(In)visibility on social media in the 2020 election, part 1: Kamala Harris and Higher Heights
Higher Heights is the largest online political organization dedicated to harnessing, organizing and mobilizing Black women’s political power, with over 90,000 members. They’ve been building out the #BlackWomenVote campaign for over a year — and, most political analysts would agree, Black women are a major force in the Democratic Party.
So even though Higher Heights endorsement of Sen. Kamala Harris wasn’t the only significant endorsement that was announced last week, it’s a pretty big deal.
Here’s what I got when I searched Google news for “Kamala Harris endorsements”:
And here’s what I get from doing the same search on reddit:
Hey wait a second, I’m noticing a pattern here.
It’s a great example of a dynamic Courtney Swanson highlighted in White Out: The Unrelenting Quest to Erase Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris is empirically mentioned less often than other candidates, even when there is every reason to center her in a news story.
Yeah really. And of course it’s not just Harris; Higher Heights is also getting erased here.
Update, November 18: Meg Kinnard has an AP story about Higher Heights teaming up with Harris to hold a “woman to woman” phone bank this weekend in South Carolina. I wonder if it’ll be on Google News or reddit? In any case, it’s a good illustration of why this is in fact a pretty big deal. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Harris winds up doing substantially better in the South Carolina primary better than most people expect.
In my next post, I’ll look at another significant endorsement from last week. First, though, here’s Kamala Harris talking with Zerlina Maxwell and Jess McIntosh on Signal Boost on SiriusXM Progress. The tweet has a short video, and a link of to SiriusXM for the full discussion.
Originally published at A Change Is Coming.
Other posts in this series:
