Our findings presented in Chapter 3 from Ferguson in 2014 provided some optimism about the power and potential of social media for advocates of social justice. However, data presented in chapters 6 and 9 demonstrated more generally how power operates on social media, as other political forces can be just as influential, if not more so. While social justice themes were prominently displayed on Twitter in the summer of 2020, the political right was active in countering those messages. Notably, while the handles and hashtags associated with the political right were smaller in number on Twitter during critical moments of 2020, they also appeared to have greater political solidarity than those associated with social justice, and on the political left. The themes of social justice were greater in number and more diverse, but we are left to wonder what the future holds for social media and social justice. Moreover, how may the broader political and economic environment of online networks shape the potential effectiveness of social media for social justice? Based on the data presented through each of the cases explored in this book, as well as our wider political-economic analyses, concerns remain about the solidity of political right networks, as well as misinformation spread and the manipulation of information about social justice on social media.

Congealed political right networks

As Jessica Mahone and Philip Napoli showed, the political right has built a network of hyper-partisan news websites (and many with accompanying social media assets) that appear as independent local news outlets.1 While there were a small number of left-leaning partisan news sites, they were dwarfed by their right-leaning counterparts by more than 400 to 8. Mahone and Napoli based their study on previous work by Priyanjana Bengani, who showed that just a handful of corporate entities operate a network of 450 news sites across 12 states.2 This is another illustration of how right-leaning political interests are more congealed in their efforts, and able to produce a digital echo-chamber of similar themes and messages. Alexander Stewart and colleagues fielded a role-playing game experiment that underscored the significance of this phenomenon in which a “small number of zealots, when strategically placed on the influence network” can engage in what the authors call “information gerrymandering.”3

Moreover, it appears that power may be appreciably affected by unity. As shown in our second data sets from Chapter 6, and to a lesser extent in Chapter 9, left-leaning groups do not coalesce around a core set of ideas the way that the political right does. The political right’s coalescence tends to increase their effectiveness, even when it is outnumbered by the political left, especially in matters of national cultural politics. Without the same strength of unity as on the political right, social justice advocates and the political left will have to vastly outnumber their opponents in order to prevail with their messaging. While this was possible, as demonstrated in Chapter 9 with the broader racial justice movement in the wake of the George Floyd killing, creating awareness of more marginal social justice issues, such as food insecurity and income inequality, may not be as successful in the future.

Furthermore, the comparative lack of political unity between the left and right likely makes the larger causes of social justice, such as voting rights and racial justice, more prone to manipulation by outside forces.

Information manipulation and misinformation on social media

As reported by CNN, a more insidious form of Russian-backed manipulation took shape on social media early in 2020, similar to that which occurred during the 2016 election campaign. This time the fake social media accounts were even “better disguised and more targeted, harder to identify and track,” and based outside of Russia itself – in West African nations.4 The troll accounts claimed to be in the U.S. and featured handles such as @africamustwake. The accounts would post inflammatory content “focused almost exclusively on racial issues in the US, promoting Black empowerment and often displaying anger towards white Americans,” while employing hashtags associated with the social justice movement, such as #BLM, #Racism and #PoliceBrutality. The posts regularly tried to engage actual social justice groups on their own social media platforms, including a Black Lives Matter group in Cincinnati.5 While Twitter reported that it had taken down more than 70 of these accounts before March of 2020, it is unknown if they later regenerated in another form, or what their impact was on public sentiments leading up to the summer of 2020.

Another potent form of manipulation and misinformation taking place on social media involved a white nationalist group that created a Twitter account posing as a national “antifa” organization.6 The group, Identity Evropa, made several incendiary, false, or otherwise misleading claims on the account that played into then-president Trump’s narrative that so-called “antifa” groups and “radical left” extremist groups were looting and destroying property during demonstrations over George Floyd’s death.7

The congealed nature of political right networks likely made them more prone to manipulation and misinformation campaigns, especially from one of Twitter’s most prominent influencers since 2016, Donald Trump. Reporters, Aamer Madhani and Jill Colvin detailed several of Trump’s provocative tweets in the history of his @realDonaldTrump Twitter account.8 Perhaps none were more consequential than the ones he sent between the November 2020 presidential election and the Capitol riot in January 2021. In testimony before the U.S. Senate, FBI Director Christopher Wray said that “racially motivated extremists” were behind the Capitol riot and alluded to the role that social media played in their ability to mobilize.9 It appears that white nationalist and far-right groups, as well as other Trump supporters, coalesced around Trump’s misleading messages about election fraud, following a summer of protests about racism and policing.

In the week following Twitter’s banishment of Trump and several of his allies from the social media network, Zignal Labs reported that unbased claims of election fraud dropped from 2.5 million to 688,000.10 Twitter also suspended more than 70,000 of its user accounts that shared content from QAnon, which was a prominent source of baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, as well as other political issues.11 While the take-down of Trump and purveyors of QAnon conspiracies may have dramatically dropped the spread of misinformation about the election on Twitter, it only did so after the damage was already done via the Capitol riot. Furthermore, this kind of after-the-fact strategy does not address the potential for other forms of information manipulation related to politics or social justice in the future.

However, when trying to proactively manage hate speech on their networks, social media companies have often employed content moderation systems that may not appropriately detect context when interpreting messages. For instance, several Black Facebook users complained that their posts about racism were censored as hate speech by the network’s content moderation system.12 These systems may lack the nuance to know the difference between posts about experiencing or decrying racism and those that are actively promoting it. These kinds of misinterpretations can occur when algorithmic programs try to dichotomize information and wrongly “fix its cultural meaning.”13 This still leaves us with the thorny problem of how to effectively deal with the manipulation of information on social media networks in a way that provides depth and clarity.

A Pew Research Center study showed that Americans viewed fake news and misinformation as a major problem (rating it ahead of illegal immigration and terrorism), blamed politicians for the crisis, but expect journalists to fix it.14 Towards that end, several journalists, news, institutions and media scholars have addressed the problem. For instance, Claire Wardle’s First Draft organization provides several tools and resources for detecting misinformation online.15 Another great example is The Guardian’s interactive online resource about how specific bits of misinformation spread on social media during riots that occurred in London.16 While this kind of research from scholars and journalists is useful and insightful, they are nonetheless postmortem exercises after social media misinformation and manipulations have already wreaked their havoc on the narrative of popular politics and the cause of social justice.

The narrative politics of social justice on social media

Shiller described how viral stories, both true and false, can affect broader economic behavior in a process described as “narrative economics.”17 Our study presented here suggests a similar phenomenon involved with the narrative politics of social justice on social media. User posts, likes, and shares of information and misinformation correspond with their political beliefs and choices.

Since the 2000s we have seen the narrative politics of social media swing from the left to the right. During his successful presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, Barrack Obama social media monikers of #Hope, #Change and #YesWeCan were unifying themes for the political left.18 However, successful social media strategies were employed by Donald Trump, who dominated Twitter, and the political right during the 2016 campaign. The political left’s influencers were too late to the scene in 2016 and did not possess a theme that galvanized their base the way that #MakeAmericaGreatAgain did for the right.

The narrative politics of social media on social justice movements and white nationalists has also swung from left to right since 2016. The #BlackLivesMatter social justice movement was initially, and successfully, activated using social media through Ferguson in 2014. However, the blend of bots, bad actors, Trump and Trumpism, as well as extreme movements on the political right have since complicated the narrative and meaning of this movement, as demonstrated by what culminated in the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021. Will the pendulum of narrative politics on social media swing back from right to left, as Twitter’s purge of Donald Trump and other QAnon purveyors might suggest?

We argue here that it depends (in part) upon the impact of highly networked individuals in future social justice endeavors, such as Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman who became a trusted source of on-the-ground information during the Ferguson unrest.19 Our early analysis of Ferguson showed how specific framings may have affected popular perceptions of the events taking place there, as well as a deeper understanding of their cultural meaning. Networks of non-official state actors or affective publics can form and strengthen social justice movements through the production of their own images and interpretive frames.

Social justice activity taking place on social media has been dynamic, as tweets and hashtags not only reflected what was happening on the ground during protests but also helped to construct broader political narratives about the events that led to the protests. In several instances, specific social justice narratives moved from social media into the broader popular culture. For instance, the song “Don’t Shoot” by American rap artist The Game took its title from the hashtag #HandsUpDontShoot that trended during Ferguson and its lyrics invoke the history of Trayvon Martin, Emmett Till, and others in the wake of the Michael Brown shooting.

Journalists and journalism can continue to shape the narrative politics of social justice on social media too. In Ferguson and throughout the summer of 2020 we saw journalists as eyewitnesses who frequently validated and verified the imagery and experiences that were being shared organically by protestors on social media. Journalists such as Wesley Lowrey and Ryan Reilly, who were arrested while covering Ferguson in 2014,20 as well as Andrea Sahouri who was arrested in Iowa while covering a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020,21 became part of the story during these events. The facts of their arrests not only made national headlines, but more importantly, they further chronicled the unjust experiences and encounters that people of color often have with police. Journalists became part of the network of understanding about social justice.

While such common experiences of injustice may tend to make journalists and social justice advocates unexpected allies of sorts in search of the truth, they may also inflame other political narratives, especially by those on the political right. Journalists are supposed to be independent, and not necessarily allies of any other group. As the front line of narrative politics on social media continues to evolve, journalists, social advocates, and the political left would be well served to unify around the themes of social justice, although journalists will need care to maintain their professional autonomy. While social media and other digital communication platforms have empowered social justice movements in important ways, these tools have also been subject to broader political and economic forces, as well as exploitation by hate groups, white nationalists, and other right-wing extremists that are counterposed to social justice.