How Social Media Feeds Racism
After Facebook realized in 2012 that 83 million users on the social media site were fake users, they instituted the real name policy, weeding out what they considered “fake names.” Unfortunately, the policy failed to consider authenticating Native Americans whose names weren’t considered to be real by Facebook’s real name algorithm.
This caused several Native American Facebook users — as well as several other marginalized groups — to be suddenly locked out of their accounts, effectively shutting them out of their digital social circles. At the same time, Facebook’s advertising algorithm allowed alt right advertisers to sell their anti-semitic paraphernalia on the site, and it wasn’t until Facebook was notified by ProPublica that their engineers were able to identify the problem.
Examples like these leads one to conclude that racialization extends beyond the users of these websites, who are often the focus of linguistic analysis by researchers like Bonilla and Rosa, who make a strong case for social media as a way for racialized groups to “unmark” themselves by using hashtags like #ifTheyGunnedMEDown. They reference Auge and Boellstorff to label social media as a “non place” or a “virtual world” that allows those who are marginalized or feel displaced to connect with peers. Though social media’s primary goal appears to be to connect users, one cannot forget that these…
