In Defense of Social Media

Its critics aren’t wrong. But they’re missing the value of the social network.

We’ve all heard the criticisms of social media.

“It’s an echo chamber where people only hear what confirms their views.”

“People don’t differentiate between legitimate, well-sourced news and stories that are exaggerated or even made up to reinforce their existing view.”

“A person’s social media persona is nothing but branding.”

“Can’t people keep anything private anymore?”

“If you’re getting the service for free, you are the product.”

These critiques of the ways people use social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and the evil empire of Facebook are all legitimate. I am particularly troubled by the breakdown of privacy in the digital age and have been an active advocate, through my employer, for maintaining a wall between the government and the people and the third-party services we use to make life more convenient and pleasant, an issue that the Supreme Court is considering in its current term.

But the naysayers who are threatening to #deleteFacebook and who just cannot figure out Twitter are missing something critical: social media is a tool for social change. Movements and moments are enhanced by organizers who smartly use social media.

Rewind to November 2016. Progessives were reeling from the stunning victory of Donald Trump and the additional Democratic losses in congressional races around the country. Emotions ranged from despondent to depressed to afraid. Eventually, for people from coast to coast, those emotions galvanized into determination. A friend of a friend said it best (which I read in a Facebook post): “You’re not going to let this fool make you quit, are you?”

Soon after the election, a group of congressional staffers drafted a guide for effectively advocating to members of Congress. Entitled Indivisible: A Practical Guide for Resisting the Trump Agenda, the document was posted on Google Docs in December 2016, and a tweet by one of the authors eventually went viral, with a lift from several celebrities, including former Labor Secretary Robert Reich and actor George Takei.

“Indivisible” became the banner under which local groups organized. In Pennsylvania, like in other states, pockets of activists popped up in cities and towns large and small. Some convened by municipality, some by congressional district. And they organized themselves using online tools, particularly Facebook groups.

When Trump was inaugurated and the new Congress was seated, it was well-established that the Affordable Care Act was on the Republicans' list for demolition. The Republicans' antagonism toward the ACA is simply inexplicable. It’s not a perfect law and is merely the first step toward a healthcare system that guarantees coverage for all. But 20 million people gained health insurance coverage because of its implementation. The expansion of Medicaid has been especially successful.

Nevertheless, the Republicans were eager to tear down this legislative success that had helped 20 million Americans. So supporters of the law mobilized to save it. Phone calls, emails, and letters flooded congressional offices. Staff in those offices couldn’t keep their voice mail boxes cleared. And these new activists were encouraging each other through social media with the latest updates on vote counts, rumored amendments, and offline actions. As the vote neared, videos of people with disabilities putting their bodies on the line in civil disobedience in congressional office buildings rocketed around the internet, further galvanizing the movement to stop the repeal.

This is how online organizing is most effective — by convincing people to take offline action.

In the end, three Senate Republicans voted with all of the Democrats against the bill to repeal the law. The ACA — Obamacare — was saved. To be sure, the tax bill that Congress passed in December removed a pillar of the ACA by repealing the individual mandate. But the infrastructure of the law remains. And there is an argument that the repeal of the individual mandate will lead to greater government involvement in funding healthcare coverage.

Now, let’s pause here to be clear; social media as an organizing tool didn’t start after the election of Donald Trump. Democratic partisans who had been lulled to sleep during the Obama years were merely joining in where civil rights advocates and other social justice activists had already been working.

Black Lives Matter started as a Twitter hashtag, in response to the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in Florida. And, according to Trayvon’s brother, national awareness of his death grew after the Miami Heat basketball team took photos of themselves in hoodies, which was symbolic because the man who killed Trayvon mentioned that the teen was wearing a hoodie during a phone call with a police dispatcher. Retired NBA player and activist Etan Thomas has described the photo as “iconic.” While the traditional media in south Florida certainly would have covered the players’ action, it had the life that it did because it spread through social media.

For advocates and activists, social media gives us a platform for self-publishing, without going through the filter of traditional media. When protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 after a police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, videos and descriptions were shared across all platforms by people who were there. When coverage of this kind of event is left to the professional media, the people who are trying to get out their message are left to the editorial whims — and biases — of reporters with no connection to the issue. When riots broke out in Baltimore after the death of Freddie Gray while he was in police custody in 2015, local people complained that they had been engaged in nonviolent street protests for more than a week, but media coverage increased dramatically only when a small group of people burned a CVS store and engaged in other minor acts of vandalism.

For those who think this creates an “echo chamber effect,” I have some bitter medicine: Get over it. Conservatives have had their own echo chambers for nearly three decades — talkradio and Fox News. To their credit, those platforms have been an incredibly effective tool for honing and distributing their message, and that has strengthened conservatives stranglehold on power in Washington and in state capitals around the country.

Progressives need their own echo chamber for both motivating and energizing people who are already with us and for widely distributing our message. Tommy Vietor, the co-host of the podcast Pod Save America and former staffer for Barack Obama, said on a recent episode, “If a bunch of liberals delete Facebook (in response to the Cambridge Analytica scandal), there’s still a billion people on Facebook, and then they’re not getting anything from us.”

I have heard people complain repeatedly about “preaching to the choir.” Preaching to the choir can be a very effective tactic when you need the choir to sing.

The social media naysayers are also missing how effective these platforms have been for engaging young people, in ways that our generation never was engaged. As a teen, I had some awareness of social justice issues, specifically human rights, thanks to a few co-workers from a summer job and the embrace of those issues by popular rock musicians. But today’s teens have access to information that is leaps and bounds beyond what we had. When my daughter was in seventh grade, she gave me a verbal explanation for why “all lives matter” was disingenuous. While her mother and I are both progressive voters and have encouraged her awareness of what is happening in the wider world, I had not broached this particular topic with her. I thought, ‘Where did this come from?’

One need only to look at the work that is being done by students from Parkland, Florida, and their allies from Chicago and other cities to see the impact of social media as an organizing tool. On March 14, exactly one month after 17 people died at their school at the hands of a lone gunman, students around the country walked out of their schools to protest gun violence. Ten days later, approximately one million people were in the streets throughout the United States for the same cause. That could not happen without social media. And that pressure forced the state legislature to pass gun reform legislation, a bill with imperfections but that certainly moved the issue forward.

Critics of social media also complain that the platforms give everyone the ability to write whatever they want, regardless of how poorly sourced or researched their content is, and that those who then see that message accept it as fact. That criticism is not wrong. After the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February, I saw a meme making the rounds that said that liberals were placing red light bulbs in their porch lights to signal that they are gun-free households. It’s embarrassing that they anyone would actually think that was real. And most famously, Russian provocateurs exploited that openness to spread fake news throughout the 2016 election.

It is certainly true that consumers of online content have to be mindful and disciplined about what informs their views. But the argument that we should take a walk from social media for that reason is not just a criticism of social media. That’s an argument for limiting speech. That’s an argument for limiting the right to vote. Free speech, as embedded in the First Amendment, allows anyone to say (almost) anything. There is no quality control for free speech. The right to vote allows citizens to choose a candidate for any reason.

The openness of social media makes it an egalitarian form of communication. When I started reading the New York Times about 20 years ago, the paper’s lead columnists were William Safire, Thomas Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Maureen Dowd — four white people. Friedman, Krugman, and Dowd were all in their 40s at the time and Safire was 70. All were talented writers. But when this elite, limited group of people, who have advantages baked in by the culture, are the only ones who can share their opinions in any broad way, we lose the benefit of more diverse perspectives.

In a recent episode of the podcast Still Processing, co-host Jenna Wortham, a black woman who is a culture writer for the Times, talked about “black Twitter” but then revised what she said by saying, “Well, all of Twitter to me is black.” Social media provides a space for people who might not otherwise be heard.

Finally, critics of social media reflect that, rather than providing connection, one of the unintended consequences of the platforms is that people become more interested in their online connections than their offline connections. That result surely occurs. But the naysayers are missing the ways that social media provide connection for people who would otherwise be living their lives in isolation. It’s a criticism based in privilege. An LGBTQ kid who lives in a community that is not yet willing to be open to the experiences of gay and transgender and gender nonconforming people is both aware that there is a broader community out there and can connect with that community.

This is true for any person who identifies with a community that is not the one in which they physically live or with a community that is disadvantaged by the wider society. In the same episode of Still Processing, Northam said of social media, “I feel like it’s a way to take community organizing that would have just been maybe cultural salves, the kind of thing that maybe only would have happened after church — very very localized — and doing it in a distributive way that still feels very private. The way I comfort myself after reading about Stephon Clark (who was shot and killed by police officers in Sacramento) is I go and I look at my group chats on Instagram or just share black memes. It’s a way of dealing with the stresses of the world and, really, a coping mechanism for feeling unwanted.”

Communications technology is benign. It can be used for good or for ill, and social media has its pitfalls. Facebook’s brand has been damaged by the Cambridge Analytica scandal, for good reason. We are not wedded to existing platforms and can expect to see new ones spring forward in the future. Social media is also not the only tool in the advocate’s toolbox. It is one of many that has to be used smartly. But if we allow the drawbacks of social media to convince us to walk away from this type of engagement altogether, we’ll lose an important platform for changing our culture. Let’s change the world. And use every tool we have to do it.