kinglanger2004

[kinglanger2004]

Thank you for your time :)

NETIVISTI think that the first thing I have learned from my dive into online activism is that it is getting more and more difficult for companies and governments to ignore and brush off the voices of the people who disagree with their actions.  Once upon a time, the most that you could do was send a strongly worded letter to a company official or a politicians secretary and, when you got no response, perhaps organise a demonstration outside the politician or corporations offices.  The MAYBE a representative of either force would make a statement on the issue and that would be it.  But in todays world, we have the power to crash the websites of those we disagree with by spamming messages at them as well as the power to literally hack the social media accounts of politicians.  Not to mention the ability to speak to thousands of people at once through the magic of twitter, whats-app, instagram, reddit and countless other means of getting your message to the world, we have unlimited means of by which to organise, protest and be active on the political and social scene.  But when people are caught up in the mob mentality that so often comes about when the internet picks a new target to blame for some societal problem, they are less likely to slow down, stop, and take into account the actual reality of the situation and how accurate the information they are acting on is, like the unfortunate case of Sunil Tripathi.  Often times the more questionable of facts are easy to overlook when the cause you are involved in is deeply personal.

-SOURCES-

BLM : COSMO MAGAZINE https://www.cosmopolitanme.com/life/black-lives-matter-a-timeline-of-the-movement

BLACKLIVESMATTER.org : https://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/

BRAND PRESSURE ACTIVISM :  https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/online-activism-how-petitions-and-social-media-campaigns-have-changed-the-world/

KELLOG INSTITUTE : https://insight.kellogg.northwestern.edu/article/why-companies-should-engage-with-activists

REDDIT BOSTON BOMBING

NATIONAL POST : https://nationalpost.com/news/reddit-apologizes-for-online-witch-hunt-in-aftermath-of-boston-marathon-bombings?msclkid

SLATE.COM : https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/reddit-and-the-boston-marathon-bombings-how-the-site-reckoned-with-its-own-power.html

BUSINESS INSIDER : https://www.businessinsider.com/reddit-falsely-accuses-sunil-tripathi-of-boston-bombing-2013-7?r=US&IR=T

THE VERGE : https://www.theverge.com/2013/4/22/4253320/reddit-apologizes-online-witch-hunt-boston-marathon-bombing

HISTORY OF ONLINE ACTIVISM

NETIVIST.ORG : https://netivist.org/debate/online-activism-pros-and-cons#:~:text=Online%20activism%20%28a.k.a.%20Internet%20activism

INTERNET MATTERS.COM : https://www.internetmatters.org/hub/news-blogs/online-activism-social-media-and-young-people/

ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE : https://www.als.org/stories-news/ice-bucket-challenge-dramatically-accelerated-fight-against-als

[kinglanger2004]

Aftermath

It should be said that reddit was not totally at fault for disinformation spread regarding the Boston bombing, but it played a heavy hand in the collection of said false information.  Following the posting of Sunil Tripathi’s name on the r/findbostonbombers subreddit, a user (whose handle has been lost) alleged that Tripathi’s name had been mentioned on a Boston police scanner, at which point it was seen by Buzzfeed journalist Andrew Kaczynski who tweeted, “Wow reddit was right about the missing Brown student per the police scanner.  Suspect identified as Sunil Tripathi”.  His tweet, which was seen by at least his 80,000 twitter followers, was seen as legitimate due to his journalistic credibility, despite the FBI disproving the theory.  Kaczynski deleted the tweet days later, but the damage had already been done, as Tripathi’s family received many hateful and threatening messages.  Kaczynski was not the only journalist to jump the gun on sharing potentially dodgy information, as NBC news journalist Luke Russert had shared similar tweets.  Russert wrote in an email that, “I don’t think it’s an overstatement that earlier this morning new media came into its own to a degree”.  He continued by stating, “The point I was making was that reddit, twitter, skype were instrumental in the audience understanding the story”.  I think that Russert has a point here because, in theory, a large community driven effort to share information and aid in any possible way about a tragedy is a good thing.  However, it also poses some complications and even risks in regards to the possible spread of misinformation as was made evident by the sharing of innocent people’s personal information which lead to many being persecuted online.  It was, however, exciting to see traditional media organisations almost taking back seat to more “civilian” forms of information gathering and sharing.

 Following the capture of Dzhokar Tsarnev, reddit administrators posted a blog to r/findbostonbombers which apologised to the Tripathi family for any grief they suffered and for the circulation of false information regarding their son Sunil.  The post included, “The reddit staff and the millions of people around the world deeply regret that this happened.  We have apologised privately to the family of missing college student Sunil Tripathi, as have various user and moderators”.  It went on to read, “We want to take this opportunity to apologize publicly for the pain they have had to endure.”  In an interview reddit general site manager Erik Martin commented that, “Though started with noble intentions, some of the activity on reddit fuelled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiralled into very negative consequences for innocent parties”.                                                                                    I think that the entire debacle can be seen as an opportunity to examine what drives people to take part in online activism.  Looking at the events that took place and the way that many users of the r/findbostonbombers subreddit shared their findings, it is easy to notice that many of them did not really worry to much about being the most accurate but being the first to present their “information”.  I think that, if not the majority, then a substantial minority of users just wanted their names to be attached to a historic event at any cost. Social media, especially sites with such large sites like reddit, twitter and facebook, their users have a responsibility to be aware of their influence and try to reduce any possibility of real-world harm that may be caused.                                                     That being said, it’s not really fair to hold what was essentially a conversation among a group of enthusiasts to the same standards as a mainstream news organisation.  The criticism should also be directed towards the journalists who used their credibility to take what were essentially mad ramblings and treat them as if it were credible and verified information just to be the first to break the story.                                                                                                                                                     Don’t believe everything you see online.

[kinglanger2004]

A Comedy of Terrors

So far in our journey, we have discussed situations where online activism has had a mostly positive effect on and real-world issue or, at the very least, raised awareness of the issue.  However, the fury of man can often blind people to their own fallibility, and terrible mistakes can be made in the name of “justice”.  This is exactly what happened in the Spring of 2013 when, following the Boston marathon bombing, the internet forum site Reddit.com decided to play detective and catch the culprits.  The day of the bombing, news of the attacks quickly spread to different news forums on the website and many redditors began theorising in the comment section of the r/news thread.  It was decided that it would be more productive to combine and focus the various ideas and theories into one location, so r/findbostonbombers was created.  The subreddit (which has since been made private, meaning research of this topic is extremely difficult) enforced strict rules relating to the posting of personal information of people of interest to the investigation, and heavily encouraged users to leave any law enforcement to professionals.  The idea was to discourage vigilante justice, which is ironic because that was inevitable in this situation.  

 The exact details of the “investigation” are difficult to determine due to so much of the information shared on r/findbostonbombers has been scrubbed from the internet, but we do know that a lot of images were posted of the crowds surrounding the detonation sites both before and after the bombs went off and in many cases, anyone seen wearing a backpack was labelled a suspect by the subreddit’s users and were then subject to public accusations of terrorism on social media.  The Boston police attempted stop this by releasing pictures of their official suspects, but this backfired spectacularly as the subreddit quickly identified 22-year-old Brown University student Sunil Tripathi from the picture of Dzhokar Tsarnev, one of the actual bombers.  Tripathi suffered greatly from depression and had dropped out of college and broke contact with his family a month before the bombings took place, which the detectives on r/findbostonbombers took to be him plotting and preparing his attack. Tripathi’s family received threatening and hateful messages due to the misidentification of Sunil, but Reddit was far too busy enjoying the sweet taste of success to be worried about maybe being too hasty in their assessment of Tripathi.

 Unfortunately for Reddit, the real culprits behind the attack, Kyrgyzstani brothers Dzhokar and Tamerlan Tsarnev were found on the 18th of April 2013. Tamerlan died in a shootout with the police while Dzhokar escaped, being found on the 19th.  He now lives in a high security supermax prison in Colorado, but neither he nor his brother were Sunil Trapathi, because Sunil Trapathi had killed himself by jumping into a river the day he vanished a month before the bombings even took place.  Tripathi was not the only falsely accused, however, as two other popular suspects on the subreddit were Salaheddin Barhoum, a Boston-area teenager and Yassine Zaimi, a 24-year-old college student had their faces spread upon the cover of New York Magazine with the headline “Bag Men”.  The now infamous phrase, “We did it reddit!” was posted on r/findbostonbombers by the head moderator and the members congratulated themselves on a job well done, until the actual suspects were identified and captured.  On April 22nd the administrators of the subreddit published a blog post formally apologising to Tripathi’s family for misidentifying their son and any grief that they suffered.  

[kinglanger2004]

Hit Them Where It Hurts

Not every form of online activism must address massive social inequality, often times it is as simple as wanting Lego to stop using oil in their products.  Which is exactly what happened in 2014 when Greenpeace released a video on YouTube titled “Everything is NOT awesome”, which depicted a Lego Arctic region being slowly submerged in oil while a haunting rendition of “Everything is awesome” from The Lego Movie’s soundtrack played.  The video went viral and caused Lego to quite swiftly end their highly lucrative, half century long relationship with Shell oil.  Or in another Greenpeace stunt which tempted to draw attention to Sainsburys supermarkets use of single use plastics, they had an actor pose as Sainsburys head of PR, Polly Ethelene (lmao), and declare that Sainsburys had come up with the perfect solution to the issue of plastic disposal.  Miss Ethelene makes the obvious suggestion of simply dumping the plastic in the sea, “The ocean offers us a perfect storage solution!”. That video also went viral and caused “#couldntcareless” (a pisstake of Sainsburys slogan “Live Well for Less”) to go viral and the real Sainsburys public relations department received hundreds of complaints.  The company responded by pledging to cut their use of plastic packaging in half by 2025 which, if stuck by, could cause ripples across the whole industry.  

 Even going back to the sit-in protests of the 1950s and 60s in which black Americans refused to leave white-only cafés and restaurants to protest segregation, companies have long been subject to the will of the consumer.  And while the days of segregated businesses are (mostly) behind us, the environmental practices of large corporations are now being put under the microscope as climate change is becoming a far more visible threat.  Most businesses seem careful to toe the line and keep consumers happy by buckling to their demands, just as many simply issue a statement vowing to change the way they produce their product to make their carbon footprint less harmful or promise to stop using child-slave labour while really doing nothing.  Professor Brayden King, a professor of management and organisation at the Kellogg School, says that “We’ve seen many examples in our research where companies make a commitment, don’t do anything, and end up becoming more of a focus of a movement in the future rather than less”.  However, according to King, as the number of millennial and gen z entering the workforce increases, a shift may soon appear where CEOs begin taking serious action, if for nothing else than to keep their employees. Corporate Social Responsibility Committees have increased in existence over the past 15 years, according to Insight.Kellogg.northwestern.edu.  According to Professor King, “They often take on the activist point of view and become allies with these activists in the future”.  The best example of such is Nike in the 1990s when facing accusations of sweatshop labour and, instead of seeing the activists as enemies, Nike saw them as potential allies in cleaning up the companies practices and, most importantly, their image and reputation.  It goes without saying that the age of social media has made it easier than ever for consumers to interact with companies, whether that be commenting on Instagram and Facebook posts or tweeting at them, and this has led to companies being called out far more often than in the past by consumers unhappy with their practices.  Brand pressure activism has undoubtedly been helped massively by social media and brands now have an even better opportunity to work with their customers and not only keep the mob off their back but also keep profit margins nice and high.

[kinglanger2004]

#BLACKLIVESMATTER

The Black Lives Matter movement was born online.  Following the murder of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in 2012, his killer, George Zimmerman (a Hispanic American), was acquitted of the crime and walked free.  The court’s verdict caused massive outrage in the United States, with hundreds of students at Martin’s high school staging a walkout in protest, protests and demonstrations held in major US cities, and a Change.org petition was started by a social media coordinator by the name of Kevin Cunningham which went on to garner 2.2 million signatures, the largest amount in the site’s history.  In 2013, following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, three women named Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi became highly active on Facebook to voice their displeasure at the result of Zimmerman’s trial.  I tried my best to find the original message that Garza posted on Facebook for this, I have searched the WayBack machine from top to bottom but I just can’t find the original, but in any case, Alicia Garza posted a message promoting solidarity between black people and urging them to believe that “Black Lives Matter”.  That last phrase was turned into a hashtag by fellow founder Patrisse Cullors that quickly spread throughout Facebook and Twitter.  

Travis Gosa, a social science professor in African studies at Cornell studies commented that the hashtag spread to quickly because it, “distilled the complexities of police brutality, racial inequality and social justice into a simple, easy to remember slogan that fits in a Tweet or on a T-shirt,”.  From that point on, the slogan has been used countless times, whether plastered t-shirts, posters, spray painted on buildings or being roared by hundreds strong crowds at protests and demonstrations.  But it has evolved from just referring to police discrimination and evolved into a critique of the wider social and political system in the United States, being used by those wishing to end racial profiling and reduce prison population to those aiming to completely gut the public education and health systems.  Black Lives Matter’s success cannot be discussed without mentioning it’s masterful use of social media, as Travis Gosa is quoted as saying in an interview, “(BLM) quickly moved from social media to the streets due to its low bar to entry for the movement”. “Anyone with a Twitter or Facebook account, smartphone, and a basic belief in social justice could and did join the movement”.  I think that #BLM was perfectly suited to the online age as it has a snappy, marketable name/slogan and, honestly, could only have worked in the social media age because of it’s founders internet savvy.

[kinglanger2004]

History of Online Activism

Online activism is, according to internetmatters.com, “the use of technology such as social media, email and websites as a form of activism.  It enables users to spread awareness and information about political and social change”.  It initially emerged in the form of mass email campaigns taking place in the early 1990s in the United States and spreading quickly to other nations.  Well known sites that modern activism takes place on include Change.org and MoveOn.org.  These sites seek to raise awareness about important political, social, economic and even cultural issues facing people and wider society today.  Online activism was initially utilised by normal people that wanted to cause whatever small change that they could, but more and more these days governments themselves are creating online petition sites in order to give the people a more involved role in the governance of their country. The UK’s GOV.uk website has a section where citizens can lodge complaints on various topics including education, the local council, financial services, and even driving instructors.  Online activism has seen a history of both success and failure, but occasionally results can be mixed, for example in the summer of 2014 when the “ice-bucket challenge” was wildly popularised on Youtube and the now defunct Vine.  The challenge consisted of someone getting a bucket of ice water thrown over them and they would then subsequently nominate other people to take part in the challenge themselves, all in an effort to raise awareness for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).  Numerous celebrities partook in the challenge including Lebron James, Robert Downey Jr and Tom Cruise and, according to the ALS foundation themselves, profits raised from donations received from just the 2014 boom in awareness were enough for them to “increase their annual funding for research around the world by 187 percent”.  However, a valid critique of persons taking part in the challenge was the seeming lack of awareness of the condition ALS or showing of empathy towards sufferers of ALS and only took part in the challenge to increase their clout.

 Which leads into the issue of “Slacktivism”.  Slacktivism is the half-hearted endorsement or support of causes by merely posting about the issue or by clicking a link to a petition, with no further action being taken.  Some see this a flaw with online activism, seeing it as just a hollow attempt for people to seem righteous while putting the bare minimum amount of work towards a goal that others commit hundreds of hours and even large sums of money towards. This has caused more “traditional” activists to dismiss online activism altogether in favour of more “concrete”, real world action.  In my opinion, though, even those outing the bare minimum into a cause or campaign are still providing something to it, even if it’s just posting an infograph on Instagram.

[kinglanger2004]

Before the beginning...

Hello, my name is Daragh, and I’m a secondary school student in County Wicklow.  This blog is to serve as the format for my Politics and Society Citizenship Project for the Leaving Cert 2023, which I have chosen to do on Online Activism and its impacts on the real world.  I chose to focus on this topic as I have a great interest in online culture in general and collective online outrage in particular.  My plan is to portion this blog out into around 7 entries, with the initial entries following this one going into detail on examples of online activism having a positive real-world impact on important issues or at least raising awareness, and where the attempted activism ended in extreme failure and even tragedy.  I will also be defining online activism and giving its history so that we have a good idea of what we will be exploring in this blog.

The final entry will be a write up of my final thoughts as well as all my sources and resources used in my investigation.  My first  entry will chronicle the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement as it was a movement that was developed very heavily online and has seen tremendous success by using the internet in its various initiatives.  The following posts will focus on Brand Pressure activism, in which groups use the internet to protest or show their distaste for major brands which carry out unethical practices in their business.  For example, environmental activist boycotts of businesses that are known heavy polluters.  My final posts will chronicle the events following the 2013 Boston bombing in which members of the internet forum website Reddit.com attempted to “crack the case” and identify the culprits behind the terrorist attack.  Keep em’ peeled for more posts lads.