How Effective Social Media Protests Actually Are?
Was #blackouttuesday an epic fail?
If you have opened your Instagram account in the past week, then you must have seen this image:
You’d have seen it shared by not only your friends but also celebrities. This Instagram post, where you’d see a blank black square followed by #blackouttuesday, is involved in a protest against the killing of George Floyd, who was murdered by an on-duty policeman in Minneapolis.
The protests started because of a video in which the policeman was seen crushing Floyd’s neck with his knee, while Floyd gasped for breath. Floyd was being arrested because allegedly he had used a fake dollar bill. After this video, questions have been asked about the use of excessive force by the police, because according to the protesters, this incident showcases the racial intolerance in America, its societies and its institutes.
By the 3rd of June, that hashtag had over 30 million posts. That is where emerges the question, how effective are social media protests actually?
The short answer is: They are not that effective.
Social media protests.
Before the social media era, any protest would take a long time to build-up. America’s civil rights movement took almost a century to grow under the leadership of Martin Luther King Junior. India’s demand for a linguistic reorganization of states which were seen after the independence, such as the demand for Gujarat, also took a decade to pick up steam. Act 377 which prohibited same-sex marriage in India had been petitioned against in 2001 but it was overturned only after 17 years in 2018.
However, social media has completely changed how we interact, share information and also how we protest. On ground protests carry the risk of revelation of identity, physical harm and even arrest. Whereas on social media, these risks are minimized.
Social media protests came into prominence around 2011, in the Arab Spring, which started in the form of an argument between a police officer and a vegetable vendor in Tunisia, after which the vendor alight himself because police confiscated his produce. That protest escalated to such a level that Tunisia’s president had to resign and this political protest spread in other Arab countries as well. An Egyptian activist had explained how they used Facebook to schedule, Twitter to coordinate and YouTube to tell the world about the protests.
Pros of social media protests.
Because of some features, social media protests can be very effective.
Firstly, it enables us to comfortably voice our opinions. There’s a concept called ingroup and outgroup, we as humans usually want to participate ingroup. That is, we want to feel accepted in our group. For example, suppose you are a part of a family WhatsApp group which is mostly pro-government, so most probably you won’t feel comfortable in sharing anti-government posts in that group. But let’s say, you are also involved in a friends WhatsApp group, where most of your friends are anti-government, logically you’ll feel more comfortable sharing anti-government posts in that group.
Social media provides us with the option to form our own groups where we can voice our controversial political or civil rights opinions freely.
Social media can also keep our identities safe with the help of end to end encryption.
Social media moreover facilitates the spread of important information which helps in the organization and coordination of the protests. During the CAA and NRC protests in India, information about the protests was mostly shared through social media.
Social media platforms further allow one to share emotional and motivating content.
Finally, social media protests also encourage leaderless protests. That is, a protest where there is no clear leadership. The best example of it is the Hong Kong protest in 2018, where the people were protesting against the autonomy of the Hong Kong government. At the time, Joshua Wong, one of the most high profile activist of democracy was behind the bars. Regardless of that, the protests resumed.
Leaderless protests are a big challenge for any government because they are clueless about how to deter them. These kinds of protests can gather a handsome population since people do not necessarily have to identify themselves with any one leader or group.
Why social media protests fail?
The same salient features that make a social media protest significant, can also very easily render them ineffective.
Cons of social media protests.
Leaderless protests can potentially grow to a huge scale but every protest demands a certain change. In a leaderless protest, governments have no definite person or group with whom they can negotiate the demands.
Also, every successful protest has some clear demands but because of the absence of a leader or leader group, these protests lack a clear vision.
In the absence of a dependable leadership, there also lurks a risk of certain protesters getting violent with the police or the authorities, because of which some middle ground supporters start abandoning the protests. This makes it very easy for the authorities to take strict measures against the rest of the protesters.
Because of this lack of efficient leadership, many social media protests, which start out for a good cause, can not only be ineffective but can also do more harm than good. Just like #blackouttuesday; it had started out as a response of some music industry leaders who had started a hashtag of their own “#theshowmustbepaused ”. They basically halted all their businesses for a day to fight racism and inequality. They also inserted links on their websites to support the cause.
Following the trend, many companies such as Spotify and Apple also announced that they’d suspend their regular work for Tuesday. Unfortunately, this campaign took a weird turn, after which people started posting images of “the black square”. Many people even declared that they won’t post anything after posting the black post. This became a sort of a blackout for information. Activists weren’t happy with this since it is necessary to share information especially when numerous people are at risk when on-road protests are going on.
This flow of information is what allows people to know where the protests are going on and whether has there any brutality against protesters by the authorities.
Activists also argued that by this incessant use of #blacklivesmatter on the picture of a black square, the actual content for #blacklivesmatter got lost in the pool and it becames harder for anyone who was actually searching the content for black lives matter to find it.
On other hand, many said Tuesday was actually not a good day for information blackout since elections were to be held in nine states on that day.
When on one side, social media can impel protests, on the other side it can also be discouraging. Whereby posting a black square, we may feel like we’ve done our part. People have apparently even given a name to this phenomenon — “Slacktivism”. To discourage slacktivism, UN Sweden had launched a campaign called “Likes don’t save lives”.
Despite the fact that many of us don’t physically participate in the on-ground protests, we definitely pose for it, this is why people join these online groups.
When we see hundreds of thousands of posts or group members, it also engages a free ridership mentality. That means, we might feel like, “Oh! There already are more than enough protesters, why would they need me?”
Another problem with social media protests are, the protests can subside just as fast as it rises when we move from one social issue to another. The reason for that is, because of social media, a specific incident gets a lot of attention but it doesn’t focus on the broader cause of that problem.
To exemplify this, we can take a look at the Nirbhaya rape case. Where the particular incident garnered a lot of heat and attention but the root causes of gender-based violence were overlooked by the protests.
A similar episode was observed in the Hyderabad rape case, where many were demanding death penalty for the guilty but very few were talking about the root causes of such problems in India.
That is because demanding capital punishments for rapists on social media for a few days is easy and convenient but it’s incredibly challenging to maintain consistent pressure on the government to include sex education in their curriculum.
There also has been a research on it, which proved that because of social media, users mostly focus on “Crime of the day” rather than their root causes.
Also, the very features for which social media is liked and appreciated can also turn out to be a curse in disguise. Many terrorist groups use Telegram because of its encryption features, since Whatsapp has some strangely creepy privacy policies:
Social media has made fake news and misinformation a tough challenge for us. A UN commission had cited Facebook’s role in the Rohingya genocide in Myanmar.
An echo chamber.
Where on the bright side, social media can provide a platform to voice our opinions, it can also develop an echo chamber, where your view of the world can be totally different from my view of the world solely because we follow different accounts. Recently researchers analyzed the tweets which had been tweeted at the time of the Charlotte protests in the US which sprung out due to the killing of an African American.
Researchers found that the groups who were protesting for the cause and who were protesting against the cause, where very interactive amongst supporters of their own group, but the interaction between the two groups were minimal.
How to use social media effectively.
So we come to the conclusion that people must keep in mind, social media protests cannot substitute on-ground protests. Eventually, people will have to come out on the streets because policymakers can ignore online protest but not offline ones.
However, social media can very well support on-ground protests. Through a Russian research, it was found that in the areas which had access to VK, Russia’s own social media, it was 10% more likely for a protest to break out.
A more recent example of social media actively aiding protests was seen in Hong Kong. The protests were decentralized and activists used social media to coordinate the protests. Posters were shared on Telegram with thousands of protesters, who then printed and posted them all over the city. Confidential information was “air-dropped”. Protesters also had five clear demands and they also made sure not to disrupt any public services.
For any hashtag to be effective, it has to be converted to a civil rights campaign and this is exactly what happened with #blacklivesmatter which did start out as just a hashtag but now leadership groups of many cities plan for policy action beforehand.
This doesn’t mean, however, that social media independently is completely ineffective. In 2014 a certain #icebucketchallenge had went viral which raised funds for ALS diseases. The challenge helped raise 220 million USD globally. It’s video-friendly nature and celebrity involvement skyrocketed the campaign.
Any genuine political change needs persistence which calls for on the ground presence of protesters. Merely signing petitions on change.org can’t put nearly as much pressure on a politician as the presence of thousands of protesters on-ground can.
Also, social media protests require one basic necessity — the internet. Considering the authoritarian mentality of governments these days, even that cannot be relied upon. Especially, in India, the number of internet lockdowns under the Modi government is mind-boggling. Thanks to Narendra Modi, India is now known as the Internet shutdown capital of the world.
Despite the internet shutdowns in Egypt during the 2011 protests, the protest only magnified in intensity and strength, which shows us that internet is not necessary for a successful protest and there are many such evidences of that in history.
But the internet and social media can definitely strengthen on-ground protests and we must always keep this in mind.
