Social Justice in Social Media
In response to the recent contributions to the continuous injustice against black people, many people took to social media to present their many forms of activism. Therefore creating and reproducing several hashtags aligned with the Black Lives Matter movement and the many recent victims of police brutality. The question to this is why do people think to reach for their phones when they receive unsettling news such as this? Technology has certainly corrupted the minds of the people in our world today. In ways it could be for the better and possibly for the worst.
People have began creating ‘slideshow presentations’ to post on social media which serve a purpose to educate and inform the masses of many different topics. These include discussions of defunding the police and information on how to protest virtually. Due to the recent climate that we have developed in response to the rapid spread of the coronavirus, most in-person activities have been limited to very minimal capacity. Therefore, resulting in the newer effort to allow citizens to vote by mail. These slideshows can be both informational and entertaining greatly depending on the topic. Terry Nguyen says, “The slideshows are bold and eye-catching, and they feature colorful gradients, large serif fonts, pastel backgrounds, and playful illustrations — design choices intended to pause a user’s scroll and prompt them to read the text.”
Speaking from my own experience as an active social media user, I can agree that slideshows have been heavily used for activism purposes on social media. Social media relies greatly on popularity which makes it difficult for some and easy for others to obtain a high following and amount of likes on their posts. It is mostly about making connections with one another and about the content that one posts. As explained, “Instagram is a very predictable platform. Everyone gets the same 10 squares, but how you fill it in makes the biggest difference. Instagram privileges certain content, like attractive people, vacation photos, and graphics with inspirational messages. But now, you’re seeing a lot of infographics trying to Trojan horse these tropes to trick the algorithm.”
I specifically wanted to highlight the last sentence in the second paragraph where the author says, “For a brief moment, it seemed as though people, whether they have 150 followers or 150,000, were hyper-aware of what they should or should not post.” There has been a lot of controversy surrounding what people post and when they choose to post it. People are angry about how quickly people stopped posting about BLM with the recent deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Those who are angry call out the others by saying that the movement isn’t just a trend to get likes and followers from. Instead it is a real-life situation that has a huge impact on black people in America. After some time passed since these incidents, people started to become less active in these movements. They no longer posted the facts or ‘said their names’. So it really makes you question, who really supported the movement and who only did so to appear to be ‘woke’?
However, we cannot really help the fact that people no longer support such movements. Especially those who are not personally affected by these injustices. They only know enough to understand that it is a problem but they do not care enough to continue to do their research as well as continuously support the movement.