With abundant free time due to the pandemic, many of America’s teenagers and young adults have turned to social media to while away the hours. A favorite medium in recent years has been the Chinese-owned platform known as TikTok. Along with making dances and “POV” videos, young people also use the app to organize around relevant social issues. For instance, on a Tuesday in July, popular creators urged viewers to boost Black creators as a demonstration aimed at app administrators. This “Blackout Tuesday” filled TikTok’s homepage with videos featuring Black artists, dancers, and comedians, sending the message to stop unfairly featuring white creators over Black creators. A similar demonstration appeared on Instagram, where millions of users posted black squares in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. On social media platforms used by millions of people, these protests seemed to make a huge impact on everyday viewing. But does all this awareness translate into genuine action?
Our verdict? Not necessarily. Performative activism and allyship have surged in recent months. This is illustrated by the multitude of teenagers who posted plain black squares on Instagram, yet remained silent on racial equality thereafter. By definition, these behaviors are performed in order to make one look like a “better person” rather than to actually further a cause that one deeply cares about. There is an important distinction to make between raising awareness and empty virtue signaling. Social media can be an incredible tool to spread helpful information, share ideas quickly, and rally people behind a cause. Raising awareness is often productive, especially when resources are provided so the viewer can immediately sign a petition, send an email to a lawmaker, or take another relatively quick and easy action online. In this way, social media can and does have a large-scale positive impact on social justice movements. Performative activism, however, does not. It mainly serves to create feedback loops within circles of people who already share ideologies rather than disseminating information to people who haven’t yet heard it. Therefore, it is not an effective way to raise awareness of the issues that plague our local community, our country, and the world.
Shallow, virtue-signaling behaviors in the name of allyship can actually be counterproductive. For example, when Instagram users searched up hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter looking for informative or uplifting content, they were instead confronted by a flood of black squares posted as a performative initiative to identify themselves as allies. This misguided attempt at solidarity (or in some cases, virtue signaling) did little to raise awareness and delegitimized the movement as a whole by making it appear meaningless and performative.
In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, many are reluctant to protest in person and instead seek online alternatives to protests, rallies, and dialogues. The purpose of most demonstrations and rallies is to either disrupt the status quo or empower people already in the movement. Social media activism can serve both of these functions if utilized correctly, but we argue that it is not a proper substitute. More often than not, social media movements achieve no productive disruption and circulate buzzwords which eventually lose their meaning.
The people naively condemning racism fail to take active steps to address it. They are not in touch with community needs or goals, nor are they acquainted with direct action outside of signing petitions and writing to representatives. This discrepancy stems from the national focus on social media at the expense of local movements, which are often represented instead on local radio stations, flyers around town, and community spaces. Supporting local anti-racist organizing done by the Multicultural Resource Center and Black Lives Matter Ithaca will make more of a tangible impact in our community than posting cheeky infographics will. Another challenge for social media activists is to understand the intersectionality of the systems of oppression they oppose. Intersectionality refers to the idea of a world made up of oppressors and oppressed, in which the oppressive social structures in place uphold one another. It would be unproductive to dissect the existence of racism in America without tying it to the settler colonialism of the country’s origin or its prevailing capitalist system.
Social media activism can be utilized in a productive way when in tandem with in-person activism. Sharing the details of a food drive, caravan protest, or rally on an organization’s website or social media profile is far more effective than distributing posters or announcing it on the radio, just by virtue of the mass of educated young people who frequent social media. In addition, disseminating informative videos or written resources is better than a few slides with only a sentence or two on each one. Viewers would have to take the initiative of finding a book, article, or film outside of their preferred platform, but it would satisfy a need for deeper knowledge than infographics can provide.
There is no shame in having only recently become aware of injustice or being in the process of discovering it. Spreading awareness is important, but it is only a first step. By shifting their focus to local action, social media activists will avoid the feeling of their efforts being lost in a void. This active participation will forge a stronger connection between members of the community, set tangible goals, and result in actual progress rather than unproductive loops of repeated information.