How effective are social media solidarity campaigns such as BlackOutTuesday?
Thousands of people around the US and the world have gathered to protest police violence and unjust deaths like George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and many others. In the past few months many notable corporations, sports teams, brands, and influencers have felt compelled to also speak out. Across many social media platforms, the black square has become a prominent signal of solidarity by these entities. However, to many activists, the square is seen as a cop-out and counterproductive to spreading resources related to national and international protests and progress. This dilemma begs to question, how effective are social media solidarity campaigns.
The evaluation of the effectiveness of social media solidarity campaigns depends on the criteria used to determine the type of effectiveness. Thus, effectiveness can be divided into two categories- awareness and action. While awareness involves the mere advertisement of the social issue to as many people as possible, action is what actually matters – this category effectively judges the amount of social media campaigns that resulted in corporate, national, or international policy changes in the favor of the social issue.
The depressing reality about most social media solidarity campaigns is that most of them are a means for influencers of showing that they care about what’s happening in their community and that they are actively taking measures to fight with the oppressed people to make a change, this is a lot of the time a lie, evidence of this can be the fact that one Instagram model stopped by a man repairing his shop after rioting, took a picture with a drill in hand and left.
Another example is Madison Beer and several other celebrities executing actual photoshoots with plaques that have #BLM written on them. The corporate reality is also just as disappointing as while countless brands post thoughtful posts about black inequality, their workers protest saying that those brands are as much part of the guilt as anyone else. Useless means of spreading awareness such as the #blackouttuesday in fact dilute real messages such as the promotion of real petitions to combat the situation, resulting in more harm than good. However, this doesn’t mean that all social media solidarity campaigns are baseless and spineless attempts by influencers, corporations, and brands to increase their monopoly and fame. After all, George Floyd’s cries for life and the world wide protests that followed were also a by-product of the use of social media.
This leads to the conclusion that most social media solidarity campaigns are the most effective in their raw, unfiltered form where the public directly sees brutality, inequality and societal problems, whereas he more refined a campaign, the more diluted the goal becomes and the more actual, beneficial information gets buried.