Social media warfare shapes our view of US protests

For the majority of us, events in the wider world are only remembered through the medium by which we first viewed them. The riots that followed the acquittal of Rodney King’s assailants in Los Angeles in 1992 are now hard to disentangle from the live helicopter footage, an innovation at the time, which took us into the heart of a city spiralling into anarchy. Yet the optics of protest have always been this reductive. Try to think of the protests in Birmingham, Alabama, without remembering Bill Hudson’s famous black and white photograph of the young man being attacked by a snarling police dog, held back by one of “Bull” Connor’s officers.

What we are witnessing today through the mediums of Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter sometimes feel no different to those earlier forms of media where it was left to artists, cartoonists, and then photographers to reduce conflicts to their crudest terms. When James Gillray drew Napoleon and William Pitt carving up the world in 1805, there was nothing in the tag “the great Globe itself, and all which it inherit, is too small to satisfy such insatiable appetites” which spoke to the geopolitics. Those are largely forgotten. The cartoon is not.

Social media is no less reductive, though it does operate differently. Rather than representing a conscious effort of an individual to present an editorialised view, social media works through the power of numbers. When the protests started in Minneapolis last Friday, every vantage point was notionally presented across the various media outlets. Yet whatever generously complete view of “reality” was presented through those many thousands of lenses, it didn’t last. As the social network got to work on the raw footage, selection took place and the community chose which perspectives they would amplify.

Soon the peaceful protests were under-represented as our attention was snatched away by footage of flashbangs, rubber bullets, bloodied wounds, and tear gas grenades going off beneath journalists’ feet. “Police brutality” fought with “lawless rioters” for dominance across the broad Left-Right axis of social media. Twitter itself interceded at one point, banning the hashtag “#DCBlackout”, which attempted to create a false reality of a city cut off from the rest of the world.

This is that danger which critics of social media have been warning about for years. “Falsehood flies and the Truth comes limping after it” as Jonathan Swift once wrote. It has been the defining logic of Trump’s ascendency. Where Roosevelt leveraged the power of radio to deliver his “fireside chats”, Trump leverages Facebook and Twitter. The latter gets all the attention but it’s the former where all the black arts took place in 2016 and will probably take place again in 2020. It’s there that video and photographs take on a different character once they’ve been manipulated through the meme engines.

It works for both sides, of course. Hillary Clinton suffered terribly from the meme wars in 2016 and now it seems to be Donald Trump’s turn. No sooner had the President held up a bible in his crass photo opportunity this week before St. John’s Episcopal Church than another photo turned up of Hitler holding up an identical bible. It was photoshopped, of course, but many viewing it didn’t notice (probably didn’t care) before they helped spread it across the network. It was a lie but, they’d say, a lie containing a grain truth – no different to Gillray’s depiction of Napoleon and Pitt with their “insatiable appetites”. When Hillary was attacked by Trump’s meme army in 2016, were they warping reality or merely elaborating some truth about a deeply flawed candidate?

There is no answer. The algorithms are blind to quality and see only popularity. And popularity meant that the narrative around George Floyd’s death initially became not one of protest but of riot. As a consequence, journalists and politicians begin to mistake one for the other; believing that trending topics are a statement of “what is” rather than a highly distorted version of “what might be”.

We witnessed this as Donald Trump attempted to turn the protests into a debate exclusively about “AntiFa” and the “radical Left”. That narrative is a forceful one – probably the basis of his coming election campaign – because, quite clearly, it’s rooted in the actual existence of a very small but potent minority; a minority who always make their way to the front of a crowd to goad the police, hurl stones, and generally ferment anarchy. Yet it’s also wrong to say that everybody wearing black and wearing a facemask is part of a far-Left radical organisation that wants to tear down capitalism. It certainly doesn’t explain video footage shot in New York City of masked black-clad rioters robbing a store having pulled up in a black Rolls Royce Cullinan, conservatively priced at about $480,000.

And that, perhaps, is one of the most critical developments. At first social media did what we expected it to do: it magnified the worst examples of human nature. Yet what distinguishes it from past media is that none of this is entering into a vacuum. The graphic imagery of looting and violence wasn’t the end of the story. Nor was the AntiFa narrative. We began the week talking about rioting. We end the week talking about restraint.

It seems those operating at the heart of social media are very self-aware. The same people producing videos are also watching videos. Within days of the protests beginning, what had been filmed was beginning to inform what was being filmed. It made for a powerful feedback loop.

One of the most effective videos of the week was of a black protestor who called out two young white women spray painting a Starbucks with graffiti about Black Lives Matter. “I want you to know that this isn’t a black woman putting Black Lives Matter”, says the woman to her viewers before turning her complaints to the vandals. “Don’t spray stuff on here when they’re going to blame black people for this and black people didn’t do it.”

After that, the narrative seemed to change. It was notable in subsequent days that protestors began to care about how they were being represented. When the police began to line up on the edge of Lafayette Square, protestors seemed to understand the significance of whatever imagery would emerge. Many sat down rather than square up to the police. When a fence was erected next day around the White House, the crowd condemned anybody who tried to bring it down. When a white teenager was filmed smashing windows with his skateboard, a group of young black protestors stepped in. These are but a few of many examples that began to trend.

And this should be one of the enduring memories of these riots. It’s easy to remember the violence – which is an inherent problem with human nature – but it’s also important to remember the calming effect social media has had. It is often condemned for what it spreads but it is already a vital tool for recording what has happened.

Without the viral video of George Floyd’s death, none of this would have happened. Some might say would have been a good thing, but ignorance is a hard product to sell and twice as hard when bound up with an injustice. Without social media to circumvent the system, America wouldn’t now have this chance to grow and that, surely, is something we should all welcome.