Social Media, Social Justice, and Our Digital Futures Series

Jeffrey Layne Blevins, James Jaehoon Lee

• Publisher: University of Cincinnati Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781947602854
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Next Generation e-book nonfiction 2023 Indie Book Award Prize. While social network analyses often demonstrate the usefulness of social media networks to affective publics and otherwise marginalized social justice groups, this book explores the domination and manipulation of social networks by more powerful political groups. Jeffrey Layne Blevins and James Lee look at the ways in which social media conversations about race turn politically charged, and in many cases, ugly. Studies show that social media is an important venue for news and political information, while focusing national attention on racially involved issues. Perhaps less understood, however, is the effective quality of this discourse, and its connection to popular politics, especially when Twitter trolls and social media mobs go on the attack.

Taking on prominent case studies from the past few years, including the Ferguson protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, the 2016 presidential election, and the rise of fake news, this volume presents data visualization sets alongside careful scholarly analysis. The resulting volume provides new insight into social media, legacy news, and social justice.

Chapter 1

Social Media and Our Political and Economic Lives

The Capitol riot in Washington, D.C. on January 6, 2021 was an infamously historic moment for the United States, as it was only the second time in the life of the nation that its statehouse had been breached. The first time was on August 24, 1814, when British adversaries set the Capitol building on fire during the War of 1812, when Congress was in recess. In January of 2021, though, it was some of the country’s own that stormed the Capitol while Congress was in session to certify the results of a presidential election, and many of the insurrectionists posted images and livestreamed video of the violence on their social media accounts as it unfolded.

Not only did social media play a role in documenting the events of January 6, 2021, it was arguably the primary platform for unfounded claims of election fraud and calls to action that precipitated the rioters’ march into the Capitol. Then-president Donald Trump, a lame duck incumbent who lost his re-election bid to Democratic rival Joseph Biden, had refused to concede his defeat. On his Twitter account he steadily promoted baseless claims of election fraud and promoted a rally that would ultimately precipitate the mayhem, tweeting on December 19, 2020: “big protest in DC on January 6th” adding “Be there, will be wild.”1 The U.S. House of Representatives impeached Trump for incitement of the insurrection that day, and his Twitter messages before, during, and after the Capitol riot were used as evidence against him during the impeachment trial. Throughout the day on January 6, Trump tweeted inflammatory messages, including two that were flagged by Twitter and later deleted, before the social media company permanently suspended his account two days later.

The Capitol riot and the permanent suspension of a U.S. president from Twitter were, perhaps, a strange coda to the story that had been unfolding about the role that social media had played in the Breonna Taylor and George Floyd protests during the summer of 2020 and the social justice activities taking shape on social media since Ferguson in 2014. How did social media, which evolved through message boards, personal spaces on the web, and connecting with high school friends on Facebook become so integral to our social, political, and economic lives? Why are digital platforms designed for recreation so useful to both the causes of social justice and right-wing authoritarianism? What does the front line of popular politics look like on social media?

Our initial approach to these questions was to combine political economic theory and network analysis techniques to further our understanding of social movements and political action. What does a “social movement” (conventionally defined in terms of strikes, protest marches, or sit-ins) look like through network visualizations, and how might these visualizations of movements taking place on Twitter reshape our understanding of how political action takes place in the digital era? We aim here to contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of how social media may empower and hinder social justice activity.

We explored these questions through a series of data-based case studies of Twitter activity, including tweets during the Ferguson demonstrations in 2014 when the hashtag #BLM trended, the 2016 presidential election season when Donald Trump’s #MAGA hashtag came into prominence, and throughout the summer of 2020 that featured nationwide protests around the #BlackLivesMatter movement and another presidential campaign season. While the goals of social justice advocates and political groups may be different, we are curious about how they might intersect on Twitter, especially as social justice is often linked to popular politics. The examination presented here relies on both data analytics and qualitative analysis, as we provide political economic context for the most used and impactful hashtags in the immediate aftermath of Ferguson, as well as describing how hashtags went viral during the 2016 election season and throughout the summer of 2020. We also address the meanings and implications of these activities and hashtags. Our work here is decidedly large-scale in method and yet critically determined, as we consider the scope of social justice activity on social media and examine it within the broader context of the political economy of misinformation, disinformation, and so-called fake news.

One of the key features of our work is the use of machine learning methodologies to develop a unique and engaging look at social movements on social media. We combine data visualization and computational text analysis to parse the semantic discourse within Twitter archives, and provide digitization, imaging, and 3D modeling of networks. Our analysis also engages critical political economic theory and network analysis to create an interactive look at the role of social media activity such as Twitter posts in social justice and political campaigns.

Before we examine the social justice and political activities on Twitter in the current age of fake news and post-truth, as well as network manipulation by bots, the influence of commercial interests, troll farms, and clever memes that shape public discourse, we must first return to our original question: How did social media, which evolved through message boards, personal spaces on the web, and connecting with high school friends on Facebook become so integral to our social, political, and economic lives?

The rise of social media platforms

Social media platforms are a byproduct of Internet development, which began in the 1960s and culminated in an early internet prototype created by the U.S. Department of Defense and university researchers, known as the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) in 1969.2 A commercial version of ARPANET called Telnet was created in 1974, and the first “major development toward social media sites” came about in 1978 with an online bulletin board system in Chicago, which included announcements, meetings, and other information posted by users.3 With the growth of home computing systems and modems in the 1980s, internet service providers (ISPs) such as Prodigy in 1984 created relay chats and news sharing for its users, while America Online (AOL) featured member profiles that were organized into communities.4 With the development of the World Wide Web, ISPs like Mosaic, Prodigy, and AOL began offering their users access to the world wide web in the early 1990s, and their popularity grew in a matter of years. In 1993 there were just over 200 web servers online, just over 1,500 in 1994, and over a million by 1997.5 While there was no website specifically referred to as “social media” in the mid-1990s, the concept of social media has existed at least since the mid-1990s, as there were many sites that featured elements of today’s social media. For instance, several websites allowed users to post comments, later referred to as “web logs” or “blogs.” AOL’s instant messenger “chat rooms” were popularized in the 1998 film You’ve Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. Other websites created in the mid-to late 1990s, such as Classmates, SixDegrees, BlackPlanet, AsianAvenue, and MiGente allowed users to create personal profiles, create groups, and identify friends – all of which are features of what is commonly known now as “social media.”

Danah Boyd and Nicole Ellison defined social media as “web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system.”6 In the early 2000s, other social media sites, such as Friendster and MySpace, came along, but it was not until Facebook was made public in 2006 that social media grew even further in popularity and developed more permanent features, such as the “like” button, which has been adapted on other social media platforms and apps. Also in 2006, another social media mainstay, Twitter, was developed and allowed its users to “follow” each other. Additionally, Twitter featured cross-platform connectivity, so that users could more easily share other online content to and from Twitter, as well as their other social media channels. Twitter is an open-network in which people can “follow” other accounts, while Facebook is established on a more closed “friend” structure. Both Facebook and Twitter now provide instant communication (including images and videos) to large numbers of friends/followers, while also affording one-to-one communication, similar to AOL’s early instant messenger service. YouTube also emerged in the mid-2000s, as a platform specifically for sharing user-generated video content. Users have their own “channels” and can post comments on videos posted by other users. YouTube and Facebook, along with Twitter and now others, also feature cross-platform connectivity, which was an important element for users to quickly disperse content across an array of online-based media channels during the Arab Spring in 2011 and Ferguson in 2014.

The development of smartphones and tablets, such as the iPad in 2010, have made social media more accessible and popular. Today, social media applications are most often used with mobile telecommunication devices with either iOS or Android operating systems, allowing users to post images and livestream videos from their mobile phone’s camera. These critical features were employed by protesters, journalists, and other social media users during the Breonna Tay...

Table of contents

• Front cover
• 0
• Frontmatter
• 1 Social Media and Our Political and Economic Lives
• 2 Social Media and Social Justice in the Digital Age
• 3 Social Media Power in #Ferguson
• 4 Affected and Effective: @BlackLivesMatterCincy
• 5 Political Discourse on Social Media, Twitter Trolls, and Hashtag Hijacking
• 6 Election 2016: Trolling in the Twittersphere and Gaming the System
• 7 Fake News, Bots and Doublespeak
• 8 The Political Economy of Social Media Networks, Social Justice, and Truth
• 9 Social Justice, National Cultural Politics, and the Summer of 2020
• 10 Conclusions: The Political Economy of Social Media and Social Justice
• References