The revolution of the digital sphere has allowed us to have a wide accessibility to information and an expansive set of tools to assist us in engaging in political conversations and activist campaigns (Kaun et.al, 2017). Social media is a powerful mechanism for creating awareness and sharing information to masses in split seconds. But how successful are these activist campaigns that emerge and are amplified on the internet, and how do we measure what that success looks like?
The act of campaigning has existed for years and well before the internet, defined as “a project of linked actions organised towards achieving a particular goal” which may include (but not restricted to) political, social, business or marketing objectives (Stickels, 2020). Campaigns now have a large online presence, the term coined, ‘digital activism’, which encompasses all digital media that is used for political purposes (Gerbaudo, 2017). The term is ambiguous and vast (Yang, 2016), reflecting the messiness and unstructured way activism exists online within many mediums.
The #Blacklivesmatter movement originated in America and began in 2013 on Twitter (Baptiste, 2017). The hashtag inspired organised protests which were born primarily in retaliation to police violence and the inequality of treatment of black men and women (Davis, 2016). This campaign determined to become a movement and not just a ‘moment’ on the internet in response to the racism that saturates our society (Davis, 2016). And although the hashtag may have not been as active in the last couple of years, recent events have seen the campaign become a global push for systematic racism to be eradicated from the world. The murder and mistreatment of George Floyd who was suffocated to death by a white police officer was recorded on camera and the footage has set the internet ablaze with outrage. The racism and blatant police brutality conversations now in the spotlight, forcing the uncomfortable truth upon us all.
Although #BLM is everywhere we look, with everyone desperate to fight and educate the world to create change, we ask- will all the Instagram posts, hashtags, updated statuses, likes, follows and comments generate enough chaos to uphaul a whole government system and dismantle societies frameworks in which now exist? We ask to rewrite the future, to change our actions but is any of this really going to happen outside of the internet? Research shows sadly, that online activism rarely translates to change of policies and attitudes. The Black lives matter movement is vast and prominent, but as Davis states, “it is difficult to build a movement, do the work, whilst also trying both to create and correct historical record.” With so many objectives and interpretations, it’s unclear how #BLM translates into real action.
The paper ‘The social media response to Black Lives Matter: how Twitter users interact with Black Lives Matter through hashtag use’ explores how social media users interact with BLM by using hashtags and thus modifying the framing of the movement. It has been recognised that social movements frame social issues (McAdam, 1996; Miller, 2000: Sewell 2001; Ferree et.al, 2002). That is, “they engage in a process of meaning construction that allows audiences within the movement to understand a social situation in a specific way” (2017). The study pieces together empirical data which analyses 66,159 tweets that contain #BlackLivesMatter (2014) and tallies, other hashtags associated with #BLM in order to measure how online communities influence the framing of the movement. The nature of social media platforms allows the global online community to alter and reshape the movements message which ultimately contributes to the development and eventual outcome. This although positive in the sense that people can relate and ascribe to the message in their own way to be included, does manipulate the meaning, which can inherently be detrimental in defining a clear goal/purpose for the movement.
And although the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter is easy to identify, it is hard to algorithmically assess the context of the message. The hashtag, for example may be associated with a positive message of hope and change or express a negative message of anger and/or grief (2017).
Evident above, more research needs to be done to uncover how online activism works and how we can translate all the online noise into physical change. It’s clear there needs to be strategical frameworks that support the movement to infiltrate reality. “The infrastructure of knowledge has changed, yet our strategic knowledge has not’ (Joyce, 2010).
References
Baptiste, N., 2017. The Rise And Resilience Of Black Lives Matter. [online] The Nation. Available at: <https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/origins-of-a-movement/> [Accessed 2 June 2020].
Davis, A., 2016. #BLM And Millennial Activism: “A Moment, Not A Movement”.
Dixson, A., 2017. “What’S Going On?”: A Critical Race Theory Perspective On Black Lives Matter And Activism In Education -online] SAGE Journals. Available at: <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0042085917747115> [Accessed 2 June 2020].
Ince, J., Rojas, F. and Davis, C., 2017. The social media response to Black Lives Matter: how Twitter users interact with Black Lives Matter through hashtag use. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 40(11), pp.1814-1830.
Kaun, A. and Uldam, J., 2017. Digital Activism: After The Hype. [online] SAGE Journals. Available at: <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1461444817731924> [Accessed 2 June 2020].
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