The Serious Issues that Emerged After the #BlackoutTuesday Movement
The #BlackoutTuesday was an interesting phenomenon. What began as an act of solidarity and pause from one’s other activities resulted in the most widely and rapidly shared image online.
The idea came from within the music industry following the act of police brutality and racism with the killing of George Floyd, as an attempt to increase the awareness of this serious issue. Quickly the image spread and what initially looked like a successful “marketing wave” soon rendered a movement full of hypocrisy, counterproductiveness, and self-gratification. It had successfully highlighted another serious issue in today’s society. I figure you might not understand my argument, so let me explain.
The directions were the following: share a completely black image and nothing else, and spend the day disconnected from work and normal social media activity, but connected with one’s community instead. What happened was nowhere near that. People began reposting the picture in their normal fashion, and they carried on with their lives as usual. It didn’t matter for them that they continued to post other things or had no other intent to spread awareness of this issue. What had become most important was that you as an individual had reposted the black image. This showed primarily two things:
1. Anxiety and the role of social media
Having shared the image quickly became an indicant of you not being a racist, or not having opposite views of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. As more and more people shared this image you felt obliged to do the same, otherwise, what would people think of you? “Why isn’t he sharing this — is he a racist?!”, “She must be a racist for not liking my blackouttuesday picture!”. This phenomenon is causing real anxiety in people — the almost omnipresence of this picture and other acts of activism online causes actual pressure and forces people to engage in the matter on social media. To be passive and just watch and observe is no longer fine. This is problematic. You might argue that in real life if you remain quiet, you are part of the problem. And while this is true, when this type of behavior and ways of thinking reaches social media, it legitimates social media as a part of human life. Even the non-participation of certain events, the “non-action” you take, begin shaping who people think you are. Research shows that social media causes anxiety, and in some cases even depression. We must all have felt this sometime, not only last Tuesday. Leaving social media for a while is the cure for this, and this shouldn’t cause concerns that you are in a certain way (racist/homophobic/whatever). What should matter is what you do in real life, not on social media.
2. The hypocrisy
The second issue with the Blackout Tuesday movement intertwines with the first one a bit. When posting an image everyone else is posting you are bound to get likes, it’s popular. Getting likes, whatever it is you are posting, is always gratifying. Therefore the movement becomes imbued with a lot of hypocrisy. People are sharing for one’s own interest rather than getting attention to police brutality against black people. While the attention towards that is somewhere embedded within the black picture, the likes become the most important part. Also, not wanting to be seen as someone who doesn’t care, or as a racist, posting this would relieve that stress and earn you gratification. In an age where gratification is always easy at hand, we become addicted and very easily manipulated. Although this hashtag has grown incredibly big, how many of the pictures are genuine, and how many actually realize how and why it began?
Social media works as a second exterior, but with this one, we have more strings to pull. We can carefully design our feed, and what we share in our stories. One does not often choose to show unattractive features etc, or only one’s ugly side. What’s on our profile is not authentic, and not necessarily real at all, but this is something we cannot take into account always. It’s the reason, as stated earlier, social media causes anxiety and depression — “why do others have it much better than me?, “I have nothing interesting to post, people must think I’m weird.”. Seeming like someone who lives a perfect life will lead to a lot of likes and momentarily gratification, even though your life might not be perfect at all.
In the comments of many of these pictures, there seems to be a lot of people wanting them gone. For some, it has probably to do with them being racist, but according to others it has to do with the pictures making it hard for people to see what is actually going on during the riots, etc — real news disappears, actually valuable posts. The pictures hide important posts due to two things. Firstly, it has to do with the usage of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. The BLM hashtag operated as a platform where posts about the riots, police brutality and protests against racism were gathered. As of Tuesday it got filled with black squares, essentially hiding the posts of real value. This was never intended as the official hashtag, as it already had one (#BlackoutTuesday), and sadly it became a counterproductive force. Secondly, Instagram algorithms sense what friends and people you follow are liking and sharing. Therefore a lot of black pictures come up, whereas had the Blackout Tuesday not been a thing there probably would be videos and images of ongoing demonstrations and riots.
A lot of people also find it funny that some people are posting this because in real life, and even on social media, caring about black people is not something they all do. They also notice how people only post the black square and call themselves finished with the activism — sharing a black square is nowhere near enough. When everyone else’s doing it there’s no reason to do it yourself except for personal gain. People recognize the hypocrisy.
“What matters is real action, not what you do on social media.”
Despite this the movement is still going on today, Wednesday the 3rd of June. The hashtag has 28+ million posts and counting. The core message is long gone as Tuesday has already gone by (Article posted late Wednesday). Posting it now, despite it saying “Tuesday” in the hashtag, almost confirms the fact that this has more to do with oneself rather than the fight against racism and police brutality. What matters is real action, not what you do on social media.
Jakob Wilmer. June 2020
