Instagram is no place for an anti-racism movement

Instagram showed support for BLM by posting empty black squares on Instagram

Today marks the start of the end of the UK’s 14-week lockdown. As we start to thaw out from our quarantine, the world we’ll be met with will look quite different from the one we left behind.

We’ll be met with a country still reeling with some of the biggest anti-racism protests this country has seen.

It’s on Instagram that much of activism for Black Lives Matter (BLM) took place. On a June Tuesday, Instagram users’ feeds were ‘blacked out’ as millions posted black squares in solidarity of BLM. Scores of 10-second- stories were dedicated to sharing information, organising protests, and talking though racial issues. Our globalised newsfeeds aided collective social action, and fast. Protests spread within days from Minneapolis to London, Amsterdam, Paris, Bristol, showing just how connected our digital consciousness really are.

Instagram and its global, interconnected brand of activism has been heralded by some as an important tool in creating social change.

Riccardo Oi, 30, an Italian artist living in London, praised the site as an important tool for organising social movements, publishing information and talking to others about social issues.

Mr Oi, who did not attend any of the BLM protests, said he uses Facebook to talk to and educate his friends and Instagram to publish information to his followers about racial issues.

But how effective can this kind of activism be?

Social media has allowed for a new kind of fluid and personalised membership to social activism as a form of asynchronous identity. But let’s not overestimate its influence outside of our phone screens. Martin Luther King’s march on Washington took a decade to organise. The 2011 Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street used a juvenile Facebook to organise mass anti-government rallies, organising, rising and dying out within weeks.

Activism on Instagram feels empty and vapid and that’s because it is.

The average person spends around 2 hours and 44 minutes per day on social media. In the US, roughly four-in-ten users said social media is personally important to them for finding others who share their views about important issues (42%). Their importance in our lives only increased in the wake of a global pandemic. When asked, 45% of people said they used social media more or a lot more than usual during the lockdown period. And it’s easy to see why. A 12-week government-mandated quarantine shrank our worlds and social media became the main and oftentimes only prism to experience the world outside our bedrooms.

So is there any wonder there’s been so much social media activism during lockdown? Aside BLM, Instagram’s users have rallied against JK Rowling’s transphobia, Shane Dawson’s black face and shamed Dominic Cummings and Neil Ferguson for breaking lockdown, before telling everyone gather in mass rallies on parliament square. Activism on Instagram feels empty and vapid and that’s because it is. The empty black square makes for a perfect demonstration then. Especially when only a few days later feeds returned to their usual tirade ofl flat whites, soda bread recipes and #notspon #ootd influencer posts.

Past moments of successful activism, like that of the ’68 marches, were formed through face-to-face interaction, which builds trust in a way no WhatsApp group or Discord server ever can. Social media tries to mimic real-life relationships, but its discourse is simultaneously combative and placid, in a way real-life communication is not. Instagram’s algorithms work to refract users’ own opinions back at them, so they simply aren’t used to seeing views they disagree with. It makes for an environment that shuts down debate as soon as it sees it. We’ve never had so much information, but its saturation on social media is turning us into mindless zombies. Activism on social media, no matter how good the cause, does little more than mirror the platform it uses; one that’s vapid, unsustainable, and lacking in any kind of real meaning.

That’s why posts supporting social issues like BLM, although mostly well-intentioned, become quickly hijacked by the person posting about them. Racism become secondary to bolstering the poster’s own public persona on Instagram. It’s hardly ever intentional, but it’s part-and-parcel of the platform; one designed to mould personal branding though the lens of Americanised ‘me me me’ storytelling.

It’s Instagram that holds the power in this new post-Covid world, not governments or newspapers.

Money talks on Instagram. It’s highly commodified and tightly controlled by moderators who curate content so that it’s in line with its shareholder’s and affiliate brands’ guidelines. It’s why so much of its content is sex-driven; think #foodporn, #travelporn, #bookporn, but actual porn is prohibited. It makes for good marketing, as it toes the line between what we want and what we can’t have. But mods censor more than just nipples. In 2011 Facebook removed 80 groups rallying against the government’s austerity measures. Twitter recently kicked Katie Hopkins off its platform and just this week and Reddit shut down its r/The_Donald sub for hate speech.

Right now, social media platforms have no-platformed those who go against their community guidelines, a move heralded by some as triumph against hate speech, but only because right now it makes financial sense to them. It’s Instagram that holds the power in this new post-Covid world, not governments or newspapers. BLM heavy reliance on a platform that periodically curtails the rights of its users for economic gain robs its anti-racist message of any longevity and meaning. As we start to move out of lockdown, we should take the momentum of BLM offline, away from our phone screens, and keep it there, for good.