seems to foster a specific kind of social formation: the undifferentiated mass. She observes the “tactical freeze” these sprawling movements are inevitably saddled with, as they expand into erratic, unwieldy, unstable blobs, incapable of specialization or coordination. Eventually, they become movements that are unable to move, so they stall out, then dissolve. Tufekci contrasts this life cycle with the slow, heavily coordinated, and decidedly very unspontaneous activism of the civil rights movement, concluding that the March on Washington succeeded as a result of these traditional organizing strategies, while Occupy Wall Street (along with so many other gods that failed) always crumble for lack of them.

Herein lies the fundamental misunderstanding of movement-building in #HashtagActivism. It’s true that political sentiments irradiated by the internet do experience remarkably rapid growth — but so does a tumor. The impressive speed and size of online movements are too often mistaken for viability and maturity, when, in fact, the accelerated development of online activism belies a deadly progeria: it burns hotly, brightly, and briefly, often with nothing to show in the end but a glut of forgettable, disposable content and the emotional exhaustion of participants (and perhaps a monograph or two).

by Amber A’Lee Frost, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: David McNew/Getty Images