#HashtagActivism

#HashtagActivism

Networks of Race and Gender Justice

Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles

foreword by Genie Lauren

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

© 2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

This book was set in ITC Stone Serif Std and ITC Stone Sans Std by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bailey, Moya, author. | Welles, Brooke, author. | Jackson, Sarah J. (Sarah J.), author.

Title: #hashtagactivism : networks of race and gender justice / Moya Bailey, Brooke Welles, Sarah J. Jackson ; foreword by Genie Lauren.

Description: Cambridge : The MIT Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019009509 | ISBN 9780262043373 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Hashtags (Metadata) | Social media

Classification: LCC P302.37 .B35 2020 | DDC 361.201/4--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019009509

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

d_r0

For those who insist on being heard

Contents

Foreword by Genie Lauren

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Making Race and Gender Politics on Twitter

1 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo

2 Visions of Black Feminism: #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, #SayHerName

3 #GirlsLikeUs: Trans Feminist Advocacy and Community Building

4 Racial Violence and Racial Profiling: From #OscarGrant to #TrayvonMartin

5 From #Ferguson to #FalconHeights: The Networked Case for Black Lives

6 The Utility of Digital Allyship: #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite

Conclusion: #HashtagActivism: Here to Stay

Afterword: Ethics, Backlash, and Access in Twitter Research

Notes

Index

Foreword

Genie Lauren* (@MoreAndAgain)

One of the most recognizable aphorisms about the plight of Millennials is that we are overeducated and underpaid. The causes and effects of this have been detailed in the abstract, but for me this meant that when I joined Twitter on December 22, 2008, I was working two jobs to make my student loan payments every month. My supplemental job at a popular midrange clothing retailer would provide me with discounted business attire and some extra cash, while my meatier employment—working the night shift in the communications department of a twenty-four-hour, international corporate law firm—would provide me with a salary, benefits, and lots of downtime to tweet.

Initially, tweeting was not natural to me. Blogging had become popular about a decade earlier, and yet I had a difficult time understanding why I would publish my own thoughts on the internet. My personal blog, MoreAndAgain, in its earliest days was often neglected. Compounded by Twitter having the reputation of being the site where navel-gazers talked about what they’d just eaten, in 140 characters or less, and you’ll understand why I spent much of my time on Twitter stumped. Although an acquaintance helped me find my cohort in a group of under- or unemployed insomniacs who kept me company as I counted down the hours until I could clock out, even that small community seemed to lack a raison d’être. It was basically Seinfeld, the show about nothing, but with much looser relationships. Twitter didn’t become compelling for me until the protest following the 2009 presidential election in Iran and the resulting hashtag #IranElection.

I have always been the type of person who is sensitive to the plight of other people. As a child, I wanted to aid those who were less fortunate. In high school, friends and I walked out of school to protest the acquittal of the police officers who were responsible for killing Amadou Diallo. And, as I continued my education, it became important for me to learn about the ways people were treated unfairly around the world. When the #IranElection hashtag dominated Twitter’s global trending topics, it was the first time I had a front-row seat to a revolution. Suddenly, this platform, which previously had seemed rather pointless, allowed me to communicate directly with people on the ground in Iran, and I wanted to learn everything. I spent less time tweeting with fellow New Yorkers in my Twitter community and more time reading the minute-by-minute updates of protesters several time zones away. I had seriously lucked out, having a job that required me to be awake during times of peak #IranElection activity. Retweets, not nearly as sophisticated then as they are now, led me to news accounts that were updating their feeds much faster than twenty-four-hour news networks were airing their coverage on television. My Twitter feed, made up of roughly 150 people, finally had a reason for being: to spread the word and unpack what it meant with the help of witnesses and experts. “What are you doing?” would soon become “What’s happening?”

One of the first mainstream news outlets that seemed to share this mission and fully embrace Twitter was CNN. Retweeting the accounts of journalists on the ground using the #IranElection hashtag seemed to lend legitimacy to the user-generated idiosyncrasies that made sharing and finding information easier. Being stuck in an office for hours meant I wasn’t able to turn on a television—and streaming television broadcasts online wouldn’t be possible for years to come—but I could log on to Twitter and refresh my Twitter feed to make sure I had the latest news. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the way tweeters engaged in this movement would become the framework for signal-boosting information on Twitter. In the years that followed, creating a hashtag would become the artery for organizing resistance.

In the years after #IranElection, my own Twitter community grew at a steady pace. The more I engaged in Twitter conversations, the more people I was able to converse with. When the #FailWhale wasn’t spoiling our fun, we used hashtags to share tunes (#MusicMonday), share grievances (#HereBeforeOprah), and even share favorite tweeters (#FollowFriday). In just three years after its inception the platform had allowed users to create a taxonomy, with no major overhaul of the underlying program; this feature would later be adopted by other social media networks such as Facebook. Regular tweeters became so accustomed to organizing tweets by hashtags that when someone decided to hashtag a name, it immediately made sense. On my Twitter feed, the first occurrence of a hashtagged name was #TroyDavis.

#TroyDavis first appeared in my Twitter feed on September 11, 2011—ten days before Troy Davis himself was scheduled to be executed by the State of Georgia. Davis had been tried for and convicted of the murder of police officer Mark MacPhail, but recanted testimony and new evidence pushed activists to argue there was too much doubt to warrant his execution, thus leading to the affiliated hashtag #TooMuchDoubt. Through the hashtags, a Change.org petition was shared encouraging tweeters to sign and demand Davis’s clemency. The petition, which garnered 258,505 signatures, was addressed to the State of Georgia’s Board of Pardons and Paroles and Chatham County district attorney Larry Chisolm.

It is impossible to overstate how penetrative #TroyDavis was on Twitter, from September 11 through September 21, the day Davis was unjustly executed. I cannot recall a single tweeter I followed who not only tweeted about #TroyDavis but also called on DA Chisolm and the Supreme Court of the United States as the justices deliberated over whether or not to stay his execution. There was even a vigil on Twitter: ten minutes without a single tweet at 7:00 p.m. on September 21, in the hopes it would sway the SCOTUS decision. Though our mission seemed to be failing at every turn, my entire Twitter feed remained engaged, making calls, encouraging action, saying virtual prayers. Briefly, it looked as though the SCOTUS decision would go our way, after Jeffrey Toobin reported that the deliberation was “unusually long.” Unfortunately, our efforts to save one man’s life were unsuccessful. When the DA failed to act, followed by the SCOTUS failing to act, the result was the state’s murder of Troy Davis at 11:08 p.m. In that moment, I could feel the devastation ripple across Twitter. We contemplated what it meant that all these people could act in unison and still not save one life, and what it meant to be at the mercy of the criminal justice system.

Though the campaign to stop the execution of Troy Davis was unsuccessful in saving his life, it did succeed in giving this subgroup, which would soon become known as Black Twitter, a collective sense of obligation. After Davis’s execution there was no shortage of tweets imploring people not to skip jury duty and to pay close attention to local elections—both sentiments I had heard expressed before, but now there was more weight behind them. A heightened awareness of how our legal system worked informed our conversations, with the accompanying reminder that these instances of injustice weren’t increasing, technology just allowed us to learn about them as they happened.

With each instance of social media activism, Twitter, specifically Black Twitter, grew faster at signal boosting and raising awareness of the issues and events that needed attention. Twitter’s introduction of native retweets meant important tweets could be shared without editing the text to fit character limits, thereby improving the accuracy of the information being shared. Each exercise in hashtag activism brought lessons in what worked, what didn’t, and what to be mindful of to be more effective in the future. We made our virtual arteries work better.

When word of Trayvon Martin’s death made it to Twitter, I found those arteries at work once again. George Zimmerman, who fatally shot Martin on February 26, 2012, had been walking around free for eleven days without being charged, thanks to the “stand your ground” law enacted in Sanford, Florida. Without needing a poll or a vote, the general consensus was that something had to be done to change this. It was all hands on deck. The response was intuitive.

#JusticeForTrayvon was created, like the #TroyDavis tag before it, to draw attention, connect, and spread information. We knew that the best chance of getting justice for Trayvon was to get national news organizations to cover the case. The Change.org petition that was dispersed using #JusticeForTrayvon was the fastest-growing petition to run on the site, as reported by the Orlando Sentinel. The phone numbers of Sanford mayor Jeff Triplett and State’s Attorney Norman Wolfinger were both shared with the hashtag, encouraging tweeters to call and demand that George Zimmerman be charged for Trayvon Martin’s death. Many tweeters even went so far as to mail bags of Skittles and AriZona-branded beverages to the Sanford Police Department, in protest of George Zimmerman being allowed to go free (Trayvon had only the Skittles and AriZona Tea in his possession when he was killed).

At this point, I was no longer working overnight, and had to rely on tweeters who could watch news broadcasts during the day for updates. Through my Twitter feed, made up of close to five hundred tweeters, I could now find out about the latest call for action, statements released by the family, and, most important, whether George Zimmerman was finally being charged with the murder of Trayvon. Along with the steady flow of information regarding the case, a discussion about the social significance of Trayvon’s murder provided perspective on what was happening. Almost as a coping mechanism, intellectuals and academics unpacked the ways race and class worked together to create the circumstances we were fighting against. It felt as though if we thoroughly understood the problem, we could fix it.

We would need that can-do attitude because progress was agonizingly slow. I knew that Twitter activism would bring national attention, and local action on the part of elected officials, but those elected officials were taking a long time to respond. We tweeted to organize rallies and raise funds for Trayvon’s family while continuing to make phone calls to the mayor, governor, and state’s attorney to demand that George Zimmerman be arrested and charged with murder. The officials in Florida, however, seemed resigned to ignoring the protests or waiting them out. Almost two months after Trayvon’s murder, Zimmerman was finally charged with second-degree murder.

Technically speaking, I never watched the trial. Having to be at work during traditional business hours, I was never near a television to see a single moment of it, but I knew the people who contributed to my Twitter feed would be on top of it. Each day, those who could watch the trial live-tweeted what often read like line-by-line transcripts of the testimonies of witnesses for the prosecution and witnesses for George Zimmerman’s defense. It was a nerve-wracking experience. Here we were, once again, wondering whether all the work we had done to get to this moment would pay off. There was so much evidence against Zimmerman, and yet, if it took this much work to get an indictment, we knew a conviction was no sure thing.

When I watched the tweeters on my feed report news of Zimmerman’s acquittal on July 13, 2013, a familiar sense of dismay washed over me. What kind of world did we live in where all the evidence that was mounted against Zimmerman meant nothing because the life he stole was that of a Black child? What had we changed? Was all that effort for nothing? Shortly after I would read that not only Zimmerman didn’t care about Trayvon’s life, neither did the prosecution or the jurors—specifically juror B37.

When the trial concluded, reports of juror B37 having a book deal were widespread. I recall one report mentioning she had started looking for a publisher as soon as the trial began. I, and many of the tweeters I followed, grew suspicious. We questioned whether she was concerned with justice at all, or whether she was simply happy to have stumbled upon what could have been a major payday. It was bad enough that the jurors voted to let Trayvon’s killer go free, compounded by the racists who raised hundreds of thousands of dollars to help Zimmerman pay for his legal fees, but now juror B37 was also planning to walk away with money and fame while Sybrina Fulton, Trayvon’s mother, had neither her child nor redemption. It was too much to bear.

I knew we had to do something. Fellow tweeters @miss_hellion and @MF_Greatest pointed out that our Twitter activism had previously resulted in the firing of Paula Deen. We could do something. We couldn’t bring Trayvon back, and we couldn’t change the verdict to convict Zimmerman, but we could still stop the juror from profiting from the death of a child she clearly didn’t care about. So I decided to take action.

A few minutes on Google provided me with the name of the agent, Sharlene Martin, who was brokering the deal for juror B37’s book. A few more minutes of Googling led me to her contact information, which I then tweeted out to my timeline in the way we typically called for action to influence elected officials. My previous experience with signal-boosting information let me know it would be easier to share links than tweets, so I consolidated all of Sharlene’s contact information into a Google doc, to be shared far and wide. The more I tweeted about stopping the book deal, the more people wanted to help me stop it. Soon other tweeters had located both Sharlene’s personal Twitter account and the Twitter account for her business, Martin Literary Management, and I directed people to tweet to those accounts to ask that Sharlene stop representing juror B37.

As people were participating in the action I was organizing on Twitter, I started to feel disconnected. I was receiving lots of encouragement, but there was no way for me to gauge how many people were actually calling Sharlene, and there was no way to show people that anyone else was involved other than myself and the handful of people who were tweeting at me. I didn’t want the momentum to die as soon as I went to bed, so I created the Change.org petition.

I expected the Change.org petition to consolidate all the information in one place: what the issue was, whom to contact, and how many people were already contacting them. I also expected that this would build into an action that would take days before the desired results would be seen: if we couldn’t get the agent to drop juror B37, the next step would be contacting whichever publisher signed on. What I did not expect was Sharlene Martin herself to message me within hours of the petition going up, telling me the deal was off and asking that the petition be locked. I was floored. I immediately shared Sharlene’s message with my Twitter followers, and my mentions were, as we say, in shambles.

The support I received in the wake of the agent dropping juror B37 was overwhelming. Before this action on Twitter, I had gained a little over one thousand followers. By the morning after I tweeted the petition, I had more than nine thousand Twitter followers, including television show producers, who were inviting me onto their morning news broadcasts. I had the attention of other Twitter activists, as well as those who were organizing offline, who were also inspired by #JusticeForTrayvon. Being a Tweetdeck user, I found it almost impossible to reply to anyone who mentioned me because so many people were mentioning me at once. I was especially appreciative of all the tweets of kindness because they also helped flush out the disparaging tweets and death threats I received from people who identified with George Zimmerman and juror B37. It felt as though our efforts, for once, had paid off.

While the win was not what we originally hoped for, stopping juror B37’s book deal briefly put some wind back in our sails—and now with us even more connected than before. We did more than simply gain experience, as with previous instances of hashtag activism; we gained a much broader network. Black Twitter seemed to grow larger and smaller at the same time. My own network now included leaders of organizations who provided knowledge and perspective on what direct action was taking place on the ground. Before, we had just heard about the protest; now we knew the people who were organizing it. Their perspective on the work being done helped me to see each incident that inspires a hashtag, and subsequent protests, not as a time we lost but as another moment of resistance—a push forward.

Hashtag activism is repeated resistance. Black Twitter tapped into our shared history of resistance and used the technology available to us to reach further and faster. We continue to draw national attention to local problems, to underscore the fact that these injustices are happening everywhere. No town in America is exempt—especially not in the north, and especially not New York City, home of the infamous New York Police Department.

The discussion about the NYPD’s stop-and-frisk policies and other uses of excessive force had long made its way through various news outlets by the time the #myNYPD hashtag appeared on my Twitter feed. Unfortunately, Mayor Bill de Blasio and Police Commissioner William Bratton seemed intent on doubling down on their support for the status quo rather than working on any fundamental change that would actually improve the experience Black and brown residents of New York City had with the police. It seemed the NYPD was resorting to a publicity stunt to win favor while eschewing accountability for racist policies by asking for friendly user submissions that praised the police with the hashtag. The hijacking of the #myNYPD hashtag by ordinary New Yorkers like me redirected the conversation back to the injustices that were being doled out at the hands of those who had sworn to protect and serve. It was powerful (and fun) to be a part of telling stories on Twitter about the NYPD that are often ignored, and it was those of us who subverted the hashtag who succeeded in trending it. A hashtag that might have otherwise gone under the radar with a handful of friendly pictures now put the NYPD back in the spotlight and reminded the nation that police officers were still not living up to their oath. There was still a need for resistance.

I am pleased to be included in this book as it explores the evolution of the hashtag networks I have contributed to and watched firsthand. In my time on Twitter I have found hashtag activism to be irreplaceable. It is both a means to an end, a tool to consolidate information, and way to share a call to action, it is used to share examples of the injustice and oppression that users have experienced. While there are several ways to deliver information, none are as compact, mobile, and easily digestible as a hashtag. While hashtag activism isn’t the whole of any resistance movement, it is the arterial network of any movement that seeks to gain national support and impact.

*A note from the book’s authors: When Genie Lauren wrote this contribution for us, her @MoreandAgain account was going strong on Twitter, with more than 14,000 followers, and she had become one of the many influential Black women building activist and everyday culture narratives on Twitter. In March 2018 she was the victim of brigading—an online harassment tactic in which a group of opponents gangs up on a user they dislike or disagree with ideologically. In this case, brigading was used to silence her, as she was reported for abuse on the platform for her commentary by multiple unknown users and subsequently suspended because of the number of complaints. Despite her best efforts to contact Twitter support, they never informed her of the exact reasons for her suspension—or the supposedly offending content that justified it. This exemplifies one of the failures of the platform. Without real people taking time to distinguish between legitimate complaints of policy violations and efforts seeking to silence members of counterpublics, Lauren’s account remained suspended for most of the year, while the accounts of avowed white supremacists and others peddling false and incendiary rhetoric remained. Her account was reinstated in October 2018 after the ACLU contacted Twitter on Lauren’s behalf. Her content history and contributions were absent for nine months of one of the most politically tumultuous years of recent history and almost lost to us entirely.

Preface

We were inspired to write this book because of the incredible social justice activism we independently witnessed on Twitter beginning in 2011. As avid users of the platform and diversely trained scholars of media, we watched and participated in many of the hashtags and stories that came to shape global, national, and local politics. We began to specifically study race and gender work on Twitter in 2014, with Sarah J. Jackson and Brooke Foucault Welles studying #MyNYPD and #Ferguson while Moya Bailey investigated #GirlsLikeUs. Our interests, the interdisciplinary theory and methods we offered one another, and serendipity brought us together. We quickly realized we could best study hashtags, identity politics, networks, and social change by working together and with the input of the hashtag creators themselves.

Five years ago, when we began this journey, we could only imagine what we would learn through this collaborative project. It has been an incredible experience to write about a medium so dynamic and in a raucous political environment, as more and more people in the United States turned to Twitter with new versions of old demands for race and gender equality. In the course of our writing this book, Twitter character counts expanded, media policy changed, Donald J. Trump was elected president of the United States and adopted the platform as his own, hashtag politics became increasingly influential offline, the debate over social media’s role in democracy raged, and a plethora of new hashtags were born. In the pages that follow, we offer a record of how hashtags have become central to racial justice and gender justice efforts, what stories hashtags tell, and why we should listen.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to our colleague Alan Mislove, who hosted and provided us access to the Twitter data that made this work possible.

A wonderful group of graduate and undergraduate students helped us with our work. Research assistants Ryan Gallagher and Devin Gaffney helped with data collection and analysis. Gregory Palermo assisted with literature collection. Sonia Banaszczyk was instrumental in searching for literature, locating media sources, and assisting with the general organizing of the project in its early stages. Kristen Miller was an important editor who also assisted in literature collection and synthesis in later stages of the project.

We would like to thank all the people whose voices, images, and videos contributed to the conversations we chronicle in this book. We would especially like to thank our hashtag activist contributors, including Genie Lauren, for her powerful and moving foreword, along with Wagatwe Wanjuki, Jamie Nesbitt Golden, DiDi Delgado, Janet Mock, and Jason Ross, whose commentary you will find within chapters. Their hashtag activism inspired us and made us want to tell the stories herein.

We are grateful for the funding and equipment we received in support of this project from several Northeastern University units, including the NU Lab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, the College of Arts, Media, and Design, and the Global Resilience Institute, and from the NVIDIA Corporation. We are also thankful for the collaborative writing space we were able to utilize in Northeastern University’s Program for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Network Science Institute. Finally, we appreciate the immense amount of feedback we received on this project over the years from research conference audiences, colleagues, mentors, and the manuscript’s reviewers and editors.

Last but certainly not least, we thank our families and friends, who have supported this work for many years, tolerated our excessive time on Twitter, and given us the encouragement we needed to see this project through.

Introduction: Making Race and Gender Politics on Twitter

In this book we argue for the importance of the digital labor of raced and gendered counterpublics. Ordinary African Americans, women, transgender people, and others aligned with racial justice and feminist causes have long been excluded from elite media spaces yet have repurposed Twitter in particular to make identity-based cultural and political demands, and in doing so have forever changed national consciousness. From #BlackLivesMatter to #MeToo, hashtags have been the lingua franca of this phenomenon.

African American journalism is an often highlighted exemple of the influence counterpublics can have on the mainstream public sphere, even under conditions of extreme inequality and surveillance. The African American journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells, for example, famously engaged in a careerlong antilynching campaign at the turn of the twentieth century. While the logic of Jim Crow and a deeply racist nation resulted in white-run news sources that legitimized or ignored the lynching of African Americans while embracing racist mythologies of Black barbarism and white civility, Wells reported on lynching from the perspective of African American families and communities who lived in fear of white mob violence and who found no protection in a complicit legal system. The consequences of Wells’s work were severe. In 1892 a white mob burned down her newspaper’s offices and, by all accounts, intended to lynch Wells or her co-editor, J. L. Fleming, but found them absent. Ultimately, Wells’s persistence and courage in telling alternative lynching stories helped lead a national antilynching movement.[1] Likewise, during and after World War II African American newspapers told the stories of the domestic oppression and terror faced by Black veterans even as mainstream news sources engaged in a white nationalistic fervor that ignored such soldiers altogether. Other groups that have experienced varying degrees of exclusion from political discourse and power have also created notable mainstream interventions through community-centered frames; some examples here are the newspapers of the 1960s feminist movement, which buoyed national activism against employment discrimination based on gender, and the theatrical storytelling of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), which steered movement among both drug companies and the national government on AIDS research in the late 1980s and 1990s.[2]

Such examples of counterpublics at work are usually presented to assess the historical shape of the U.S. public sphere, with less emphasis placed on the role counterpublics continue to play in shaping U.S. politics in the modern era. In fact, some have suggested that counterpublics, and the alternative meaning-making processes they further, have waned as U.S. institutions that formerly excluded marginalized voices have normalized, at least on the surface, their inclusion. Since the 1980s, and well into the supposedly “color-blind” Obama era, neoliberal narratives of inclusion and diversity insisted America has achieved or is near achieving its democratic ideals. Yet such narratives perpetuate the invisibility of members of counterpublics who, despite increasing token inclusion and celebration as objects of consumption, are still vastly underrepresented and misrepresented in contemporary politics. The virulent sexism and xenophobia that arose and were repeated over and over again in mainstream political discourse during the 2016 election cycle highlight the failure of inclusive ideals in the public sphere. It is to this underrepresentation and misrepresentation, along with efforts toward solidarity and community building, that contemporary counterpublics respond, using media technologies available to them. Our work here demonstrates that counterpublics are alive and well in contemporary civil society, using Twitter as one important technology to push the mainstream public sphere on issues of social progress in ways more powerful and visible than possibly ever before.

In the twenty-first century, the proliferation of social media has enabled the widespread study of and speculation about the impact of digital technologies on politics, activism, and social change. Key among these debates is the role of social media in shaping the contemporary public sphere and, by proxy, our democracy. Since the 2011 Arab Spring and the upwelling of Occupy movements across the globe, social networks have influenced how both those on the margins and those at the center engage in sociopolitical debate and meaning-making. Building on the success of the activist tool TxtMob, Twitter was launched in 2006 as a microblogging platform that allowed users only 140-character communications at a time (280 characters as of November 2017); by 2015 the site boasted more than 300 million active users.[3] These users’ tweets create a continuous live deluge of information. Following certain users, creating lists of users, and using third-party apps are among the tactics available to help manage the flow of tweets. Hashtags, which are discursive and user-generated, have become the default method to designate collective thoughts, ideas, arguments, and experiences that might otherwise stand alone or be quickly subsumed within the fast-paced pastiche of Twitter. Hashtags make sense of groups of tweets by creating a searchable shortcut that can link people and ideas together. Throughout this text we use hashtag activism to refer to the strategic ways counterpublic groups and their allies on Twitter employ this shortcut to make political contentions about identity politics that advocate for social change, identity redefinition, and political inclusion.

Evolution of the #

In the late 1990s, the “pound sign,” as it was called in internet forums, was used to group items in online conversations and chat streams. In 2007, Twitter user Chris Messina asked his followers what they thought about using the sign to designate groups on the fledgling platform. His tweet would be the catalyst for the ongoing evolution of hashtags as a method to thread conversations, people, and movements together. Since this user-created innovation in 2007, hashtags have been so normalized by Twitter users that their use has spread beyond the platform and been incorporated into other social media spaces such as Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. More and more people have adopted hashtags as a way to connect multiple sites of shared interest, and mainstream media outlets and politicians, noting their ubiquity, have used them to engage on a range of topics and debates.[4] Hashtags have even become self-referential and an ironically used convention in everyday speech.

The narratives that emerge around Twitter hashtags evolve more quickly than traditional media, and for this reason Twitter has become one of the major tools for disseminating information to the public in the hope of spurring particular actions or outcomes. For example, when the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation announced in 2012 it would withdraw financial contributions to Planned Parenthood intended for breast cancer screening, Planned Parenthood and its supporters flooded social media spaces with the hashtag #IStandWithPP, along with emotional stories and compelling statistics about the significance of Planned Parenthood to American women’s health. Within days, the Komen Foundation responded to the growing public relations disaster by reversing its decision and pushing the official behind the original decision into resignation. This speed in the race to frame important issues is attractive to activist tweeters because it means there is less time for those with power to create spin or for traditional media to moderate issues according to mainstream logic. In an attempt to keep up with this communication revolution, many mainstream news organizations, politicians, and corporations have been motivated to create their own Twitter accounts and have hired “social media managers,” tasked with responding to the new communication logics enabled by the platform. These efforts are not always successful, as became evident when New Yorkers and other Americans hijacked the New York Police Department’s public relations hashtag #MyNYPD to tweet a seemingly endless stream of stories about police brutality, or when Bill Cosby’s social media team asked followers to use #CosbyMeme to create fan images of the actor but instead were inundated with memes referencing the dozens of sexual assaults of which Cosby was accused.

The practice of hashtagging is shaping how everything from presidential executive actions to snack-food branding takes shape. While hashtags have extended the communicative reach of those who already benefit from widespread access to the public, for those individuals and collectives unattached to elite institutions, Twitter, and the unifying code of the hashtag, have allowed the direct communication of raw and immediate images, emotions, and ideas and their widespread dissemination in a way previously unknown. While the public waits for print journalists to narrativize national crises and controversies, ordinary people on the scene are able to tweet firsthand accounts. While politicians embed particular issues in opaque language and meaningless euphemisms in their public discourse, ordinary people are able to explicitly advocate using unrepentant and concise rhetoric on these same issues. Notably, Twitter has low financial and technological barriers to entry. Using relatively inexpensive equipment, and with limited technical knowledge, ordinary people can engage in public speech and actions without mediation by the mainstream media or other traditional sources of power. Moreover, the use of hashtags and other conversational conventions enables an emergent organization whereby individual tweets coalesce into a larger collective storytelling.[5] At the same time, as the internet sociologist Zeynep Tufekci points out, hashtags facilitate something that looks very different from traditional, institutional-based politics—a kind of democratic participation that is inclined toward a horizontal, identity-based movement building that arises out of grievances and claims.[6]

For example, the 2011 democratic uprisings that came to be known as the Arab Spring demonstrated the power of Twitter hashtags in movement spaces. Along with more traditional forms of organizing, people used English- and Arabic-language hashtags to alert each other to the movements of state actors and communicate with the world what was happening in the region. Frustrated by corrupt local governments, income disparities, and poor labor conditions, youth and union members organized large-scale protests in multiple countries in North Africa and the Middle East. These uprisings were not coordinated but built on each other, aided by the proliferative capability of social media to share important, time-sensitive information.[7] Hashtags like #Tunisia, #Jan25, and #Egypt that specified the country and day of political action were among the first to bridge political consciousnesses across oceans and cultures.[8] Hashtags morphed as the movements grew, responding to both the number of places and points of overlap.

This resistance precipitated the Occupy movement in the United States as it served as one motivation for the magazine Adbusters to issue a call to readers to mobilize in Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2011, using the hashtag #OccupyWallStreet.[9] Fed up with the economic corruption of global capitalism, New Yorkers and other members of the public descended on Wall Street for a multi-monthlong sit-in and occupation protest that sparked other encampments across the country and around the globe.[10] Participants used the hashtag #OWS and region-specific hashtags such as #OccupyOakland and #OccupySeoul to signal the needs of those encamped, report on police actions, and communicate with others about the goals of the movement.[11] Whether it’s the clever repetition in the hashtag #StandWithStandingRock or the power of using a name like #CyntoiaBrown, successful digital mobilization and the continued media interest in the way Twitter hashtags are deployed have made “hashtag activism” a favored strategy for young activists trying to effect change.[12]

Hashtag activism, a term that first appeared in news coverage in 2011, describes the creation and proliferation of online activism stamped with a hashtag. We argue that this online activism leads to material effects in the digital and physical sphere. In this book we focus on the activism of members of historically marginalized groups in the United States, which in recent years has had a measurable impact on political debates, social policy, and the public consciousness. These hashtag activists, occasionally maligned as “slacktivists” or “armchair activists” because digital activism is sometimes considered less valid than direct action and is mistakenly regarded as in competition with it, use hashtags to create social change.[13] As we discuss in the following chapters, such hashtags as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo have had far-reaching influence, moving debates about identity politics, inequality, violence, and citizenship from the margins to the center and into places as crucial as presidential agendas.

From the Margins to the Middle: Publics and Counterpublics

The question of how ordinary people use media in democratic societies is not new. Scholars of the public sphere, from Jürgen Habermas and Michael Werner to Nancy Fraser and Catherine Squires, have long contended that contemporary civil society is in part constructed, maintained, and moved toward or away from change by mediated messages that inform the public. Inherent in this idea is that communication is politics, that mediated public discourse, which in the twenty-first century is all public discourse, is political: it informs, misinforms, expands, limits, bolsters, or undermines the way we understand and in turn respond to and engage with politics.

While hashtag activism is a uniquely twenty-first-century phenomenon, there is something familiar about the goals of those using Twitter to push for social change. Indeed, ordinary people challenging, redefining, and changing the terms of public debate is one of the most enduring and crucial characteristics of democracy. Much of the discourse related to U.S. progress, from the abolition of slavery to the sexual revolution, was rooted in narratives created on the margins of society. Counterpublics, the alternative networks of debate created by marginalized members of the public, thus have always played the important role of highlighting and legitimizing the experiences of those on the margins even as they push for integration and change in mainstream spaces.[14]

In an idealized civil society, democratic access to the production and distribution of public forms of communication would be (and always would have been) granted to all people. Yet this is not, and has never been, the case. Access to public discourse, and thereby access to politics itself, has always been severely limited for those with less power and privilege. Just as civil society throughout history, from the Enlightenment salons in Paris to the famed Lincoln-Douglas debates, only granted individuals with particular privileged identities access, marginalized groups face ongoing barriers to inclusion in the public sphere. U.S. politics, and the issues and debates that shape it, have largely excluded individuals who, at various points in history, were not considered full citizens or otherwise worthy of prominent roles in civil society. Among those who have been excluded are people of color (in various iterations, but we use the term here to designate people who have been marked as “other” by ideologies of white supremacy), women (in this book, we consider women anyone who identifies as a woman), members of the LGBTQIA+ community, immigrants, people with physical and mental impairments, and the poor and indigent.

The political formations and cultural values that have justified these exclusions have been explored in depth in countless works and are beyond the scope of this book, yet they are important here because exclusion from the public sphere has never rendered these groups fully voiceless or wholly stifled attempts at remaking meaning, and in turn politics, in ways that are reflective of group experiences. Rather, these groups have birthed and nourished counterpublics in which their experiences and political values are given primacy. Though members of counterpublics have sometimes been invisible in conventional political spaces, the effort of counterpublics to integrate and interrogate mainstream spaces has had significant influence on the shape and evolution of U.S. politics. From the Negro spirituals sung by enslaved Blacks to the Riot grrrl festivals of third-wave feminists, members of marginalized publics have always created their own communication forms, and in turn their own politics.[15] Of note, these counterpublic communication forms have served not only to reflect and legitimize counterpublic politics but have had a real influence on definitions of citizenship and inclusivity as mainstream politics has been forced to respond to the ever more visible presence of those on the margins.

Measuring and Chronicling Hashtag Activism

Our interdisciplinary mixed-methods approach to understanding hashtag activism by networked counterpublics draws on theories and methods from communication studies, digital humanities, and network science. We illustrate the particularly complementary roles of network science procedures, communication studies theory, and critical humanities interventions. Through these approaches we offer readers multiple entry points into the data in an inquiry that illuminates how counterpublic networks construct and define issues of race, gender, and sexual politics.

From the outset, we approach hashtag activism as a networked activity, focusing not only on the attributes of individual tweeters or activists but also on the connections between them. This affords a number of possibilities, including, crucially, the ability to identify emergent leaders and their pathways of influence within each of the counterpublic networks we examine. Network science, and its related suite of analytical methods, prioritizes social structure, rejecting the assumption implicit in much quantitative social science work that individual attributes are what matter when accounting for social outcomes. Instead, a network allows us to consider the nonadditive and intersectional nature of attributes, relationships, and entire social systems in producing outcomes of interest.

Transforming online counterpublics into networked data makes it possible to understand their dynamic and interdependent properties while also narrowing an overwhelming volume of data to a manageable size. Each one of the hashtags we consider in this text appeared tens of thousands of times on Twitter, and some, such as #BlackLivesMatter, have appeared tens of millions of times, with no indication of subsiding. This presents an obvious analytical challenge—even at an initial 140 (later 280) characters per tweet, we would have had to read hundreds of thousands of pages of text to analyze the dynamics of a counterpublic Twitter conversation in raw form. Instead, we transformed these individual tweets into a network of individuals connected by conversational features in the text they produce. Specifically, we connected individuals to one another by using two Twitter conversational conventions: retweets and mentions. When someone authors a tweet, by default that tweet will be visible to anyone on Twitter. Someone else can choose to retweet that tweet, broadcasting it to their own followers, either in its original form or with some commentary attached. The act of retweeting signals at least passing attention to, and often an endorsement of, the original content. Users may also mention one another by using a particular conversational syntax (@user) within the body of a tweet. The reasons to do so are numerous, including simply addressing one another, engaging in a conversation, tagging or giving credit to one another, or drawing otherwise unengaged users into a conversation. By means of these conventions, a stream of tweets can be reconfigured as a network, with Twitter users connecting with one another via retweets and mentions within the text of their tweets.

Organizing tweets into networks rather than keeping them solely as individual posts allowed us to pick out individuals, messages, and subgroups of particular importance for closer examination. Of note, we relied on the mathematical properties of networked importance, which are agnostic to the content of the tweets or the identities of the individuals who compose them (other than the aforementioned syntax that signals a connection between users), allowing us to select individuals and cases for analysis without any a priori notions about who ought to be included in the analysis. Moreover, the specific mathematical properties we drew on, including degree centrality and betweenness centrality, are unevenly distributed within networks, such that selecting cases for analysis that exemplify these properties results in selecting tweets that are disproportionately more likely to be seen by, and to have influence over, the greatest part of the network. Focusing on importance and influence is, of course, a normative choice, though one informed by the everyday users in these networks whose communicative actions (retweeting, mentioning) collectively created the measures of networked importance that guided our selection. Borrowing Zizi Papacharissi and Maria de Fatima Oliveira’s idea of crowdsourced elites in online activism, we transformed the tweets in our samples into networks, which allowed us to highlight important people and conversations based on the individual and collective properties of their networked communication.[16]

Next, methods from digital humanities allowed us to study this massive corpus of tweets in two ways. We used Stephen Ramsay’s construct of algorithmic criticism and humanities critical theories, such as feminist and critical race theories, to fully explore the significance of the data.[17] It is by bridging between digital quantitative data and humanities theorizing that the unique story of the power of these tweets can be told. Digital tools can be used to answer humanities questions that previously would have been too cumbersome to answer without computational assistance. We examined nearly four million tweets in the course of this project. We were able to assess this archive using theories that address power and identity to deepen our analysis of the significance of these tweets both for who composed them and for those spurred to action by their content.

Finally, discursive analysis of the counterpublic networks allowed us to explore the significance of hashtags beyond quantified popularity and digital curation to highlight the social and political labor undertaken by hashtag activists as they work to tell stories and make meaning. This approach is a constructivist one that recognizes that discourse constructs reality by making ideas and events meaningful in particular ways that uphold or challenge cultural ideologies. A central focus of this book is how members of counterpublics use hashtags to make and remake reality in the face of dominant discourses that represent them as undeserving of full inclusion in civil society. Thus our discourse analysis of these counterpublic networks grants agency and a unique power to members of counterpublics engaging in the very meaning-making processes that help define citizenship and cultural belonging. We examined the discourse from the most popular and influential tweets and members of our networks (as determined in our network analysis) for causal interpretations; attributions of agency, blame, and belonging; and interpersonal connections, narrative connection, storytelling, and contextualizing to understand how members of counterpublics use hashtags to frame particular issues and experiences in an attempt to contribute to their relevance in the public sphere.

Through this unique combination of network analytics and critical readings of tweet texts, in this book we illustrate how and why Twitter hashtags have become an important platform for historically disenfranchised populations to advance counternarratives and advocate for social change. We show that members of these marginalized groups, in the tradition of counterpublics, use Twitter hashtags to build diverse networks of dissent and shape the cultural and political knowledge fundamental to contemporary identity-based social movements. Further, we find evidence of significant permeability between the mainstream public sphere and counterpublics on the Twitter platform, suggesting radical possibilities for contemporary democracy.

Deciding what hashtags to include in our analysis was not easy. We had a plethora of hashtags to choose from that demonstrate the power of the medium, and more emerge every day. However, the hashtags we chose best exemplify the diversity of networks that have been able to operationalize the tool in the service of counterpublic discourse. The selected hashtags, which focus on race, gender, and their intersections, have helped facilitate real shifts in U.S. political debates, community practices, and media representations between 2012 and 2017. Through a university agreement with Twitter, we had priority access to a 10 percent random sample of data from Twitter’s streaming application programming interface (API) for the duration of that time period.

Voices from the Margins

As hashtags are built on networks of connection, it would not have been possible to write this book without getting some insight from network users and creators about their experiences. Because we believe the inclusion of these cultural workers’ voices is important, we identified influential users and creators of hashtags and asked them to speak to the reality of the networks they were nodes in, what happened or did not happen that made their hashtagged networks successful, and what other forms of work online and offline they see as important to hashtag activism. Rather than participate in the translational practice of interviews, which can lead to misunderstanding and obfuscation of the goals of subjects, we wanted hashtag users to speak for themselves. Thus each chapter includes an essay written by an influential member of a particular hashtag activism network. We consider these essays to be in conversation with our research.

In addition, throughout the book, we have included examples of tweets created by people using the hashtags we examine. We view hashtag users and creators as researchers themselves, and we see part of our charge as practicing a more egalitarian model of research whereby our “subjects” are understood to be collaborators, particularly in light of the way some researchers have exploited prominent Twitter and hashtag users.[18] We shift this practice of potential harm by working collaboratively, ensuring that creative voices are front and center.

Of course, centering the voices of people—particularly marginalized people who are otherwise not in the public eye—risks exposing them to unwanted and unanticipated attention (however public their posts may be). Although both the Twitter API rules and best practices in online research ethics require us to confirm that the tweets we publish are (at the time of publication) still publicly available, we took some additional steps to honor, as best we could, the intentions of those we feature in this book. As we selected tweets to illustrate discursive themes, we were careful to consider the context of and intended audience for the content, choosing, for example, messages intended for the general public rather than posted in reply to a particular user (though still technically readable by the general public). We also respected signals of desired privacy; thus we did not include tweets that were subsequently deleted, those from closed accounts, or tweets from users who made direct requests for privacy. The ethics of whether and how to include social media data in research are not straightforward. But we believe that our approach strikes a balance between authentically representing conversations as they unfolded and protecting subjects from unwanted exposure. We hope readers will hear the authors’ voices as scholars alongside the multitude of voices from the subjects of our research.

In chapter 1, we consider the way women use hashtags to center and legitimize their experiences with violence. We illustrate how hashtags like #YesAllWomen, #Survivor Privilege, #WhyIStayed, #TheEmptyChair, and #MeToo work to challenge dominant understandings of gendered violence that have long relegated women to the sidelines of their own experiences of victimization, survival, and resilience even as they debunk cultural myths and offer systemic critiques of patriarchy. We consider how such hashtags further the work of a feminist counterpublic and how they break new ground in feminist political projects. Along with our analysis, chapter 1 includes a brief meditation on #SurvivorPrivilege by its creator, the feminist activist Wagatwe Wanjuki.

As chapter 1 illustrates, the networks that make up “Feminist Twitter” are diverse despite the often narrow representation of feminists and feminist issues in traditional media. Young Black women and other women of color have been able to harness the power of the hashtag to amplify conversations that do not normally receive mainstream attention. In chapter 2 we examine #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, and #SayHerName to illustrate how Black women have organized on Twitter to talk about the politics of their everyday experiences with violence. These hashtags trouble the business of mainstream (read “white”) feminism by highlighting the ways Black women and girls are policed, blamed, and harassed, and openly challenge feminist spaces that exclude Black women and girls, as a means to radically rethink gender equality. Jamie Nesbit Golden, feminist journalist and the cocreator of #FastTailedGirls, has offered her thoughts in conjunction with our work in this chapter.

In chapter 3 we center the hashtag #GirlsLikeUs, which marks a particularly compelling network of transgender women who trouble negative societal representations and build community through storytelling and organizing. Though not overtly intended for a mainstream audience, #GirlsLikeUs allows followers a window into the lives of trans women beyond media stereotypes. This chapter explores the creation of the hashtag and how it has been used, noting the most frequent topics and the ways in which the tweets signal an ingroup conversation that is open to the public. We consider in turn the contemporary moment of trans visibility and politics and connect the tweets created by this community of trans women, including several high-profile members, to it. The creator of the #GirlsLikeUs hashtag and outspoken trans advocate Janet Mock allowed us to include her story and mediation on #GirlsLikeUs in this chapter.

In chapter 4, our first on the digital activism of what some have dubbed “the new civil rights movement,” we examine how racialized counterpublics used Twitter as early as 2009, following the killing of Oscar Grant, and through 2012, following the killing of Trayvon Martin, to make state-sanctioned anti-Black violence visible to those outside traditional African American and civil rights communities. We examine how Twitter’s shifting infrastructures in just a few short years changed the way members of racial justice counterpublics engaged one another, as well as media-makers, celebrities, and politicians. This online activism, storytelling, and strategy building set the stage for what would come to be known as the Black Lives Matter movement in ensuing years.

Chapter 5 examines the spread of racial justice hashtags in the wake of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014 and through the series of high-profile incidents of police killings that followed. We consider how the hashtagged naming of victims of this violence, the geographic locations of their deaths, and resulting demands for change have evolved over time. We include several hashtags and topics that were created or occurred prior to Brown’s killing, among them #BlackLivesMatter and #EricGarner, and a series of those that followed, including #BaltimoreUprising and #PhilandoCastile, to illustrate how the networks that create these hashtags are evolving over time. This chapter includes an essay by #BlackLivesMatter activist DiDi Delgado on how the hashtag, and other digital organizing, helped shape her work.

In chapter 6 we consider hashtags created not by members of marginalized publics but by those with more social power seeking to ally themselves with the political needs and experiences of marginalized communities. Here we examine the creation and spread of the hashtags #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite. These hashtags called on men to speak out and act on feminist issues and urged white Americans to acknowledge their privilege in the criminal justice system. They present complex questions about allyship and whether it can in fact be performed successfully online, how such hashtags contribute to the larger goals of networked counterpublics, and what happens when hashtags intended to further social justice focus on those with the most privilege. Emmy Award–winning comedy writer, Daily Show alum, and creator of #CrimingWhileWhite Jason Ross offers his thoughts about his own ally work in this chapter.

In the concluding chapter we look across the counterpublic networks explored in the book, noting similarities and differences in the content, strategies, and network topologies. In doing so, we identify the underlying patterns that enable digital counterpublics—the “signature” of their success. Consistent with the rest of the text, our analyses are both quantitative (network structural) and qualitative (discursive strategy), with implications for academic audiences interested in the mechanics of online social movements and for cultural workers leveraging online media to further their causes. By linking together theorizing networks of dissent, mixed methods and interdisciplinary approaches, and commentary from members of these networks, this book presents a complex picture of contemporary digital counterpublics and demonstrates how to inclusively study the digital behavior of often ignored members of U.S. society.

1 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo

From the earliest feminist presses to Twitter, women have used technology to create and sustain narratives that demand attention and redress for gendered violence. In this chapter we examine the networks that created and spread the hashtags #YesAllWomen, #SurvivorPrivilege, #TheEmptyChair, #WhyIStayed, and #MeToo. Each of these hashtags highlights women’s experiences with interpersonal and institutionally enabled violence, and each was precipitated by high-profile events involving male perpetrators. Along with an examination of these Twitter networks we consider the social and cultural conditions that made the hashtags significant at particular moments, examining the ideological and political work these hashtags perform. We show how these hashtags challenged and changed mainstream narratives about violence against women and extended public debates about victimhood that have long depended on narrow problem definitions and attributions of blame.

Gendered violence has been framed as an individual problem in public discourse in a multitude of ways. From questions about women’s dress and behavior to laws that eschew the possibility that wives can be raped by their husbands, U.S. culture is rife with narratives that blame victims and normalize violence against them.[1] As a result, men are rarely held accountable for their violent behavior, and when they are, they are understood to be individual bad actors. This framing ignores the realities of a culture that systemically and institutionally enables gendered violence. Feminist activists and scholars have been central to critiquing this culture. For example, Ana Clarissa Rojas argues that domestic and intimate partner violence is “medicalized” when it becomes an individual issue managed by law enforcement and doctors rather than a social problem predicated on long-entrenched social norms of gender.[2] Andrea Ritchie’s groundbreaking work Invisible No More charts how the sexual violence that Black girls experience in their youth contributes to their likely incarceration years later. She argues for more effective interventions that acknowledge the cultural and social realities that make girls vulnerable to predation.[3]

On social media, victim blaming can intensify. Bailey Poland and Kate Mann have offered detailed accounts of the ways women are targeted through violent online practices such as trolling, doxing, and even swatting, which encourages state violence in the offline world.[4] And just as in the offline world, some narratives of online gendered violence have held victims accountable. If you are being attacked online, these narratives suggest, why are you talking about this issue? Why are you using this forum or platform? If you don’t like it, leave. But, like media outlets of the past, the web has become a space to challenge these narratives.

The #YesAllWomen network and those we examine that follow it in this chapter and the next two chapters are part of what has come to be known as “Feminist Twitter.”[5] Feminist Twitter is diverse and existed in various forms long before #YesAllWomen, thanks to women and feminist allies online organically building publics through common concerns. Yet #YesAllWomen seems to have opened the floodgates of feminist hashtag activism—the length of time between the high-profile trending of feminist tags lessened remarkably beginning in 2014—while around the same time, mainstream and traditional media outlets began running profiles of Feminist Twitter debates and figures.

Feminist Twitter, and earlier iterations of it such as feminist blog rings, are spaces where misogyny is challenged online in the tradition of the early feminist press. For survivors of violence, the internet has enabled networks of solidarity beyond geographic boundaries, fostered consciousness raising, and provided a forum for storytelling with less physical risk. Before the popularization of Twitter, a photoblog titled Hollaback! became a space for people who experienced street harassment to share the photos of their assailants online. The blog grew to include offline chapters in different cities and countries around the world that fight street harassment through public education and women’s empowerment.[6] In 2014 the platform released a video documenting one woman’s daylong experience of catcalling that went viral for raising questions about race and street harassment.[7]

The networks that form around women employing hashtags to talk about gendered violence on Twitter, like the ones we examine in this chapter, become spaces where a growing number of people, connected by their use of hashtags and the shared trauma that inspired their deployment, can amplify the same kinds of feminist critiques that have often had only limited or elite reach. This practice has led to the creation of networks that offer cathartic release and solidarity among those sharing stories of victimization and survival while making unignorable the political and cultural demands of a still violently patriarchal society.

For this chapter, Wagatwe Wanjuki, the activist and anti-sexual violence advocate who created #SurvivorPrivilege, has contributed a reflection on pages 8 to 10.

#YesAllWomen: The Building Blocks of Hashtag Solidarity

On May 23, 2014, twenty-two-year-old Elliot Rodger stabbed his three roommates to death before embarking on a shooting spree near the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara, that left three more dead and fourteen injured. Rodger exchanged gunfire with police before fatally shooting himself. It was later discovered that Rodger had created YouTube videos and a written manifesto explaining the impetus for his violence, citing a desire to retaliate against women who would not date him. His logic was nurtured in dangerous online men’s rights and incel (involuntarily celibate) groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center has recently added to its list of hate groups.[8] Rodger’s manifesto was circulated by many news outlets, some of which played portions of the videos in which Rodger professed disdain for immigrants and disgust for white women who would date men of color but not him. A copy of his final video, with nearly a million views, remains on YouTube as we write.

Rodger’s deadly violence sparked a national debate about men’s entitlement and violent behavior toward women. Writers at popular outlets such as Slate and Salon positioned Rodger’s violence within the context of the social pressure men exert when they assume that women should be sexually available to them.[9] Male readers and commentators quickly jumped in with arguments that not all men behave this way. Though these men rarely used the exact words “not all men,” their message could be summed up with that succinct phrasing. Using the hashtag #NotAllMen created by Twitter user @sassycrass a year earlier, feminists mocked this recurrent practice of men’s desire to distance themselves from misogynistic violence. On May 24, 2014, user @gildedspine started the hashtag #YesAllWomen to decry this distancing practice by men and to highlight women’s shared experiences of sexism and misogyny.[10] Within four days, #YesAllWomen had been tweeted more than a million times.

At its peak, #YesAllWomen resulted in more than 60,000 tweets an hour. The oldest and largest of the hashtags we examine in this chapter, #YesAllWomen first trended in late May 2014, following the discovery of Elliot Rodger’s misogynistic YouTube videos. During our observation window (May 23, 2014–June 30, 2015), the hashtag was tweeted by more than one million distinct Twitter accounts connected by almost five million retweets and mentions (101,822 accounts and 457,824 connections in our 10 percent sample). The hashtag trended quickly, with one quarter of the tweets appearing the first day and nearly two-thirds within the first week. #YesAllWomen remained popular for another two weeks, an unusually long duration compared with other hashtags reviewed in this chapter. By mid-June 2014 new tweets containing #YesAllWomen had slowed to only a few per day.[11]

Though most popular in the United States and the UK, #YesAllWomen also trended in Pakistan and Iran, often appearing alongside its instigating hashtag, #NotAllMen, and political and cultural hashtags associated with women’s issues, such as #RapeCulture and #Feminism. Notably, while they sometimes co-occurred, the hashtag trended on a much larger scale than phrases and hashtags created by elites to discuss women’s marginalization, such as Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer’s “war on women,” showing the power of ordinary women to create relatable public narrative. #YesAllWomen spoke to a global experience of patriarchal hegemony, rape culture, and misogyny.

The #YesAllWomen network provided a place for women to candidly discuss the harassment they experienced and find solidarity in other stories like their own.[12] As author Soraya Chemaly tweeted, “#NotAllMen practice violence against women but #YesAllWomen live with the threat of male violence. Every. Single. Day. All over the world.” In illustrating the widespread nature of patriarchal and misogynistic thinking, #YesAllWomen documented the impact of gendered violence, demanded that defensive men sit and listen, and created rhetorical kinship among women. As Beins describes in her consideration of feminist slogans in the 1970s, phrases that work to flatten identity-based differences are important in social movements that orient their demands along a single central access of marginalization.[13] The popularity of #YesAllWomen illustrates the ways the logic of activist slogans and feminist discourse has moved online, and effectively so. And just as activist utterances of solidarity have long worked as a form of interpellation in which collective identities are built through the ideological subject, so too this process works in online networks.[14] In this case, women recognized themselves and their experiences in the ideological criticism offered in #YesAllWomen utterances.

As research by Jackson and Banaszczyk has detailed, the hashtag #YesAllWomen worked ideologically to (1) reprioritize the public’s focus from narratives that downplay the prevalence of men committing violence (vis-à-vis the reactionary #NotAllMen hashtag) to narratives acknowledging the frequency of women’s experiences with violence, (2) illustrate the connection between everyday sexism and violence, and (3) legitimate the concept of rape culture.[15] Popular tweets in the network offered “Because when a guy kills six people because he’s a virgin and women reject him, he’s met with sympathy. #YesAllWomen” and “#YesAllWomen are taught safety tips to prevent rape but not all men are taught about consent.”

While many early tweets in the network framed the Isla Vista shooting as an example of the consequences of permitting a misogynistic culture, the network later became much broader, with few of the most popular tweets overall mentioning the shooting. Members of the network used the tag to connect issues of gender inequality across economic, health care, criminal justice, and business contexts to misogynistic violence and used illustrative language to show how the prevalence of this inequality normalizes sexual violence against women. For example, the hashtag was used alongside those related to equal pay for women in Hollywood and the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act by congress. Together, the users in the #YesAllWomen hashtag provided a cultural intervention that refused to accept the violence perpetrated by Elliot Rodgers as an aberration, instead connecting it to the various way misogyny is normalized and even celebrated in U.S. culture and the diverse ways the everyday violence of this misogyny is experienced by women.

#YesAllWomen was covered extensively in traditional media outlets, with cable news segments and front-page reporting in prominent print publications such as Time and People and on NPR and MSNBC. The success of the hashtag can be measured in both its popularity and the other hashtags and online debates it spurred. In addition to responding to #NotAllMen narratives, #YesAllWomen spurred #YesAllWhiteWomen, a hashtag that called for important intracommunity debate about the erasure of women of color in feminist histories and within the most widely shared tweets using the hashtag itself. We explore the topic of women of color feminist hashtags and intersectionality in more depth in chapter 2. In chapter 6 we explore the hashtag #AllMenCan, a derivative hashtag intended to promote men’s solidarity with women on the issues of sexual violence and misogyny.

#SurvivorPrivilege: Considering Lasting Consequences

On June 6, 2014, conservative commentator George Will wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post suggesting that the way university administrators respond to sexual violence on campus “make[s] victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges” and makes “victims proliferate.”[16] Will’s arguments were painfully out of touch with data showing not only that sexual assault is underreported on college campuses but also that survivors face the most lasting consequences of often poorly written and poorly implemented university student conduct policies.[17] In response, campus antirape activist Wagatwe Wanjunki tweeted, “The #SurvivorPrivilege of being too scared to leave my dorm room for fear of running into my perp.”

Wanjunki detailed in tweets how her assault led her to be kicked out of school, with more than $10,000 in debt.

A Survivor-Activist on #SurvivorPrivilege

Wagatwe Wanjuki

The story of how I, for the first time, made something trend nationally on Twitter is a perfect example of my journey as both a survivor of sexual violence and a digital activist demanding justice for survivors.

During a bus ride to Washington, D.C., to help with a training I kept seeing links and tweets about a column that the Washington Post’s George Will wrote about campus sexual assault. In the interest of #selfcare, I tried to avoid reading Will’s piece but gathered he suggested that victims of assault somehow benefit from the experience. I didn’t want to give the Post the online traffic, and once you’ve read one piece by an old, privileged white man complaining about holding rapists accountable, you’ve read them all. However, something about the outrage seemed a little different. The righteous anger was stronger and more widespread; I noticed people outside my normal circle of antirape activists were condemning it.

I wanted to join the conversation, and I finally read the piece at the center of the firestorm. It left me so livid that I was shaking a tiny bit from rage. I didn’t want to scare the stranger sitting next to me, so I did what any other self-respecting outraged millennial with a smartphone would do—I took my outrage to Twitter. Tweeting “Where’s my survivor privilege? Was expelled & have $10,000s of private student loans used to attend school that didn’t care I was raped,” I turned my tweets of rage into the #SurvivorPrivilege hashtag and, to my complete surprise, it took off.

I had no expectations that the hashtag would go viral; I just wanted to use the little platform I had to clap back at the sexist media that tried to minimize my experience and discount the work my fellow survivor-activists did for safer campuses by demanding increased accountability. Since I didn’t have my own column at a renowned, widely read newspaper, I used Twitter to create space for a counternarrative that revealed the truth about campus sexual assault as well as shining truth on the fact that the article written by Mr. Will was not based on the reality of survivor stories.

In retrospect, I see why #SurvivorPrivilege trended so quickly. It was a powerful hashtag because it both provided a community for survivors to tell their stories while also creating a powerful, overwhelming counternarrative to Will’s column. Through the research and activism I’ve done over the past decade I have reached the conclusion that breaking the silence around victimhood and more accurate media coverage of sexual violence are extremely powerful tools in countering rape culture.

By creating a public, shared space for survivors to amplify the reality of surviving gender-based violence, we were able to use our truths to debunk irrational concerns that being raped offers privileges or advantages. With the combined power of our stories, we didn’t just feel less alone, we also raised our voices to create a stronger and more accurate media narrative. Instead of simply being outraged, we were able to channel our anger in a way that was productive by revealing the truth about survivors’ lived experiences.

Rape culture is vast and complex; it can affect every aspect of our lives, often in ways we don’t understand. That’s why I use Twitter as just one of many tools in my work toward a world free of sexual violence. As we increasingly force institutions with power to listen to our survivor stories, we are able to also chip away at the systems that enable individuals to harm with impunity. We will win—through self-empowerment, community connection, and refusing to shut up.

#SurvivorPrivilege trended less than a month after #YesAllWomen, starting on June 9, 2014, and remaining popular for several days, eventually appearing in more than 20,000 tweets in following week. Tweets continued to appear occasionally in the weeks that followed, although nearly 87 percent appeared in the first week, and virtually no tweets containing the hashtag appeared after July 1, 2014. Our data include 1,822 tweets sent by 268 unique users connected by 775 retweet and mention links. The smallest of the networks we examine in this chapter, the hashtag centered on four accounts (pictured in figure 1.1): George Will (@georgewill) and the Washington Post (@washingtonpost), respectively the author and the source of the original article, who were frequently mentioned in critiques, and Wagatwe Wanjuki (@wagatwe) and Katie Klabusich (@Katie_Speak), whose tweets critiquing Will were retweeted hundreds of times.

Although George Will’s Twitter handle appears most frequently in the #SurvivorPrivilege network (through mentions), he did not engage directly with the hashtag or resulting network. Indeed, the most popularly co-occurring hashtags, #Rape, #RapeCulture, and #FireGeorgeWill, illustrate that the prevailing conversation in the network was decisively pushing back against Will’s message.

Many high-profile and central members of Feminist Twitter contributed to this hashtag along with Wanjuki, including feminist commentators Zerlina Maxwell and Katie Klabusich. Feminist publications and digital media outlets also shared and spread the hashtag, including Mic and Feministing. The website PolicyMic, a central player in the later hashtag #AllMenCan, which is covered in chapter 6 of this book, interviewed Wanjuki and featured the tweets of other Twitter users, who shared horrific and lasting examples of their so-called #SurvivorPrivilege in action. Users explained how their sexual assaults affected their grades, mental health, relationships, and professional successes and finances.

#SurvivorPrivilege is an example of the thoughtful media criticism that arises from digital counterpublics. This media criticism specifically critiques rape-apology and victim-blaming narratives that construct survivors, and specifically women survivors, as diabolical schemers who reap social reward for accusing men of predatory behaviors. Thus these tweets focused on (1) the lasting, negative, and everyday consequences of assault and abuse that affect women long after their victimization, and (2) critiquing mainstream narratives that victim blame or work as rape apology, and particularly the fact that high-profile mainstream publications give space to narratives like Will’s.

Figure 1.1

Visualization of #SurvivorPrivilege retweet and mention network. In this and all network graphs throughout the book, network nodes are individual Twitter accounts, represented by circles, and links are retweets and mentions, represented by lines connecting interacting nodes. Nodes in this graph are sized by in-degree, such that the largest nodes have the most retweets and mentions. This graph was generated in Gephi using the ForceAtlas2 force-directed layout algorithm.

For example, one user tweeted, “#SurvivorPrivilege is actually finding solace in absolutely awful, triggering tweets because I know I’m not alone.” Another wrote, “#SurvivorPrivilege was seeing my rapist every morning in the dining hall casually pouring himself cereal after he threatened to kill me.” In direct media criticism, Klabusich tweeted, “The @washingtonpost column wasn’t just a ‘difference of opinion.’ @georgewill is contributing violent rhetoric and harm. #survivorprivilege,” and the feminist outlet Feministing shared its coverage of the story with the headline, “#SurvivorPrivilege shows George Will just how fun it is to be a rape survivor.” Together, the contributions to the hashtag made demands that women survivors be heard and that the severity of personal consequences faced by victims of violence be acknowledged.

#WhyIStayed: Expanding Victimhood

Similarly, #WhyIStayed became an opportunity for survivors of intimate partner violence to share their stories. Following the September 8, 2014, release of video footage of Baltimore Ravens football player Ray Rice’s violent attack on his fiancée and later wife, Janay Palmer, in a casino elevator, news media outlets engaged in egregious displays of victim blaming. Hosts on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends” argued that Palmer set a bad example to other women by following through on the marriage and staying with Rice through all his legal trouble. An on-air reporter jokingly quipped that Palmer should have just taken the stairs to avoid being in the elevator with Rice.[18] In a discussion of this newsclip with fellow survivors, Twitter user Beverly Gooden wrote, “I stayed because I thought it would get better. It never got any better. #WhyIStayed.” The same day, Gooden took to her blog to elaborate on why she created the hashtag. She wrote:

For over a year, I was physically abused by my ex-husband. When TMZ released the video of Ray Rice punching, dragging, and spitting on his wife this morning, the internet exploded with questions about her. Why didn’t she leave? Why did she marry him? Why did she stay? I can’t speak for Janay Rice, but I can speak for Beverly Gooden. Why did I stay? Check out some of my reasons here. Leaving was a process, not an event. And sometimes it takes a while to navigate through the process. I believe in storytelling. I believe in the power of shared experience. I believe that we find strength in community. That is why I created this hashtag. I hope those tweeting using #WhyIStayed find a voice, find love, find compassion, and find hope.[19]

Her tweet and the hashtag were amplified; #WhyIStayed appeared more than 100,000 times beginning on September 8, 2014. Our data include more than 13,000 of these tweets, 85 percent of which were posted in the week following Gooden’s September 8 message. Like #SurvivorPrivilege, #WhyIStayed was relatively short-lived with almost no new tweets appearing after a month had elapsed. #WhyIStayed tweets were sent by 8,952 users connected by 8,663 retweets and featured messages about Rice and Palmer, domestic violence, and escaping domestic violence. The network centered on creator Gooden (@bevtgooden), who was retweeted and mentioned twice as often as the next most popular users. While #WhyIStayed is one of the smaller networks examined here, it is nonetheless diverse, including well-known male writers such as Daniel José Older and Judd Legum, who used the hashtag as a form of allyship to share and highlight women’s experiences with their followers; celebrities such as actress Reagan Gomez-Preston (@ReaganGomez); influential members of Feminist Twitter (including Soraya Chemaly and Dana Bolger); advocacy organizations highlighting resources for domestic violence victims (such as @NOMOREorg and @KnowYourIX); and ordinary women sharing their own stories of abuse and survival.[20]

#WhyIStayed allowed users to share their reasons for staying in abusive relationships by illustrating the coercive language and behaviors their partners used against them and, like other hashtags examined here, created a community around an experience of violence that might otherwise lead to isolation and shame. In #WhyIStayed tweets, two primary frames emerged that (1) countered popular victim blaming narratives and (2) highlighted toxic relational behaviors as a form of public awareness. Thus, like other hashtags reviewed in this chapter, #WhyIStayed addressed the cultural prevalence of victim-blaming narratives and the work such narratives do to absolve men in particular of their responsibility to end violence. This hashtag included tweets that illustrated the systemic consequences of domestic violence. For example, Safe Horizon, one of the nation’s oldest domestic abuse hotlines, used the hashtag to share statistics on the startling rate of homelessness among women and families fleeing abuse, and Think Progress, the news site run by the Center for American Progress Action Fund, shared statistics related to the frequent murder of women trying to flee domestic violence. The adoption of the hashtag by advocacy organizations and niche media illustrates that such organizations follow and very much respond to discourses organically produced by ordinary citizens.

#WhyIStayed also served as a form of public education as it outlined the manipulative behavior of abusers, as well as the difficulty women in abusive relationships face trying to avoid and escape such situations. Women shared stories about the various forms of physical violence and emotional and psychological manipulation they experienced from people they loved. The hashtag detailed stories of men threatening to kill themselves if the woman they abused left them, men sleeping on the floor in front of exit doors to prevent women from leaving their homes, tearful pleas, apologies, and promises, and a barrage of manipulative blaming in attempts to convince victims their abuse was deserved. In the case of the emotional and psychological violence that accompanies physical abuse, the #WhyIStayed hashtag illustrated that cultural victim-blaming narratives extend and model this violence. As @feministabulous tweeted, “It’s not one day he hits you. It’s everyday he works to make you smaller,” and @juddlegum shared an infographic on the ways abusers exert power and control over their victims with his more than 250,000 followers (figure 1.3).

Figure 1.2

Tweets from advocacy organizations and news sources featuring statistics on domestic violence using #WhyIStayed.[21]

Together, #WhyIStayed messages demanded the public hear the stories of survivors of intimate partner violence and worked discursively through storytelling and data sharing to expand definitions of legitimate victimhood that have long excluded women who experience abuse in the private sphere. By the end of September, even Fox News’s “Social Buzz” segment had changed its tune, with an on-air reading of several tweets that included the hashtag. Several major news outlets covered the hashtag and featured survivors of intimate partner violence telling their own stories. In late October 2014 the NFL, Ray Rice’s employer, tried to capitalize on the success of hashtag activism and recuperate its public image by using #NoMore in a public service campaign featuring league players offering messages about ending domestic abuse. That month feminist scholar and activist Beth Richie was recruited by the NFL to assist in coordinating an effort to address intimate partner violence within the league.

Figure 1.3

Tweet from journalist Judd Legum signal-boosting information about intimate partner abuse using #WhyIStayed.

#TheEmptyChair: The Scale of Violence

#TheEmptyChair is unique among the hashtags discussed in this chapter as it is created not by a survivor of violence but by an ally, yet it was widely adopted by survivors. On July 27, 2015, New York Magazine ran a cover story that featured an image of thirty-five of comedian Bill Cosby’s sexual assault and rape accusers who had come forward in the press to detail his decades-spanning predatory behavior. The powerful image shows the thirty-five women in the same position and the same chair looking out from the cover as if looking directly at the reader. Cover story authors Ella Ceron and Lainna Fader wrote that the empty chair at the end of the last row of women “signified the 11 other women who have accused Cosby of assault, but weren’t photographed for the magazine. But it also represents the countless other women who have been sexually assaulted but have been unable or unwilling to come forward.”[22] The cover was so compelling that New York Magazine’s website crashed because of the overwhelming number of people accessing it.

Activist Bree Newsome and other Twitter users noted the visual power of the empty chair in the cover photo, and comedian and journalist Elon James White started the hashtag #TheEmptyChair by retweeting the cover image with the hashtag and the hashtag #BillCosby. Up to that point, the tweet had received only 321 retweets and 168 likes—but what White did next, as an ally, received far more attention. After receiving a direct message from a rape survivor that read, “I can’t share my empty chair story bc I signed an NDA. needed the money more than justice, and he knew it #TheEmptyChair,” White agreed to share the tweet anonymously. His public tweet of this direct message launched a wave of others, leading White to open his Twitter inbox so that anyone could message him privately and he would post their story anonymously using his own Twitter handle. His tweets prompted the rapid proliferation of #TheEmptyChair, resulting in more than 40,000 tweets total. Our data include 4,275 tweets generated by 3,192 users connected by 3,551 retweets and mentions. Among the hashtags examined in this chapter, #TheEmptyChair proliferated the fastest, with nearly all the tweets (91 percent) posted in the three days following the July 27 New York Magazine story. The network was also disproportionately driven by a single user—almost 20 percent of all the tweets were authored by White or were retweets of his messages. White was retweeted more than three times as often as the next most-retweeted user. He used his Twitter platform, which includes 70,000+ followers, and the hashtag #TheEmptyChair to amplify the voices of hundreds of survivors who were too afraid to use their own Twitter handles. White’s activism and the anonymous tweets he shared created solidarity among other Twitter users, who in turn shared their stories as well. White’s visceral reaction to the messages he received, as exemplified by the tweets in figure 1.4, reveal the startling number of stories published over the course of several days.

#TheEmptyChair worked primarily to show the scale of sexual violence and the scale at which survivors are silenced. It did so through two types of discourse, one affirming belief in survivors and the value of women’s experience regardless of when (or if) they come forward and the second calling attention to the often invisible scope of the problem. This discourse again served as a correction to mainstream narratives that victim-blame by suggesting that women’s accounts of assaults, here because of time lags to reporting or the decision to remain anonymous, are unreliable. The discourse attached to this hashtag offered important nuance, noting that in light of how survivors are treated by the media, the legal system, and people affiliated with those who perpetrate violence against them, it is wholly understandable that they fear retribution and revictimization in the public sphere. White, for example, also tweeted, “What’s fucking with me most is how many women, hell, how many women I KNOW that sit in #TheEmptyChair because of how we treat rape victims.”

Figure 1.4

Elon James White reacting to #TheEmptyChair tweets being sent to him privately by direct message.

That countless women trusted Elon James White to share their stories anonymously despite his knowing their identities shows the close kinship in the network and the important work men can do as allies on issues related to violence against women. White carefully removed identifying information from screenshots of the messages he received, adding only the hashtag to the messages, choosing to let these anonymous women speak rather than speaking for or about their experiences.

Like #WhyIStayed, #TheEmptyChair reflected a noticeable diversity of users both part of and outside what is generally considered Feminist Twitter. The journalist Jamil Smith also served as an ally in the network, tweeting, “Do not wait for a man to speak to believe women who are already talking. Nothing to add. #TheEmptyChair.” Trans activist Janet Mock, creator of #GirlsLikeUs, which we detail in chapter 3, tweeted, “#TheEmptyChair signals the women who couldn’t come forward mostly b/c we, as a culture, wouldn’t believe them.” Journalist Emily Hauser shared a link to her own reporting on the prevalence of rape culture, noting, “Men have always known that you don’t have to be beloved or famous to get away with rape: #TheEmptyChair.” Writer and actress Pia Glenn offered simply, “It could be so many of us sitting in #TheEmptyChair.” This group is representative of the diversity of engagement in #TheEmptyChair network.

On April 26, 2018, almost three years after the New York Magazine cover story that iconized the image of the empty chair, Cosby was found guilty on three counts of indecent assault—a mere scratch on the surface of the overall accusations he’s faced but an enormously important cultural moment for women fearful that justice might never come. His conviction reenergized the hashtag #TheEmptyChair and prompted White to reflect on the experience. He tweeted that reading those 2015 tweets from women survivors “destroyed my soul.” He also added, “Even with #metoo happening there are so many women still in #TheEmptyChair. Folks out here worrying about the men’s lives supposedly ruined while ignoring all the women who still can’t come forward because of how society still blames them for their own assault.”

Figure 1.5

Elon James White sharing #TheEmptyChair direct messages from his inbox with identifying information of senders removed to protect their identities.

White’s allyship was incredibly successful in amplifying the voices of women who might otherwise have kept their stories to themselves. He used his platform to make space for survivors to tell their own stories without talking over them or sanitizing their sentiments. His useful intervention in the deployment and proliferation of the hashtag differs from the hashtag use of allies explored in chapter 6 because he simply never centered his own experiences.

#MeToo: The Tipping Point of Visibility

White’s recent nod to the connection between #MeToo and #TheEmptyChair is important because it shows that these hashtags create a discernible genealogy that has important cultural resonances. #MeToo is also unique because it was an activist campaign before it was a hashtag. Sexual assault activist Tarana Burke started Me Too in 2007 to provide women and girls the opportunity to connect with other survivors. Through her nonprofit Just Be Inc., Burke has long created opportunities for women to share their stories of survival and access the support they need. However, her work was almost erased with the adoption of #MeToo in hashtag form by actress Alyssa Milano.

On October 15, 2017, Milano responded to the growing discourse about sexual violence in Hollywood initially sparked by actresses coming forward about producer Harvey Weinstein’s serial predatory behavior. Milano tweeted “If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet.” Milano’s tweet, as we write, has more than 50,000 likes. The difference in magnitude between Elon James White’s initial call to acknowledge #TheEmptyChair and Milano’s reintroduction of #MeToo is explained in part by the evolution of hashtags as a successful vehicle for movement building—in addition to the significantly larger number of followers Milano and other celebrities who picked up and legitimized #MeToo share.

Further, the gender and racial politics of these hashtags and the communities from which they sprang tells another part of the story. Notably, Black women had been speaking up about Cosby’s sexual violence for decades, but their voices were not heard. It was not until another Black male comedian, Hannibal Buress, called Cosby a “rapist” during a 2014 standup show that many in the mainstream discovered the story.[23] Women noted at the time that stories about Cosby’s behavior were frequently shared by them without similar mainstream controversy or interest. Thus Elon James White’s 2015 act of solidarity with #TheEmptyChair was all the more powerful as it exposed a reality first laid bare by the response to Buress—that Black men who were seen as Cosby’s in-group and who carried the benefits of credentialed masculinity were able to propel the conversation forward in ways that women previously could not. Similarly, Alyssa Milano, a wealthy, famous white woman, was able to garner a level of attention for #MeToo that none of the other hashtags discussed in this chapter enjoyed. Yet there is no doubt that without these prior hashtags, the conversation that empowered even the most privileged women to reveal acts of violence perpetrated against them would not have been as easily received.

Both #TheEmptyChair and #MeToo illustrate the power of cross-identity solidarities as White continues to use his platform to share the voices of women survivors and Milano quickly sought to align with Burke in orchestrating the next moves for #MeToo. After an immense amount of press around #MeToo, thanks to the high-profile identities of many of the actresses who came forward with stories about Weinstein, Burke and other longtime women of color activists partnered with Hollywood actresses and started a new campaign using the hashtag #TimesUp, putting men and other perpetrators on notice that time was up for them to keep getting away with their abusive behaviors. At the January 2018 75th Golden Globe Awards, A-list actresses invited Burke and fellow women’s rights activists onto the red carpet, where they donned all Black and spoke out about the need for significant changes not only in the entertainment industry but among all industries in which women are sexually exploited under the guise of naturalized labor conditions.[24]

The primary frame of #MeToo is one of solidarity and an insistence that stories about the personal are systemic and political. In their #MeToo stories, women speak to mainstream media, to patriarchal establishments, and directly to one another as a form of community building that works to alleviate the risk and fear associated with coming forward that #TheEmptyChair so eloquently illustrated. As with #YesAllWomen, much more scholarly and media attention has been paid to #MeToo than to the other hashtags we examine here, in large part because of the high-profile status of the celebrities connected to it, but we argue that the #MeToo boon was made possible by its predecessors and by the digital labor, consciousness raising, and alternative storytelling done by #YesAllWomen, #SurvivorPrivilege, #WhyIStayed, #TheEmptyChair, and many other hashtags and conversations about gendered violence that were pushed into visibility by women and their allies on Twitter.

The Personal Hashtag Is Political

Ultimately these hashtags are embodiments of the feminist demand that “the personal is political,” and illustrate how storytelling on Twitter raises consciousness, creates solidarity, promulgates new cultural narratives, and articulates demands for change. What has become known as the “#MeToo moment” was not so much a moment but a loud chorus of voices that had for years been using Twitter and other social networks to tell the stories about women’s experiences with violence that were not and had not been told in mainstream media, by politicians, or by most journalists. In these networks, unlike in most other public spaces, women told their own stories, women were believed, male allies helped elevate women’s voices, and women—experts in their own lives—added nuance to the all too often oversimplified and inaccurately reported systemic issues of gender, violence, and victimhood.

Each hashtag, from #YesAllWomen to #MeToo, did different work as part of a larger movement, creating cultural interventions in response to particular news stories and events that reached the public sphere. This shows the adaptability of digital feminism and the power of Twitter to be utilized beyond its initial social media purpose. As this chapter illustrates, these hashtags provided a source of discursive and collective energy that catalyzed both online and offline movement work, leading to powerful cultural repercussions and, yes, change. Since the hashtagification of #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein has been removed from his organization, as has his name, and he has been charged with multiple counts of rape and sexual misconduct in the Manhattan Supreme Court.[25] #MeToo has also been taken up by women in countries such as China that lack the protected freedoms of expression we enjoy in the United States. As Leta Hong Fincher has documented, the #RiceBunny hashtag is widely used by Chinese feminists to get around the nation’s censorship of #MeToo after innovative users began employing the emojis for a bowl of rice (phonetically pronounced “mi”) and a rabbit (phonetically pronounced “tu”) on the popular social media platform Weibo.[26]

In addition to the growing number of celebrity men who have been implicated by #MeToo, the repercussions have also had an impact on men in academia and politics. The feminist sociologist Michael Kimmel was accused of #MeToo misconduct when he was on the precipice of receiving a lifetime achievement award for his role in the field at the 2018 annual American Sociology Association conference.[27] Brett Kavanaugh, the Trump administration’s 2018 nominee for Supreme Court justice, was accused of sexually assaulting Christine Blasey Ford. Dr. Blasey Ford, an initially lone voice, evoked Anita Hill’s experience with sexual harassment at the hands of a nominated and eventually seated Supreme Court justice, Clarence Thomas. As reporters attempted to compare the stories and potential outcomes of the Kavanaugh and Thomas hearings, race and the social climate created by #MeToo were noted as important difference in these two cases. While Kavanaugh was ultimately confirmed even after two more women came forward, the ferocity of the resistance was unparalleled. Tracie Cheng invigorated the growing protests with her visual rendering of Kavanaugh in Obama’s red, white, and blue HOPE posters, replacing the header with the text “Kava” and “NOPE,” accompanied by the hashtag #StopKavanaugh. The image went viral, and #KavaNope and derivatives such as #KavaNo and #KavaNah helped further the feminist fury.[28] Though these actions did not stop Kavanaugh’s confirmation, they did demonstrate the power of feminist organizing both on- and offline.

2 Visions of Black Feminism: #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, #SayHerName

In chapter 1 we considered hashtags created to address violence against women that trended on Feminist Twitter, within wider Twitter networks, and in some cases within the larger public sphere. As that chapter illustrates, many of the hashtags that interrogate issues of gendered violence on Twitter are started by women of color, then picked up by others to address overarching experiences shared by women across racial, ethnic, religious, class, and other social identity categories. Yet what is missing from much of the mainstream commentary about trending feminist hashtags is not only that women of color often lead creative and political work on popular hashtags but also that they regularly create and lead racial and ethnic in-group conversations about feminist issues. These in-group hashtags provide critical challenges to feminist and ethnic counterpublics by centering intersectional frameworks and experiences.

For example, while much was celebrated about the #YesAllWomen hashtag following the Isla Vista shootings, women of color created #YesAllWhiteWomen to address how the original hashtag was appropriated in the service of a kind of “mainstream” or “white” feminism that is understood to be blind to intersectional politics—after all, it is not the case that all women experience the same forms or severity of sexism. Likewise, Mikki Kendall, whom we discuss in greater depth later in the chapter, created the hashtag #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen in response to prominent white feminists on Twitter coming to the defense of self-proclaimed male feminist Hugo Schwyzer despite years of mistreatment of women of color online.[1] #YesAllWhiteWomen and #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen were disparaged by some as divisive and unreasonable for pointing out that women of color face unique forms of oppression.[2] Similarly, it was only with intentional pushing from women of color and white allies in the feminist counterpublic that journalists in 2017 corrected their initial attribution of the #MeToo hashtag from Alyssa Milano to Tarana Burke, who had originated the hashtag several years earlier.

In this chapter we focus on hashtags often ignored or excluded from celebratory accounts of Feminist Twitter and Black Twitter—those created by Black feminists to challenge the gatekeeping narratives in both. We consider, in particular, the significant role that Black women play in Twitter counterpublics and how these women, through hashtag activism, insist on a politics of intersectionality. Black women’s voices on Twitter challenge not only mainstream narratives about race, gender, and sexuality but also those within gender and race counterpublics themselves.

For this chapter Jamie Nesbitt Golden, cocreator of the hashtag #FastTailedGirls, has contributed a reflection on pages 36 to 37.

Black Feminist Thought Moves Online

Black people are instrumental to the success of social media, and to the success of Twitter specifically. According to a 2018 study by the Pew Research Center, Black Americans use Twitter more than any other racial demographic in the United States.[3] Black women especially use social media platforms to grow awareness about intracommunity concerns, turning Twitter into a town forum to discuss important topics. Here we examine three Twitter hashtags that raised awareness about Black feminist interests among narrow and broad audiences. The hashtags #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, and #SayHerName are among those that illustrate the power of Black feminist politics online.

The roots of Black feminism in the United States can be traced to the work of Anna Julia Cooper in A Voice from the South in 1892. Cooper wrote, “[The colored woman] is confronted by both a woman question and a race problem, and is yet an unknown or unacknowledged factor in both.”[4] Cooper’s words express the unique positionality of Black women who battle both racism and sexism at the same time as not independent but intersecting experiences. This “double jeopardy” has also been discussed by other Black feminists, including Frances Beal, whose 1969 pamphlet (an early form of social media) detailed how Black women are economically disprivileged in relation to both Black men and white women.[5]

In 1977 the Combahee River Collective published a statement that included the first use of the term “identity politics.” The collective wrote, “This focusing upon our own oppression is the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end someone else’s oppression.” The collective articulated the particular nature of their perspective as Black women radicals, stating, “The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”[6] Their words laid the foundation for the Black feminist legal theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw’s solidifying the concept in the term intersectionality in 1989. Crenshaw’s work in relation to discrimination law details that race and gender hierarchies don’t have an additive negative effect but rather intersect and interact to produce uniquely discriminatory realities for those multiply marginalized. In her canonical text, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Crenshaw explains, “My objective there was to illustrate that many of the experiences Black women face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood, and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the women’s race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately.”[7] Since then, Crenshaw’s distillation of the term “intersectionality” has become popular not only in academic scholarship but also in popular culture, activism, and politics.

Social media, for example, have allowed terms like “intersectionality” and “identity politics” to circulate and reach broader audiences. One of the authors of this book, Moya Bailey, coined the related term misogynoir, which has similarly diffused through online spaces largely owing to other Black women’s embrace of the term. Misogynoir describes the “particular brand of hatred directed at Black women in U.S. visual & popular culture.”[8] A large body of scholarship has documented the stereotypical and dehumanizing way Black women have been depicted in U.S. films and on television, but even on social media sites such as Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter, examples of misogynoir are rife. For example, the hashtag #RuinABlackGirlsMonday was created to share photos and selfies of voluptuous white women who are portrayed as being more attractive than Black women, particularly because they have physical characteristics associated with Black women without being Black. Black women’s lived experiences and the way those experiences can be understood through intersectionality and misogynoir animate the hashtags discussed in this chapter.

#FastTailedGirls Challenge the Narrative

Longtime bloggers and real-life friends Mikki Kendall and Jamie Nesbitt Golden were early adopters of Twitter, joining the platform in 2009 and 2008, respectively. In 2013 they teamed up on a digital effort they dubbed “Hood Feminism,” drawing on their Black working-class roots and the everyday grappling with and subverting of gendered power by the women in their families.[9] These women, they note, would likely eschew the term “feminist” because of its association as something for privileged white women. During the time they were building Hood Feminism, singer R. Kelly performed with Lady Gaga at the November 24, 2013, American Music Awards, sparking a Twitter debate about his continued celebrity despite his predatory sexual behavior toward Black girls.[10] Spurred by this conversation on Twitter and a blog post inspired by Michonne Micheaux on “Fast Black Girls,” Kendall tweeted on November 29, “If I did a chat for #FastTailedGirls as part of a greater discussion of Black women’s sexuality would y’all participate?” In less than twenty-four hours the hashtag was trending on Twitter.[11] In total, over 20,000 tweets containing the hashtag appeared, the vast majority of which were posted the day following Kendall’s request.[12] Among these tweets there emerged a core network of 131 unique users, mostly Black women, whom Kendall and Golden led in a coordinated conversation about the ways Black girls are dehumanized, objectified, and then punished for men’s predatory behavior toward them.

On Fast-Tailed Girls

Jamie Nesbitt Golden

As of this writing, there have been a number of discussions about the rape allegations involving Birth of a Nation’s Nate Parker and his writing partner, Jean Celestin. While some of those discussions have been thoughtful and productive, others have not. Recently, Roland Martin, a respected veteran TV journalist, took to Twitter to defend Parker, blaming Black feminists for his movie’s dismal box office showing. Martin believed it was because Black women had an issue with Parker’s white wife, not that Parker may have been complicit in a heinous act resulting in the victim later taking her own life.

This is the norm in conversations about rape and sexual assault. Misplaced blame and deflection are often the order of the day, and both at the expense of victims. For Black women, doubly so. The myth of the “fast-tailed girl” is imprinted on us before we take our first steps. It follows us from playground to prom, from college campus to boardroom. Though I was fortunate to have a mother and grandmother who didn’t believe the myth, most Black women I knew weren’t so lucky. After a sobering discussion about the R. Kelly case (prompted by his controversial American Music Awards performance with Lady Gaga), Mikki and I started the #FastTailedGirls tag on Twitter in hopes of dispelling the myth. We had no idea how much of an impact it would have. Women from across the country—across the world—were sharing their stories. The myth of the fast-tailed girl spanned not only generations, but cultures. We watched as this conversation evolved from a few uncomfortable anecdotes to a place of absolution and healing. We also watched as people attempted to derail and shut down the conversation.

It was shocking, even for us, that so many folks were so unwilling to hear these stories or examine their own complicity in rape culture. We would eventually learn that when discussions of sexual violence were centered on Black girls and women, our most vocal opponents would be Black men. The blowback illustrated the necessity of the conversation. What we were doing was, in fact, making a difference. We didn’t realize it at the time, but soon we were seeing write-ups in publications, message board debates, and academic exploration. While a number of journalists, media figures, and scholars were dismissing digital activism as some sort of “New Age slacktivism,” people were picking up the mantle and lending their labor and voices. As many have said, Twitter is just one component of activism, one that has proved to be extremely vital. From the Arab Spring to Ferguson to the ongoing battle for reproductive rights, we’ve all witnessed the power of 140 characters. It has given social capital to those previously without. It has democratized communication. It has given people the ability not only to shape their own narratives but to share those narratives with the world. The role of Twitter and other forms of social media will always be to amplify, connect, and nurture marginalized voices. I say nurture because this work will tax you, body and soul. The importance of finding a community that nurtures you cannot be overstated.

You won’t make it without one.

The terminology “fast-tailed” in AAVE (African American Vernacular English) is used to describe young women who are supposedly overeager and sexually curious or promiscuous. Such language absolves men interested in underage girls of their prurient interests and reflects misguided respectability politics that operate as a form of victim blaming and perpetuate misogynoiristic ideas about Black women and girls. As Kendall details on the #FastTailedGirls hashtag, “One of the reasons #fasttailedgirls was so specific in focus is because while we all experience #rapeculture we don’t all do it the same.”[13] With the hashtag, Kendall names not only the way Black girls are blamed for their victimization but the ways in-group members are complicit in that victimization.

While #FastTailedGirls tweets focus on the sexualization of Black girls within the Black community, they also make clear connections to and critiques of larger white supremacist tropes that have constructed Black women and girls as “always rapable.” In the discourse of the hashtag’s intracommunity critique, the uplifting of Black women’s stories through personal testimony and larger systemic critiques happen simultaneously. Black women use the hashtag to reflect on their girlhoods, sharing stories of being told that they were acting too grown up for their age for undertaking simple everyday behaviors, and having to counter assumptions that they were seeking adult male attention as children. Hashtag creators Kendall and Golden respectively tweeted, “Some 40–60% of Black girls are sexually abused before 18. Many don’t report it because they know they’ll be called #FastTailedGirls,” and “#FastTailedGirls is why 20-something dudes are allowed to have 14 y.o. GFs. It’s why R. Kelly got off.” Kendall further tweeted that “15 year old me believed every ‘you’re grown where it matters’ lie. That’s what you say when grooming prey. #FastTailedGirls”; and “I need y’all to understand that if you can blame a 14 year old for her own murder because #FastTailedGirls then I hope you go to hell.” Other top users of the hashtag make up a who’s who of Black feminist twitter. @FeministaJones, for example, offered “#FastTailedGirls is why when our daughters go missing, they get no media airtime. They’re not ‘innocent’ or precious. Must be runaway hoes,” and @HoodFeminism wrote, “This is about telling our stories and healing however we can. #FastTailedGirls.” @GradientLair, the Twitter account for the Black feminist blog authored by user @Trudy, tweeted “Fast Tailed” Girls: Examining The Stereotypes and Abuse That Black Girls Face #FastTailedGirls,” along with a link to a post expanding on the need for and the background of the hashtag.

Despite starting as an intracommunity conversation, the hashtag was covered by several mainstream outlets, including NPR, Bustle, and XOJane. No doubt building on the success of Kendall’s earlier (and to some, controversial) 2013 #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen hashtag, #FastTailedGirls provided a candid conversation on misogynoir and its deleterious effects.[14] The hashtag picked up additional steam when actress Rashida Jones tweeted that young pop stars should “#stopactinglikewhores,” sparking renewed debate over how Black girls are represented in the media and how people of color internalize these representations.

Notably, this hashtag preceded the feminist hashtag evolution we traced in the last chapter and offers critiques of both feminist and Black uplift narratives that exclude the intersection of Black women’s experiences with sexual violence. For example, @FeministaJones also tweeted, “The Black Power movements (or whatever) are deeply rooted in supporting BM [Black Men] above all else, even those who abuse BW [Black Women] & girls #FastTailedGirls,” and @deluxvivens offered a critique of the limitations and privilege of reclaiming sexist language in the feminist movement with “want to know why so many woc [Women of Color] loathe #slutwalk? check out #fasttailedgirls.” Here we see Black women on Twitter calling out and calling in both Black men and white women whose political efforts toward liberation have relied on tactics too narrow to fully include Black women’s experiences. The hashtag then is an enactment of a politics of intersectionality and insists on the political legitimacy of Black women’s experiences and critiques.

Several users popular in other networks we discuss in this book linked their own hashtag conversations to those happening on #FastTailedGirls. For example, @JennMJackson, the creator of the hashtag #YesAllWhiteWomen, directed users following her hashtag to check out stories being told on #FastTailedGirls, tweeting, “#YesALLWhiteWomen meet #FastTailedGirls. This is why it’s not #YesALLWomen.” Others connected #FastTailedGirls to the next hashtag we examine here, #YouOKSis, noting the way the ideologies that construct Black women and girls as always sexually available make #YouOKSis interventions necessary. Here it is clear that members of these networks understand their hashtag use and creation as activism as they self-reflexively position the hashtag in relation to other on- and offline activist causes.

Black women using the hashtag also expressed catharsis in being able to share their stories, and began a conversation for shifting communal norms. Actress Reagan Gomez-Preston offered, “If we don’t stick up for our girls, and stop blaming them for the actions of grown men, who will? SMH. #FastTailedGirls.” Her words were a call to action to do away with this accusatory trope. Feminista Jones added that communities need to “‘Turn off’ the accusations of being #FastTailedGirls and the street harassment many begin experiencing at age 11.”[15]

Figure 2.1

Co-occurrence of #FastTailedGirls and #YouOKSis as a “revolutionary act,” according to one Twitter user.

In 2017, the hashtag came full circle when R. Kelly was once again in the spotlight for allegedly creating an abusive sex ring of teenagers in his multiple homes around the country. The revived interest in Kelly’s abhorrent behavior resulted in a new hashtag campaign, #MuteRKelly, and a revival of #FastTailedGirls. Author Jamilah Lemieux wrote, “Black women writers, like Mikki Kendall and Jamie Nesbitt Golden, have written articles and used hashtags like #FastTailedGirls to draw attention to not only Kelly’s behavior, but cultural norms that allow Black girls to be treated as if they have the sexual agency of adult women in a world in which far too many adults of all races believe that Black girls are more ‘mature’ than their peers.”[16]

Teaching Intervention with #YouOKSis

Just six months after #FastTailedGirls trended, Twitter user @FeministaJones began #YouOKSis. She tweeted, “If each of us who witnesses #streetharassment is brave enough to ask, ‘You OK sis?’ we might make a difference, however small.” Mia McKenzie of the now defunct blog Black Girl Dangerous replied, “@FeministaJones Can this be a thing? Can we, like, start a national #YouOKSis? Campaign?”

The hashtag prompted a robust discussion among Black women about experiences with street harassment and bystander intervention. As Jones explained in an interview with TheGrio.com, “A lot of the conversations about street harassment in the mainstream media only show white women as the faces of victims. Rarely do you see Black women as the face of the victim.”[17] Jones alludes to the fast-tailed girls conversation by talking about the ways Black women are not believable victims of sexual violence. By using the term “sis,” Jones, like Kendall and Golden, and like much of Black Twitter conversation, calls on AAVE and references Black codes of speech that interpolate other Black folks as kin—in this case, Black women as sisters.[18] #YouOKSis thus centers Black women’s experiences of street-based sexual violence but also has the capacity to hold other women’s stories, as “sis” recalls the use of “sisterhood” and “sister” in the larger feminist movement.

#YouOKSis first appeared following Jones’s original tweet on July 7, 2014, and trended over the next three days as users heeded McKenzie’s call to participate. Unlike many of the other hashtags examined in this book, the popularity of #YouOKSis extends well beyond a single burst of activity. Only 21 percent of the nearly seven thousand tweets in our data set were posted within a week of Jones’s original tweet, and the hashtag persisted with dozens or hundreds of new tweets per day through June 30, 2015, the end of our data collection window. The longevity of the conversation can be attributed to Jones herself, who, along with other women of color, regularly attached the hashtag to news stories they shared about street harassment. Indeed, the most popular co-occurring hashtags with #YouOKSis included #StreetHarassment, #WeGotYouSis, and #YesAllWomen, suggesting connections with broader conversations about harassment and other forms of violence against women.

From its inception, #YouOKSis offered users and observers real-time storytelling and modeling of the need for bystander intervention. In this case, the hashtag users make clear that because of the intersections of racist and sexist assumptions about Black women and girls, their harassment and abuse often happen in public, with little outrage or formal intervention. The hashtag is a directive to compel bystanders to simply ask the victim-focused question, “You OK Sis?,” as a demonstration of a politics of care for women of color being harassed, as well as a clear protest against their treatment.

Using #YouOKSis, many adult Black women shared stories of helping other women and girls in situations when no one else moved to do so, and also encouraged men and other people with privilege to similarly step in. Performer @PiaGlenn, for example, recalled through a series of threaded tweets a harrowing experience that happened only the day before in which a man spat on her and yelled threats at her in a subway station as bystanders looked on after she rejected his advances.[19] Explaining that “It’s literally about getting from point A to B without feeling under attack. And it’s constant. #YouOKSis,” Glenn detailed how her recent experience was just one of many that she and other women face on a daily basis in public spaces. Similarly, user @tajhntee live-tweeted the aggression she observed on the train toward other Black women and told her own stories of being harassed on the street on the way home from such daily activities as her job as a nurse or attending a yoga class with a friend. The ordinary places and behaviors in these stories worked together to illustrate that “safety” is not something enjoyed by women of color in even the most mundane public spaces.

Figure 2.2

Hashtag creator Feminista Jones featured in a promotional tweet advertising NewsOne Now’s discussion of street harassment.

Exchanges like those seen in the below thread, on which hashtag creator @FeministaJones notes the prevalence of men presuming access not only to women’s bodies but to their property and environment, and the resulting replies of commiseration as well as comfort, are common in the network.

Beyond storytelling, the tag directly critiqued toxic masculinity and male entitlement. @0hBehave shared, “I gotta tell men I’m underage or have a boyfriend for them to understand I’m not interested bc ‘No’ won’t work #YouOKSis,” and @afemal3pr observed in response to one of the common excuses used to downplay the violence of street harassment that “‘It’s just a compliment’ [is] men’s sense of entitlement and inability to handle rejection. #YouOKSis.” Male user @chaddgway noted, “Men need to pay attention to #YouOKSis to understand how their privilege, hyper masculine, patriarchal and predatory behavior needs to stop.” Other male allies in the network, including @____PantheR and @Soulfulbrotha, used the hashtag to share stories of Black women being assaulted and murdered on the street by intimate and prospective partners, actively soliciting and sharing various stories from Black women, who recounted details of being harassed, assaulted, insulted, and stalked by men in a range of public places during both their childhood and adulthood. Perhaps most important, these few men in the network responded to other men who attempted to derail the conversation. For example, @Soulfulbrotha replied to one user who suggested that the hashtag was “sad” and put “Black men and Black women at war” with “Stop trying to sabotage the hash tag peon,” and @____PantheR replied to Black men who suggested that the idea that speaking to women on the street is threatening was simply a stereotype with “An unlimited amount of women can say otherwise,” “Look up #YouOkSis.”

Figure 2.3

Feminista Jones followers react to and commiserate with posts on #YouOKSis.

The hashtag also documented the ultimate consequence for Black women who reject men or face violence from romantic partners. For example, also employing the next hashtag we discuss, @FeministaJones tweeted, “#SayHerName: On Janese Talton-Jackson, Mary Spears And How Street Harassment Is Killing Black Women #YouOKSis,” along with a link to a Hello Beautiful blog post discussing the 2014 and 2016 murders of the two women by men who responded with violence after their advances were rejected. This tweet and post connect the larger phenomenon of the violence Black women face from intimates and strangers to the invisibility of these stories in larger conversations about violence against both women and Black Americans. In this vein the hashtag also became something of a place for memorialization (which we discuss more below with #SayHerName) as users shared the names and stories of both cisgender and transgender Black and Latinx women killed by partners, would-be partners, and on the streets by men; these included Shanique Bellamy, who was six months’ pregnant when she and her two children were shot while sleeping; Dominique Tibedeaux, teen Sakia Gunn, Keisha Jenkins, Tamara Dominguez, and others.

#YouOKSis was taken up by media-makers in the Black public sphere on and off Twitter. Notably, NewsOne Now, the news program of TV One—a network aimed at African American adults—brought Jones on to discuss the hashtag as an entrée for conversations about bystander intervention and misogynoir. The Grio, a news site that targets African Americans, also covered the hashtag. #YouOKSis was subsequently covered in mainstream news outlets, including the Atlantic, Mic.com, and Forbes.

#YouOKSis succinctly summed up a call to intervene in the everyday violence of intersecting marginal identities that many women of color recognized. The hashtag has remained relevant, resurfacing in 2018 conversations about #MeToo, as well as the headline-grabbing abusive behavior of rapper XXXTentacion.[20]

Black Women’s Lives Matter: #SayHerName

While campaigns that protest state violence faced by Black men have garnered high-profile attention at various points in U.S. history, Black feminists have long challenged this limited focus, arguing that state-sanctioned violence has a unique and disproportionate effect on Black women.[21] Whether in Reagan-era propaganda that popularized the mythological figure of the “welfare queen” as justification for divestment from social service programs or in the contemporary realities regarding the high rates of eviction and homelessness Black women face, the state has been and remains violent toward Black women.[22] As Crenshaw pointed out in her legal work on intersectionality, even state-sponsored policy seeking to address systemic inequities has been negligent in acknowledging or addressing intersectional oppression. In recent years, the deaths of Black women and girls like Aiyana Stanley-Jones and Sandra Bland as the result of overzealous police officers sparked activism that led activists and scholars to insist we “say her name” to prevent the erasure of women of color victims of violence.

Figure 2.4

A #SayHerName tweet from Color of Change the day after an organized vigil remembering Black women and girls killed by police.

In 2015 the African American Policy Forum, cofounded by Crenshaw and Columbia Law School, hosted a weeklong webinar series dedicated to discussing the state of Black women and girls in the United States. The event, titled “Her Dream Deferred,” offered daily streaming of panel discussions accompanied by real-time Twitter conversations. #HerDreamDeferred, evocative of Langston Hughes’s 1951 poem about the Black nihilism of Harlem, did not resonate widely as a hashtag, but the first day’s webcast conversation, on Monday, March 30, 2015, included a different one, #SayHerName, concise enough to gain popularity. The day’s conversation began with emotional testimony from Martinez Sutton, the brother of Rekia Boyd, who had been shot in the head by an off-duty police officer and left brain-dead. Martinez Sutton, who had to pull the plug on his baby sister, struggled to speak through tears, noting that a fatal shot to the head is not how white women are treated by police officers over interpersonal conflict or even crime.[23]

After Sutton’s powerful introduction, scholar and activist Andrea Ritchie discussed sexual violence committed by police, referencing Daniel Holtzclaw, an officer accused and subsequently convicted on eighteen counts of rape, sodomy, and burglary, who targeted vulnerable Black women on the fringes of society who he knew would fear coming forward or would not be believed. The day’s conversation detailed other ways Black women and girls have been targeted by police violence, including the cases of Tanisha Anderson and Michelle Cusseaux. The presenters argued that without a racial justice analysis that includes Black women and girls, the systemic nature of state violence can never be fully addressed.

Figure 2.5

Color of Change and African American Policy Forum tweets using #SayHerName to publicize events, share the AAPF report, and commemorate victims

Thus, #SayHerName, a more academic and policy-rooted hashtag than those we looked at earlier in this chapter, represents a clear melding of the Black feminist impulses that animate #FastTailedGirls and #YouOKSis with the various #BlackLivesMatter networks we examine later in the book. #SayHerName began by focusing on the extrajudicial murders of Black women by police but evolved to shed light on all state and communal violence faced by Black women. For example, the Twitter account for BYP100 (Black Youth Project), a Chicago youth-based racial justice organization, shared infographics of statistics, such as “Rape & sexual assault are the 2nd highest crime committed by the police,” along with the hashtags #SayHerName and #BlackWomenMatter.

From its inception, #SayHerName embraced a diverse group of women of color, including LGBTQIA and nonbinary Black people. In May 2015 the AAPF capitalized on the growing use of the hashtag by releasing a report titled Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women and organizing a national day of action on May 21, 2015.[24] The day of action allowed more names to come to the fore and expanded the reach of the hashtag. The Say Her Name report included the story of Mya Hall, a Black trans woman who was shot by National Security Agency Police after driving into a restricted area and failing to respond to orders to stop. The report also included the story of the New Jersey 7, seven Black lesbians who were arrested on charges of assault, with some subsequently convicted of those charges, after defending themselves from street harassment. The AAPF report, which is intended as a resource for the media, organizers, researchers, policymakers, and other stakeholders to better understand and address Black women’s experiences of profiling and policing, took on the task of challenging the common assumption that Black women and girls are victims of the state only through their relationships with Black men who have been killed and harmed by police violence.

But it was after the July 2015 death of Sandra Bland—and in the midst of the mainstream breakthrough of the Black Lives Matter movement—that the #SayHerName hashtag reached a tipping point in visibility. Bland, who was found hanging from a plastic trash bag-turned-noose in a Texas jail after being arrested, inexplicably, for assault following a traffic stop by an overzealous officer, became the most visible victim on the #SayHerName hashtag. Her death was ruled a suicide, prompting a wave of protests as people questioned how someone successful, happy, and starting a new job in a few weeks could deteriorate to the point of wanting to end her own life, and after video footage of the arresting officer throwing her to the ground and threatening her with his taser surfaced. Among the high-profile figures who spoke out about Bland, actor Jessie Williams of ABC’s Grey’s Anatomy tweeted a series of twenty-four questions about Bland’s treatment and subsequent death. Other celebrities, including comedian Margaret Cho, Broadway star Audra McDonald, singer Keyshia Cole, and reality star Kim Kardashian West, all tweeted using #SandraBland, contributing to her hashtagified name alone reaching 200,000 mentions by July 16, 2015.[25]

Our #SayHerName data include almost 170,000 tweets sent by more than 60,000 unique users, connected by more than 75,000 retweet and mention links between May 1, 2015, and May 1, 2017. Unsurprisingly, the hashtag trended on the National Day of Action organized by the AAPF as the kickoff event for the campaign (May 21, 2015) and in mid-July 2015, as the public became aware of the suspicious circumstances surrounding Bland’s death. The hashtag continued to trend periodically, often during events associated with the criminal and civil proceedings related to Bland’s death and with similarly suspicious deaths of Black women in police custody.

#SayHerName is ideologically and discursively connected to the broader Black Lives Matter movement, with #BlackLivesMatter appearing alongside #SayHerName more often than any other hashtag by a considerable margin. Additional hashtags emerged alongside #SayHerName, including several related to Bland (such as #JusticeForSandy and #SandySpeaks) and the chilling #IfIDieInPoliceCustody, through which Black people interrogated the state of police-citizen relations by preemptively calling for action should they too one day die under suspicious circumstances while in police custody.[26] The hashtag was connected to related intersectional feminist hashtags, including #MeToo and #BlackTransLivesMatter, and to broader discursive memes of resistance against oppressive state power such as #NeverForget, a phrase commonly invoked in reference to the Holocaust but also invoked in this network in the context of commemorating victims of racist and misogynistic violence. The hashtag was also used to commemorate the women victims of the June 2015 white supremacist shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, and users immediately connected the church’s history of resistance to the larger goals of the network.[27]

Figure 2.6

#SayHerName tweets from Color of Change and the Chicago-based BYP100 (Black Youth Project) commemorating Sandra Bland and demanding accountability.

As the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign heated up, activists pushed for Democrats to acknowledge women victims of police violence. Candidate Bernie Sanders was interrupted on two separate occasions by Black Lives Matter protesters demanding he “say her name.”[28] During a chance meeting at a D.C. restaurant with Sandra Bland’s mother, Sanders promised to say her name during a debate. On October 13, 2015, he followed through, responding to an audience question asking about Black Lives Matter during the first Democratic primary debate: “Black lives matter,” Sanders said. “The reason those words matter is the African-American community knows that on any given day, some innocent person like Sandra Bland can get into a car and then three days later she’s going to end up dead in jail.”[29] His naming of Bland prompted a Google search surge of her story as more members of the general public became aware of her death.

Actor and musician Janelle Monáe, who has participated in multiple hashtag streams we discuss in this book, took her frustration to the recording studio, creating “Hell You Talmbout,” both an ode to those recently slain by police violence and a call to action. The lyrics chant:

Aiyana Jones, say her name

Aiyana Jones, say her name

Aiyana Jones, say her name

Aiyana Jones, won’t you say her name?

Sandra Bland, say her name

Sandra Bland, say her name

Sandra Bland, say her name

Sandra Bland, won’t you say her name?

Monáe continues to name Black men and women slain by extrajudicial violence, hauntingly including both recent and historical victims, among them fourteen-year-old Emmett Till, who was lynched for allegedly whistling at a white woman.[30] Monáe uses “say her name” and “say his name” to link these murder cases across time, space, and gender, giving listeners a sense of the long durée of racist violence in the United States. A similar commitment to historical memory is seen in #SayHerName tweets highlighting historical cases of state violence against Black women, such as the 1984 killing of Eleanor Bumpers by the NYPD, alongside more recent ones.

As a digital utterance engaging a variety of political demands around visibility, state violence, feminism, and racial justice, #SayHerName plays two primary roles on Twitter. First, it eulogizes women of color killed as a result of misogynoiristic violence, insisting that their lives and stories matter. On Twitter, this came to include cis and trans Black and Latinx women and girls killed by police or while in police custody, as well as those killed as the result of a larger culture of neglect regarding the safety of Black and brown women. Second, it demands visibility of these stories in the name of specific interventions into systemic and intersectional forms of oppression. This visibility is frequently accompanied not only by the invocation of names and stories but also by statistics, political demands, and calls for policy interventions. For example, the Chicago-based activist organization BYP100 (Black Youth Project) frequently posted real-time videos of protest actions in Chicago and elsewhere related to the deaths of women of color, as well as news and updates pertaining to planned future actions and locations. These #SayHerName videos were created during a twenty-six-city coordinated effort and included speeches by a diverse range of activists, from Rekia Boyd’s brother, to the founders of the AAPF, to legal advocates commenting on the cases of Shelly Frey, Shantel Davis, and Alberta Spruill.

Figure 2.7

AAPF #SayHerName tweet memorializing Eleanor Bumpers.

At the Chicago #SayHerName action, Shelly Frey’s advocates told the story of how she and friends were approached by an off-duty police officer-turned-security guard who fired at them. Frey’s mother choked back tears as she said her daughter left behind two young children. The poet Aja Monet offered words of affirmation for Black women in the wake of all the ways they are demonized in society and subsequently made disposable. In D.C., #SayHerName organizers’ videos highlighted the hail of NSA gunfire that killed Mya Hall, a trans woman misgendered in early reports of her death, as well as the death of Natasha Mckenna in Alexandria, Virginia, while in police custody. The creators of these videos wanted to make sure that even those who were unable to attend in person would be able to bear witness to the stories of these lives through Twitter and the hashtag #SayHerName.

Further, the AAPF and Color of Change shared informational statistics and action items about violence against Black women and girls alongside the hashtag, including the statistics that Black women are “3 to 4 times more likely to be incarcerated than white women,” “Black girls are 6x more likely to be suspended than white girls,” and “Black women are 243% more likely than white women to die from pregnancy or childbirth related causes.” These informational tweets usually included links to studies or policy recommendations that members of the #SayHerName network could read and share further.

As these tweets reveal, Black activist and advocacy organizations, including BYP100 (@BYP100), Color of Change (@ColorOfChange), and the AAPF (@AAPolicyForum), which popularized the hashtag and released the corresponding report, played a central role in the network, tweeting data, statistics, and action items that offered members of the network a variety of ways to seek justice for women of color victims. Other advocacy organizations, including the abortion rights organization NARAL Pro-Choice America (@NARAL), offered support and content that contributed to the visibility of the hashtag and focused on building offline political alliances.

Thus, #SayHerName fully embodies the integration of an online and offline activist network in which the hashtag is used both to insist on the value of Black women’s lives and to drive attention to activist organizations, protests, academic and policy research, and particular political and civil interventions that members of the network can further. Tweets are used to advertise particular offline commemorative and protest events, to engage the network in organized online discussions about the connections between cases of violence against Black women, girls, and femmes and police accountability policy, to make demands for change, and to draw in members of other networks.

Top #SayHerName tweets also worked through storytelling and reminders of particular cases of state violence and complacency in the deaths of Black women. For example, popular tweets in the network reminded people of Lavena Johnson, Rekia Boyd, and Sandra Bland, who died in 2005, 2012, and 2015, respectively. Many top users tweeted the names of these women along with their ages and manner and place of death, eulogizing them much as an obituary would but with the demand for justice. Among other women memorialized on the hashtag were Shantel Davis, Shelly Frey, Natasha McKenna, Korryn Gaines, Yvette Smith, Keisha Jenkins, and Lamia Beard. These and other women’s names were often hashtagged, resulting in a high co-occurrence of #SayHerName with names. It was common for users to simply list the names of cisgender and transgender Black (and sometimes Latinx) women murder victims, accompanied by #SayHerName, in threaded tweets—several top users in the network did this, including @JennyVSmile, who focused on sharing the names and smiling photos of murdered transgender women along with links to news stories and family fundraisers.

Figure 2.8

Reproductive justice organization NARAL Pro-Choice America signal-boosts #SayHerName responses to Sandra Bland and issues a statement on allyship.

While the specific circumstances surrounding each case shared on the hashtag are unique, what the cases have in common is violence or neglect from state actors, intersectional concerns about oppression, and an insistence that Black women are valuable. Many of the stories and statistics shared on the hashtag speak to the way state-enabled violence against Black women can happen in less public spaces than that against Black men or question the legitimacy of official accounts of suicides, accidents, and murders that fail to take into consideration police abuse and neglect. Black women also used #SayHerName to talk about intracommunal violence against Black women that leads to state intervention in Black communities, in turn enabling state-sanctioned violence against Black women and families. While some popular #SayHerName tweets included brutal, graphic descriptions that recalled histories of violence against Black bodies, other popular tweets in the network center stories about how much Black women victims are loved and how valuable their lives are to their families and communities.

Media that reflect the niche nature of the Black public sphere, including Black Entertainment Television (BET) and the Huffington Post’s “Black Voices,” were active in the network. These sources engaged in the network and participated in and elevated the visibility of formal chats organized by activist organizations. However, mainstream outlets, including CNN, Teen Vogue, and the Guardian, also paid attention.

Figure 2.9

Teen Vogue roundup on #SayHerName.

Together with #FastTailedGirls and #YouOKSis, #SayHerName reflects what sociologist Ruha Benjamin calls Black Afterlife, “the stubborn refusal to forget and be forgotten.” In a few memorable characters these hashtags buoy the introduction of nuanced and complex concepts into conversations about both racism and sexism. The specificity of these hashtags introduces observers to the intersectional nature of Black women’s oppression. Benjamin connects Black Afterlife to scholar Zhaleh Boyd’s “ancestral co-presence,” of which Benjamin writes, “Hashtag signifiers, like #SayHerName, [are] gathering points that make present the slain and call upon recent ancestors—Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, Ayana Jones, and so many others—as spiritual kin who can animate social movements.”[31] Both Boyd and Benjamin see the power of hashtags to thread together both people who have survived violence and those taken by it, further complicating our idea of what is irl (in real life).

Trust(ing) Black Women

While the hashtags in this chapter have not seen the kind of mainstream attention as #MeToo and #YesAllWomen, what we document here (and in chapter 3) testifies to the complexity of counterpublics engaging in technological networks. First, it is clear that Black women, who occupy positions in multiple counterpublics and carry with them multiple identities, have found Twitter to be a productive tool for highlighting misogynoir, sharing survival strategies, and calling both intra- and intercommunity members to account. Second, this work speaks comfortably and clearly both to the larger Black public sphere (or Black counterpublic), wherein discourse and communal knowledge about experiences with anti-Black racism are centered and resisted, and the feminist counterpublic, where collective critiques of male violence have long been centered but in which white women’s experiences have often taken precedence. Thus, here we see those who are multiply marginalized from mainstream narratives about violence and safety, as well as from the popular discourses of the margins themselves, effectively use Twitter to speak truth to power. Outside observers from a diversity of communities are thus allotted access to the personal stories of Black women that challenge long-standing cultural tropes that normalize their victimization.

Notably, while not as systematically deployed as Elon James White’s use of #TheEmptyChair, some Black men in these networks have challenged other Black men’s attempts to derail the hashtags and contributed to their visibility. This act of solidarity is particularly heartening insofar as the intra-community violence hashtags such as #FastTailedGirls and #YouOKSis address most often come from other Black men. The impact of in-group members speaking to others on Twitter who share their social status can profoundly influence behavior.[32] Hashtags provide an opportunity for education on these issues, as well as a relatively low-stakes opportunity for folks to practice allyship and intervention. Together, Black feminists have used hashtags in ways that expand the utility of the hashtags and bring about more complex and nuanced conversations than would otherwise be available in public debates on race and gender. While the reach and visibility of these hashtags do not always match those of feminist hashtags such as #MeToo, their influence in the Feminist Twittersphere is undeniable, as women of all backgrounds report that Black women and Black feminist thought have a disproportionate influence on how they understand the most pressing issues of the day.[33]

3 #GirlsLikeUs: Trans Feminist Advocacy and Community Building

Trans women’s advocacy online and in popular culture epitomizes the complications and possibilities of digital counterpublics. While many trans women are members of the larger LGBTQ and feminist counterpublics, and though trans women of color occupy important roles in race- and ethnicity-based counterpublics, they still occupy marginalized positions in all three. As Catherine Squires has detailed, counterpublics “emerge not only in reaction to oppression from the state or dominant public spheres, but also in relation to the internal politics of that particular [counter]public sphere and its material and cultural resources.”[1] Given historical and contemporary exclusions, both in the mainstream and within identity-based counterpublics, the communication constructed by and for trans women of color online illustrates some of the most subaltern in this book. We include a discussion of trans women’s networked labor both in the spirit of recognizing the layered ways that counterpublics function and as a response to activists and scholars who have called on academics to do a better job of considering the “T” in LGBT. As Leland G. Spencer writes in the introduction to Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories, “The ‘T’ too often tacked onto the end of ‘LGBT’ demands a spot at the center of communicative and rhetorical analysis,” especially in light of the way cisgender gay white men have been centered in research on LGBT communication and in public representations of LGBT issues and activism.[2]

The trans community in the United States was reminded of this marginalization in 2015 when trans activist Jennicet Gutiérrez was booed by a largely cisgender crowd and physically removed from an LGBTQ White House event after speaking out about the disproportionate violence faced by trans women in U.S. immigration detention centers. Gutiérrez’s words, and her interruption of President Barack Obama, were met with harsh criticism from many organizations that bill themselves as central to LGBTQ equality efforts. Gutiérrez was chastised for a “lack of civility” and “rudeness” by the LGBTQ magazine The Advocate, which compared her asking Obama to address the torture and rape of transgender immigrants in detention centers to Kanye West’s infamous interruption of Taylor Swift at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards.[3] For trans women, the moment was part of a painful pattern of derision directed toward members of the LGBTQ counterpublic to which they belong.[4]

Beyond explicitly political and activist spaces, the representation of trans women as disruptive—even dangerous—to civil society is evident in how trans women are portrayed on our nation’s big and small screens. The representation of trans women, and trans women of color in particular, in news stories and popular culture has long been one of stereotyped hypersexual tricksters whose victimization at the hands of cisgender men is framed as a natural or deserved consequence of their disruptive identities.[5] In the early 1990s, trans women became regular objects of fascination on daytime talk shows; Jerry Springer, for example, was frequent fodder for scholars interested in trans representation—representations that tied trans identities to fear, deception, and freakishness.[6] This media trope is also iconized in The Crying Game (1992), a film that shows the white protagonist vomit when he realizes that Dil, the Black woman he loves, is trans. These media representations have both influenced and been influenced by larger cultural and political narratives about trans identity. In fundamental U.S. systems of governance, trans women have been deemed deviant and held responsible for the violence and discrimination they face. In the late 1990s, for example, the gay and trans panic defense became popular among some attorneys seeking to justify their clients’ violent crimes against members of the queer and trans community.[7]

In the last thirty years, the visibility of transgender Americans has shifted significantly. In 2007, trans advocates were successful for the first time in including language addressing gender identity as a possible area of employment discrimination when the Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA) was being debated in Congress. Yet this language was subsequently removed because lesbian and gay special interest groups did not think the bill could pass if it was included.[8] The bill still failed. It was not until 2013 that a new ENDA, one that included trans identity, was signed by President Obama. Also in 2013 the Netflix original TV series Orange Is the New Black became a runaway hit in part because of Laverne Cox’s compassionate portrayal of an incarcerated Black trans woman. That same year, military whistleblower Chelsea Manning came out as a trans woman. In 2014, California became the first (and only) state to pass a law banning the gay and trans panic defense.[9] In 2015 the very public transition of Olympic gold medalist Caitlyn Jenner helped further transgender visibility.[10] As noted in chapter 2, #SayHerName was inclusive of trans victims of extrajudicial violence alongside their cis counterparts, furthering a necessary but unfortunate sisterhood.

Despite this visibility and progress on specific trans issues, and despite Time magazine’s proclamation in 2014, along with a cover featuring Laverne Cox, that the United States had reached a “transgender tipping point,” a “quantitative increase in media attention,” as Jamie Capuzza notes, “did not equate with challenges to cisnormativity.”[11] In fact, trans women continue to negotiate unique threats to life and health, which are further multiplied at the intersections of race, class, and sexuality.[12] Along with the advances and greater visibility of recent years, trans women continue to be murdered at a startling rate. In 2014, Deshawnda Sanchez, a Los Angeles–area Black woman, became one of 225 trans women murdered that year around the globe. Sanchez was shot dead by her assailant as she pounded on the door of an L.A. residence for help. According to a 2015 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, trans women are the group most victimized by violent hate crimes in the United States.[13] The year 2017 proved to be the most deadly year on record in the United States. with twenty-eight trans women murdered by year’s end.[14] Reports count the same number of trans women murdered in 2018.[15] This deadly violence is often perpetrated by intimate partners, many of whom, in a narrative that is all too familiar, claim they were “duped” or “tricked,” and became enraged to the point of murder. Further, these stories and statistics do not include the widespread harassment, abuse, and harm that trans women survive as they move about the world.

In today’s popular media, Hollywood is notorious for casting cisgender, heterosexual actors as trans women, including Felicity Huffman in Transamerica (2005), Jared Leto in Dallas Buyers Club (2013), Jeffrey Tambor in Transparent (2014), and Eddie Redmayne in The Danish Girl (2015), drawing critique from trans and allied communities for how such casting continues to marginalize trans actors.[16] The increasing visibility of trans women did not prevent the makers of the 2015 historical drama Stonewall, about the uprising that birthed the LGBTQ rights movement, from erasing the role of trans women of color in activism in 1960s Greenwich Village.[17] Notably, much-publicized critiques of the film’s whitewashing of the Stonewall Rebellion (using the hashtag #NotMyStonewall) led to a boycott of the film and its subsequent failure at the box office. Many boycotters chose instead to fund Happy Birthday Marsha!, an independent film about Marsha P. Johnson, a Black trans woman who was a central figure in the Stonewall riot and in queer and trans activist circles in New York City.[18] Writer and producer of Happy Birthday Marsha!, Tourmaline has gone on to co-author work revealing the surprising statistics that show that the increased visibility of trans women has led to more violence against them in their communities.[19]

Increased visibility and debate over trans issues and the simultaneous frequency of antitrans acts of violence and erasure have prompted a rise in advocacy by trans women, particularly through online media. As we illustrate in this chapter, online community building and advocacy among trans citizens and activists has been important in extending and nurturing a trans counterpublic that is actively shaping American culture and national politics.

While few and far between, previous studies investigating online trans advocacy have highlighted its important role in challenging and reshaping the way media-makers, and the nation, communicate about trans identities.[20] K. J. Rawson has compellingly argued that transgender worldmaking online is an especially important form of historical activism because “cyberspace provides a revolutionary tool for creating, sharing, and preserving trans histories that would otherwise remain untold.”[21] Joshua Trey Barnett has detailed how blogs authored by trans people have created a “transsexual counterpublic” in which the human body is constructed as a natural and continual site of transformation, in opposition to dominant constructions of the body and gender as normatively immutable.[22] Likewise, we view the work of trans advocates online as particularly fruitful for the study of counterpublic identity politics because on social media, unlike in news and entertainment media spaces, trans women can communicate about and construct their identities and experiences without the fraught, incomplete, and transphobic mediation of mainstream narratives.[23]

Of particular interest in this chapter is the trans advocacy and communicative self-definition that have evolved on Twitter. Through an examination of the #GirlsLikeUs network and related hashtags, we illustrate how for trans women, especially trans women of color, Twitter is an important site of countercultural practice and intervention.

The Birth of #GirlsLikeUs

In 2012, trans advocate, author, director, and TV host Janet Mock (an interview with whom starts on page 72) was moved to become a more outspoken activist because of the murders and suicides of queer and trans youth. She used her cultural capital as a former web editor for Marie Claire and digital tools such as YouTube videos and Twitter, to reach out to other trans women with messages of support and opportunities for community building. In explaining the origin of her hashtag #GirlsLikeUs, Mock describes her support of Jenna Talackova, a contestant disqualified from the Miss Universe Pageant for, in the words of the pageant officials, “not being a natural born female.” Mock’s desire to help Talackova achieve her dream led to the creation of the hashtag as a form of trans feminist community building and advocacy.[24] On May 28, 2012, Mock explained on her personal blog:

So I shared Jenna’s petition on Twitter, and said: Please sign & share this women’s rights petition in support of transgender beauty queen Jenna Talackova & #girlslikeus: ow.ly/9TYc6b 27 Mar 12 And that was the online birth of #girlslikeus. I didn’t think it over, it wasn’t a major push, but #girlslikeus felt right. Remarkably a few more women—some well-known, others not—shared the petition and began sharing their stories of being deemed un-real, being called out, working it, fighting for what’s right, wanting to transition, dreaming to do this, accomplishing that. … #girlslikeus soon grew beyond me … my dream came true: #girlslikeus was used on its own without my @janetmock handle in it. It had a life of its own.

Mock has also credited activist CeCe McDonald, whom we discuss in greater detail later in this chapter, as an inspiration for the hashtag, stating on Twitter, “#BecauseOfCeCe I was inspired to begin using the phrasing #GirlsLikeUs which led to a social media visibility movement. #CeCeIsFree.”[25]

In Mock’s description of creating the hashtag we see what Michael Warner has called the “world-making” power of publics, that is, the discursive self-organization of a public among strangers that reflexively speaks to the historical and contemporary contexts of its makers and observers.[26] As Mock notes, other trans women quickly embraced the hashtag, using it to discuss everything from the desire to transition, to the violence of being outed in unsafe situations, to dreams of success. Through the discursive contributions of other trans women, the hashtag became a space for counterpublic engagement. By sharing information through the hashtag #GirlsLikeUs on Twitter, YouTube, and various blogs, Mock and other users have created a new media network through which conversations generally reserved for members of the transgender community can, and do, reach beyond it.

Transcript of Keynote Conversation between Janet Mock and Moya Bailey from “Ways With Words: Exploring Language and Gender Conference,” Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

March 4, 2016

Moya Bailey: Do you want to talk about the origins of #girlslikeus and how you’ve seen it shift?

Janet Mock: Twitter was a different thing in 2012. I joined Twitter in 2009, and I remember wanting to have a space where I could talk about certain things, and for folks to not necessarily know what I was talking about, but then for folk that do know what that space is, they’ll get it and know, right, and then they can engage. And so when I hashtagged #girlslikeus, it was a space where trans girls and women could come together and talk about our issues, our resources, share resources and experiences, have a sounding board, and link up. And what I’ve seen is that it’s led to real life friendships for people. Even in my own space, because I created that hashtag, I connected with people. I connected with other trans women who are now friends of mine—deep, deep friends who I had never known before I created that hashtag. And I’ve seen that happen for other folk, so the hashtag was like a connector. … I don’t even use it as often as I used to, because now it has its own world. It’s a part of other people’s lives. They put it in their Twitter bios, instead of saying blatantly, “I’m a trans woman,” they just say #girlslikeus. It’s a wink and a nod. The girls know.

MB: I was really excited to see it in Her Story. There’s a moment where the two characters talk about #girlslikeus.

JM: Her Story is a project that was created by Jen Richards, who is a trans woman, and starring Jen Richards and my other friend Angelica Ross. We met through #girlslikeus. I was going to a speaking engagement in 2012 in Chicago, and I DM’d them through Twitter, and was just like, “Let’s get together.” And so they became friends because I linked them together. So it was a great connector. That’s what #girlslikeus is.

MB: Is there anything that’s exciting you about the way that language and words are moving in this moment?

JM: Yeah! So, what excites me is the fact that we all, now, have access. Our phones are like extensions of ourselves, and they carry so much stuff on them. And so the fact that I’m constantly communicating with people—on Snapchat, on Twitter, on Tumblr—I can follow a Tumblr tag and may not understand what it’s talking about, but will be taught that day about someone else’s experience. I feel like, because we have tools to create, we can now broadcast our lives. We don’t need to wait for a network or a producer to come and tell us, “I want to do a story on your life.” No—I do a story on my life every day. And so in that way, I no longer have to look at mainstream media to represent and reflect me. I can go to a hashtag and find more people that reflect me. I can find my people. And then I can find myself. And then I can be empowered because I found my people and myself to then share myself with the world.

Characteristics of the #GirlsLikeUs Network

We collected data for #GirlsLikeUs for two years, from July 2013 through the end of June 2015. During that time, #GirlsLikeUs was tweeted or retweeted more than 100,000 times by more than 60,000 unique users. Though relatively modest in size compared with other hashtags we examine in this book, as a network of tweeters connected by retweets and mentions, the #GirlsLikeUs network has several unique features. First, the conversation is dominated almost entirely by Janet Mock and actress Laverne Cox, whose tweets were retweeted thousands of times more often than the next most retweeted people in the network. The network grew steadily, if slowly, throughout the two years we observed, with an average of dozens to hundreds of tweets appearing per day, with the exception of two spikes in activity: in December 2014, when Mock, Cox and twelve other trans women appeared on the cover of CANDY magazine, and in June 2015, when Caitlyn Jenner appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair magazine. These upticks in activity were fairly modest, however, and driven by increased activity among core members of the network rather than by a sudden influx of new members (as happened with hashtags discussed elsewhere in this book).

#GirlsLikeUs is a broadcast network, or a network in which most people retweet messages authored by a small number of prominent users.[27] Almost one-third of the tweets we examined originated from either Mock or Cox, and half originated from the top ten most retweeted members of the network, which include other trans women advocates and celebrities, such as Carmen Carrara and Geena Rocero, trans activist groups such as Trans March, and mainstream media outlets that published articles about trans women during the time our data were collected (including Vanity Fair). When we look more broadly across the network, we see a remarkable level of cohesion among those using the #GirlsLikeUs hashtag, with most people tweeting at or about one another, in addition to engaging with the most retweeted members of the network. The average distance between members of the network is just slightly over three, meaning that any given person in the network is in communication with any other through just two intermediaries. Combined with the disproportionate number of tweets originating with Mock and Cox, this suggests that most people in the network are either engaging directly with Mock and Cox or engaging with people who are.

The network structure also provides evidence of a cohesive conversation stemming from Mock and Cox and centered on inclusion and affirmation of trans women. Consider the following network visualization: Mock and Cox and their followers constitute the majority (just over 75 percent) of the network, shown wrapping around the upper-right portion of the image. In the lower left is a subcommunity that is almost entirely detached from the rest of the network. This subcommunity is centered on two self-identified conservative women, @xoCAMILLAxo and @Meeeech_L, who tweet primarily about conservative political issues. They tweet frequently and are often retweeted by other users who are in conversation neither with the main portion of the #GirlsLikeUs network nor with one another. Of note, @xoCAMILLAxo and @Meeeech_L turn up in our search results not because they use #GirlsLikeUs or related content in their tweets but because both had set their profile locations to #GirlsLikeUs, which attaches the hashtag to the metadata about their tweets. This has the effect of adding the hashtag to every tweet they write and returning their tweets in search results, regardless of whether or not the hashtag appears in the text of their tweets (and there is no evidence it ever does). Although we can only speculate about their motivations for including #GirlsLikeUs in their profile information but not in the content of their tweets, because both women tweet frequently, and because their tweets turn up in search results for the hashtag, we can be reasonably sure that the broader community of tweeters using #GirlsLikeUs is aware of their existence. So @xoCAMILLAxo and @Meeeech_L’s nearly complete separation from the rest of the #GirlsLikeUs network is no accident—the community has assessed the content of their tweets and chosen not to engage with it. This divide underscores how #GirlsLikeUs is predominantly a bounded community, centered on trans women with progressive politics and sustained by a consistent, if not especially large, stream of daily trans-positive tweets.

The exclusion of @xoAMILLAxo and @Meeeech_L from the rest of the #GirlsLikeUs network serves as a reminder that neither a particular identity (@xoAMILLAxo is trans) nor the incidental use of a hashtag (in the case of @Meeech_L, who has since removed the hashtag from her location and no longer appears in the network) is enough to gain membership in a counterpublic that centers a particular set of identity politics. Rather, counterpublic membership is earned primarily through political positions and community connections, with identity mattering only to the degree that it is intertwined with the other two. For the vast majority of Twitter users engaging in conversations using the hashtag, #GirlsLikeUs is a space to talk through the ways that trans identity, along with other forms of social oppression, including racism and poverty, has an impact on daily life. Thus conservative users who reject the importance of these issues are summarily ignored.[28]

Figure 3.1

Visualization of #GirlsLikeUs retweet and mention network. This graph was generated in Gephi using the Fruchterman-Reingold force-directed layout algorithm.

Narrating the Lives of #GirlsLikeUs

Trans women use #girlslikeus in three primary ways: (1) to connect with one another on every day, often mundane, experiences, (2) as a way to advocate for trans issues and rights (particularly through critiques of mainstream representations of trans people and anti-trans violence), and (3) to celebrate the accomplishments of trans women. This third use of the hashtag often overlaps with the previous two.

Building Community

Members of the #GirlsLikeUs network regularly tweet about their day-to-day lives and challenges. Discourse about quotidian experiences, which includes, for example, accounts of sick relatives and breakups, works to both center and normalize trans voices and experiences by illustrating how trans women’s lives are not as unrelatable as popular culture would suggest. These tweets are meet within the network by words of encouragement and expressions of friendship. For example, trans businesswoman @angelicaross shared, “I’m regaining at least 20 hours of my life back a week moving to Chicago! More time for my spirit, tennis, yoga & friends #GirlsLikeUs.”[29] These kinds of positive-toned shares are frequent in the network, as are words of support and encouragement. In response to a tearful video posted by trans teen homecoming queen Cassidy Lynn Campbell about the online bullying she was experiencing, Janet Mock tweeted, “Dry those tears, babydoll. You are a bright, shining star, @xocassidylynn! #girlslikeus.”[30] This rapport building between members of the network does important discursive community-building work, shaping cultural solidarity and providing important emotional and psychological support.

Creating Change

#GirlsLikeUs tweets that focus on advocating for trans issues and rights do so by elevating the voices and history of trans women and sharing facts and information about trans experiences with injustice. These tweets are educational, a call to action, or both. For example, Trans March (@TransMarch) a San Francisco organization that works to “inspire all trans and gender non-conforming people to realize a world where we are safe, loved, and empowered,”[31] regularly tweets educational and biographical information about trans activists and figures like Martha P. Johnson, Jazzie Collins, Billie Cooper, and Chelsea Manning.

Figure 3.2

Trans March #GirlsLikeUs tweet about activist Marsha P. Johnson.

Tweets in this category also work to connect issues of trans liberation to intersectional concerns of poverty, racism, and sexism. For example, Janet Mock connected the case of CeCe McDonald to that of Trayvon Martin, the Black Florida teenager killed by neighborhood watchman George Zimmerman, whose case we consider in the next chapter. By using the hashtag #JusticeforTrayvon alongside #GirlsLikeUs and #FreeCeCe, Mock illustrates the connection between anti-Black violence and trans identities, often left out of conversations on racial profiling. At the same time, Mock makes the issue of anti-Black violence, too often excluded from the mainstream LGBT movement, central to her brand of trans advocacy.

Figure 3.3

Janet Mock tweets #FreeCeCe, #JusticeforTrayvon, and #GirlsLikeUs.

In a similarly intersectional spirit, Laverne Cox uses the mantle of sharing content about, as well as many of her public interviews on, the hit Netflix series Orange Is the New Black to discuss issues facing trans prisoners and to advocate for prison reform. For example, after her first appearance on the (since canceled) Melissa Harris Perry Show, Cox tweeted, “Check out the video of my #nerdland debut today. We talk about @OITNB and prison policy http://t.co/SuE1pJvuej @MHPshow #girlslikeus.”[32] Here, Cox connects the hashtag to a policy conversation on incarceration while maintaining the casual tone of the #GirlsLikeUs network and calling in OITNB (@OITNB) and the Melissa Harris Perry Show (#Nerdland) fans. This illustrates how the hashtag is used as a kind of prompt to a community of fans and allies who, because of shared ideologies and tastes, are invested in the lives, successes, and inequalities faced by trans women.

What is notable in these examples, and throughout #GirlsLikeUs advocacy, is the centering of intersectional experience. In particular, women of color activists and stories about intersectional activism are widely visible in the #GirlsLikeUs network. Thus, not only does the discourse created in the network contribute to an educational project on trans rights and issues, it also works toward framing the solutions to antitrans violence and transphobia as inextricably tied to fights against racism and sexism. Such hashtagged advocacy contributes to what Sarah Florini has called a “recontextualization” of mainstream social movement memory[33]—in this case, a recentering of trans experiences in civil rights, LGBT, and feminist projects.

Celebrating Trans Lives

#GirlsLikeUs users frequently engage in celebrating trans women’s accomplishments and visibility. Often this overlaps with advocacy narratives that celebrate trans activists and with community-building narratives that highlight the rise and accomplishments of trans women. For example, trans model Geena Rocero publicized a photoshoot in Glamour Magazine using #GirlsLikeUs beside the hashtag for her own trans advocacy organization, Gender Proud, and the hashtag #TransRevolution. Here we see Rocero connecting her accomplishments as a trans women and public personality—profiled in a mainstream women’s magazine—to trans advocacy work offline and to the digital community constructed through #GirlsLikeUs. As is common in the #GirlsLikeUs network, Rocero’s tweet was responded to with words of encouragement, including from Janet Mock, who replied, “gorgeous + glowing! Can’t wait to pick up my copy! #genderproud #girlslikeus.”

Figure 3.4

Geena Rocero tweets about her Glamour magazine profile with #GirlsLikeUs, #GenderProud and #TransRevolution.

Many members of the #GirlsLikeUs network, even those who are not celebrities, use the hashtag to celebrate their accomplishments, including starting new jobs, taking a new step in gender confirmation, or making a cross-country move. Here again, we see how the hashtag works to build community from within while centering and normalizing trans lives to outside observers. For example, Angelica Ross tweeted that she was “just interviewed by @Forbes on #TransTechSocial & my journey as a Black trans entrepreneur! Thanks @ClairJoyFarley! #GirlsLikeUs.” This tweet, while a celebration of her own accomplishment (being interviewed by Forbes), also works to build community by mentioning Trans Tech Social, the development and employment community Ross founded for trans and gender-nonconforming people, and by thanking Clair Farley, an advocate for trans people in business and media.

Broadening the Counterpublic

As the above examples illustrate, the #GirlsLikeUs network made frequent use of co-occurring hashtags to broaden conversations about trans women’s experiences. While considering the connections between #GirlsLikeUs and broader conversations about trans women, we find a number of other co-occurring hashtags that both reinforce and extend the conversation that emerged on #GirlsLikeUs. The most common co-occurring hashtags include references to trans people, women, and women of color in general (such as #trans, #Tgirl, #twoc), references to specific trans women in the news (such as #CallMeCaitlyn, referring to Caitlyn Jenner, and #IslanNettles, a Black trans woman murdered in a 2013 hate crime), and references to general issues that are important to members of the trans counterpublic (#education, #tolerance).

Of particular interest here are co-occurring hashtags popularized by Janet Mock and Laverne Cox, the central shapers and broadcasters of the #GirlsLikeUs network. These include #FreeCeCe, a hashtag used to advocate on behalf of CeCe McDonald, #RedefiningRealness, which is drawn from the title of Mock’s 2014 memoir, and #TransIsBeautiful, which Cox began to encourage diverse media representations of trans people.

#FreeCeCe and the related hashtag, #BecauseOfCeCe, appeared alongside #GirlsLikeUs hundreds of times, especially at the start and end of McDonald’s incarceration. As part of the broader conversation on trans rights, the #CeCe hashtags often co-occurred with both #GirlsLikeUs and other references to the trans community at large (such as #trans and #twoc). #RedefiningRealness is among the most common hashtags co-occurring with #GirlsLikeUs, ranking in the top twenty overall, with the hashtags appearing together in thousands of tweets. #TransIsBeautiful also commonly appeared alongside #GirlsLikeUs. Though used less frequently overall than #RedefiningRealness, and less frequently with #GirlsLikeUs, there are still hundreds of examples of the hashtags being used together. Inverting the analysis and looking at hashtags co-occurring with #RedefiningRealness and #TransIsBeautiful, we find #GirlsLikeUs the most common in both cases, by a considerable margin. Together, the co-occurrence of #RedefiningRealness, #TransIsBeautiful, and #FreeCeCe with #GirlsLikeUs illustrates how digital counterpublics expand community-building and advocacy efforts through the discourse of hashtags.

#FreeCeCe

In June 2012 a then twenty-three-year-old CeCe McDonald was accosted by bar patrons in downtown Minneapolis, Minnesota. McDonald and her friends were called racist, transphobic, and homophobic slurs. One of their attackers threw a bottle at McDonald’s head, which shattered and created a large gash on her face. McDonald pulled out a pair of scissors to defend herself in the scuffle, and one of her attackers—a member of a white supremacist gang—was killed. McDonald was sentenced to three and a half years in a men’s prison. Her trial and subsequent imprisonment raised many questions about the differential treatment Black trans women experience in our legal system—particularly as related to self-defense and concepts of victimhood.[34] Members of the trans feminist counterpublic we examine here used social media to share McDonald’s story and protest her imprisonment, noting that she too was a #GirlLikeUs. Thanks to this activism, the Minnesota Department of Corrections was successfully petitioned to administer the full regimen of hormones McDonald needed, but she remained quartered with men despite a transfer to a second facility.[35] On her release, Janet Mock tweeted, “#BecauseOfCeCe I’m reminded daily that our lives are worth fighting for and that we matter. #CeCeIsFree”[36]

In considering the discursive power of #FreeCeCe and its variations (such as #Free_CeCe, #CeCeIsFree, and #BecauseOfCeCe), we see the connection of the community building and advocacy work characteristic of the #GirlsLikeUs network extended to a specific criminal justice case. In this case, the two hashtags worked to center women like CeCe McDonald—Black, femme, young, and incarcerated—in the trans counterpublic and to make a specific demand of a legal system that is anything but fair in its treatment of Black trans women. For example, after the Advocate tweeted a link to an op-ed by the executive director of the Center for Transgender Equality titled “Black, Poor, Young, Trans Is Sadly Often a Recipe for Violence: CeCe McDonald Was Punished for Surviving,” multiple members of the #GirlsLikeUs network manually modified the tweet by adding #FreeCeCe and #GirlsLikeUs before sharing it. In this way, members of this intersectional trans feminist counterpublic ensured that the narratives about violence against Black trans women that did arise from more mainstream LGBTQ spaces were pulled into the discussions of their specific network. At the same time, those tweeting #GirlsLikeUs along with #FreeCeCe engaged in open criticism of narratives about McDonald’s case arising from non-LGBTQ spaces, including critiques of the media’s misgendering of McDonald through the use of incorrect pronouns and the sharing of petitions and other direct forms of advocacy related to the case. As Mia Fischer has detailed in her ethnography of the CeCe Support Committee, a grassroots group of Minneapolis activists that engaged in advocacy for McDonald during her imprisonment and trial, online activism successfully motivated, shaped, and changed the local and national framing of the story.[37]

Further, the co-occurrence of #GirlsLikeUs and #FreeCeCe hashtags was employed by members of the network to legitimize trans activism. For example, user @Arizona_Abby, a member of the #GirlsLikeUs network who describes herself on Twitter as “Attorney, trans woman and general rabble-rouser on feminism, trans and LGB issues #girlslikeus #Trans100,” tweeted about the political immediacy of violence against transgender women (see figure 3.5).

In her tweet, @Arizona_Abby recalls the power of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), one of the most revered, successful (and, to some, radical) LGBTQ activist groups of the twentieth century, to legitimize a refusal to be silent in the cases of CeCe McDonald and Paige Clay, a Black transgender woman murdered in Chicago. Alongside the hashtagging of these two women’s names and ACT UP, #GirlsLikeUs appears in the tweet to signify both McDonald’s and Clay’s belonging in, and the collective identity of, the counterpublic.

Figure 3.5

Co-occurrence of #GirlsLikeUs and #FreeCece as activism.

#FreeCeCe remains an important hashtag long after McDonald’s incarceration. In 2016 Laverne Cox produced the documentary Free Cece!, which explores both McDonald’s time in prison and her subsequent release. The hashtag has been used to promote the documentary and further the cause of trans women still embroiled in the prison-industrial complex.

#RedefiningRealness and #TransIsBeautiful

In November 2013, in concert with the launch of her book, Redefining Realness: My Journey into Womanhood, Janet Mock began a social media campaign with the hashtag #RedefiningRealness. The Tumblr instantiation of the hashtag invited people to post selfies that were overlaid with text that read, “I am [the person’s name followed by a list of descriptors] I am #RedefiningRealness.”

Mock began the social media initiative with a selfie that read, “I AM JANET writer, woman, lover, friend I am #REDEFININGREALNESS.”[38] Trans and queer, Black and white, submitted to the Tumblr site for nearly ten months, with more than 120 unique contributions. The hashtag encouraged users to say more about themselves than just their gender or sexuality, bringing in their humanity and various social and relational roles. Recapitulating much of the community-building and community-celebrating functions of #GirlsLikeUs, contributors discussed their jobs, their favorite qualities about themselves, and their hopes for the future. The use of the hashtag #RedefiningRealness quickly moved to Twitter, where it is used by trans and queer users to describe ways in which they are redefining gender, by fans of Mock’s posting selfies with the book, and in Mock’s own tweets logging her nationwide travels to promote the book and related projects.

Figure 3.6

Janet Mock Tumblr post.

Actress Laverne Cox started the #TransIsBeautiful hashtag in 2015 after discussing her past shame at being recognized physically as a trans woman. She observed:

It took me years to fully internalize that someone can look at me and tell that I am transgendered and that is not only okay, but beautiful, because trans is beautiful. All the things that make me uniquely and beautifully trans—my big hands, my big feet, my wide shoulders, my deep voice—all of these things are beautiful. I’m not beautiful despite these things, I’m beautiful because of them.[39]

Here, both Cox and Mock use hashtags to advocate for the humanity and value of trans women by insisting that mainstream and cis-normative definitions of “real” and “beautiful” be opened up to them. In doing so they encourage their followers, who happily join in on both hashtags, to share stories and selfies about learning to love themselves and finding appreciation for and community with other trans women. In extending the #GirlsLikeUs network by sharing their own experiences and validating the complexity of trans individuals, Mock and Cox encourage and extend the larger modes of social support offered by the feminist trans counterpublic. While this support often includes celebrating the style choices, successes, and physical beauty of trans women, it also frequently includes members of the #GirlsLikeUs hashtag, using co-occurrence to lift up, support, and call for help for members of the network who might be struggling with mainstream messages and conditions related to trans identity.

For example, many members of the #GirlsLikeUs network tweeted links sharing their own donations and encouraging their followers to donate to #TransBookDrive, an effort begun by Mock to ensure that low-income and incarcerated members of the trans community could read Redefining Realness and other books they requested. This effort and the tweets it inspired with the co-occurring hashtags #GirlsLikeUs and #RedefiningRealness are an acknowledgment within the trans feminist counterpublic that many of its members lack support and access to even the simplest of self-affirming resources, such as books that take up their stories.

The Power of #GirlsLikeUs

As matthew heinz has noted, feelings of isolation are one of the most frequently recurring issues among trans people. In providing a venue for a community that transcends distances through #GirlsLikeUs, Twitter has become a space in which this issue can be addressed as users locate other trans people, find social support, and share the “microstresses” of trans living.[40] At the same time, the digital discourse of #GirlsLikeUs extends the postmodern characteristics of transactivist literature noted by Heather Hundley and J. Scott Rodriguez as various members of the #GirlsLikeUs network share their stories, offer each other support, and advocate for trans histories, worlds, and rights.[41] This discourse organizes a community through identity construction, encourages polyvocality through recognizing the importance of and celebrating the multiplicity of trans voices, and promotes polysemy as a means by which members of the network can create multivalent appeals to one another and to the larger public. #GirlsLikeUs sparked similar hashtag networks from other related communities, such as #BoysLikeUs for trans men and #FolksLikeUs for gender-nonconforming and nonbinary folks on the queer and transgender spectrum.

The trans feminist network that sustains and is sustained by #GirlsLikeUs is one that centers discourses from the most multiply marginalized trans voices; influencers in this network are not only trans but women, Black, and, in some cases, quite open about their experiences with poverty, sex work, and the legal system. Influencers like Janet Mock and Laverne Cox facilitate and encourage everyday trans women with a variety of intersectional identities to speak up and speak out about their experiences in a networked counterpublic that has become much bigger than they could have predicted. In turn, the collective contributions of all the members of the #GirlsLikeUs network have aided in constructing and extending an online trans feminist counterpublic that works toward self-sustaining political identity creation and, in so doing, supports the health and social inclusion of network members while strategically infiltrating mainstream talk about trans identities.

The mainstream media have responded to #GirlsLikeUs. Popular online news sites such as the Huffington Post now allow users to quickly find stories about trans women through the linked tag “girlslikeus,” CeCe McDonald’s story has been featured in Rolling Stone and other popular publications, Janet Mock’s #RedefiningRealness has been featured on almost every major network and cable channel, and #TransIsBeautiful has been featured in mainstream fashion magazines like Elle and pop culture magazines like People. Alongside mainstream attention, this universe of hashtags has garnered debate and discussion within larger LGBTQ, feminist, and racial justice counterpublics, including feature articles in the LGBTQ magazine The Advocate, on the racial justice blog Colorlines, and on the popular feminist pop culture site Jezebel. The depiction of Laverne Cox, a Black trans women known primarily for playing a prisoner as Lady Liberty, one of the most important U.S. political and cultural symbols, on the cover of Entertainment Weekly’s first ever “LGBT Issue” speaks to the cultural power of #GirlsLikeUs. Here, Black trans women and their political frameworks have become the face not only of trans issues but of LGBT issues as a whole—a representation few could have imagined even a decade ago.

Ultimately, the discursive work done by members of the #GirlsLikeUs counterpublic works to both center trans politics and normalize trans lives by using the hashtag to mark the mundane, the popular, and the activist. It is clear from this discourse and from our network analysis that #GirlsLikeUs prioritized in-group solidarity from day one, even as its members have engaged the broader public. In-group messages spread beyond their initial community and became intentionally shared with a broader public in moments of advocacy, like that on behalf of CeCe McDonald, and more generally because of the public nature of Twitter and the especially public visibility of #GirlsLikeUs adherents such as Janet Mock and Laverne Cox. This, of course, is no accident: Twitter users who connect to online conversations through hashtags and use mentioning and replying to engage high-profile figures understand their ideas and experiences may reach unknown audiences, indicating an awareness among members of the counterpublic that their often personal conversation will be visible to anyone willing to look.[42] It is also clear that the mainstream visibility of some members of the counterpublic, Mock and Cox in particular, allows a widely visible interrogation of mainstream narratives about gender identity and feminist and queer politics while supporting in-group needs.

Figure 3.7

Laverne Cox as Lady Liberty.

Since Mock first used the hashtag #GirlsLikeUs in 2012, issues of trans visibility and inclusion have reached an increasingly wide audience and have shaped some of the most visible popular cultural and political debates. The increasing number of representations of trans lives that are written and controlled by trans people has worked to humanize trans experiences. In niche media, #GirlsLikeUs continues to be a phrase for intragroup connection. In January 2016, the web series Her Story launched on YouTube. In a scene from the final episode of the first season the character Paige, played by Angelica Ross, says to another trans woman character, “It never gets easier for girls like us.” This use of the phrase between two trans women actors portraying two trans women characters underscores its cultural significance within the community.

In politics, the lingering call for “state’s rights” has been swept up in egregious policies designed to exclude trans people from public spaces. In March 2016, North Carolina banned trans people from using bathrooms that did not correspond to their sex assigned at birth. Such laws force trans citizens to make impossible choices between their safety in restrooms and breaking the law, and has created health problems as people have avoided public restrooms altogether.[43] In response, the U.S. Department of Education and Department of Justice issued a letter supporting transgender students’ right to use the bathroom of their choice and issued an injunction to stop the North Carolina bill from being implemented. Unfortunately, the legal red tape has yet to be resolved, and trans North Carolinians remain caught in the middle for the foreseeable future. A number of other states, including Massachusetts, have passed or confirmed public accommodation access bills that uphold the rights of trans people. The successful #YesOn3 initiative in Massachusetts successfully kept language that protected trans and intersex rights.[44] Additionally, in a Trump administration memo leaked to the New York Times, advisers proposed redefining “gender” on “a biological basis that is clear, grounded in science, objective and administrable.”[45] While it’s unclear how this redefinition could be actionable, its ability to wipe away legal gains for trans and other gender-nonconforming individuals is high.

In racial justice activism the issue of transgender rights has been taken up passionately by a generation of millennial radicals unwilling to accept the respectability politics and assimilationist tactics of the past. Alicia Garza, one of the founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, has often spoken about the importance of trans and gender-queer Black lives to her and the other founders’ vision of the contemporary Black liberation movement.[46] As illustrated in the previous chapter, the use of hashtags to discuss and center Black trans women victims of violence has become intertwined with Black feminist initiatives such as #SayHerName.[47]

A hashtag alone did not result in these developments, but as part of a larger cultural shift that centers sex, gender, and civil rights and that has been led primarily by trans women of color, the hashtag #GirlsLikeUs has played an indispensable role in constructing an intersectional digital trans community and radically shifting representations of and messages about trans people that arise from outside that community.

4 Racial Violence and Racial Profiling: From #OscarGrant to #TrayvonMartin

While those invested in issues of racial justice have always deployed media strategies to produce counternarratives opposing white supremacist logic, the advent of Twitter has significantly changed the ways in which ordinary people and activists do their work. One of the first and most visible instances of the shift to digital- and social media–based racial justice organizing followed the 2009 murder of Oscar Grant by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer Johannes Mehserle Grant, a twenty-two-year-old Black father on his way home from celebrating New Year’s Eve with friends, was shot in the back by Mehserle in the early morning hours of January 1, 2009, after BART police responded to calls of a fight on the train. Grant had no weapon and was already subdued when Mehserle pulled his service weapon and fired. Grant died of his injuries seven hours later.

A number of bystanders recorded the killing on their cell phones. One person anonymously submitted footage to local television station KTVU, which broadcast the unedited video and later posted it to YouTube.[1] The videos shot by bystanders would prove important to the case, particularly because of the discrepancies between the officers’ accounts of what happened and that of other witnesses. Some witnesses reported the police attempted to confiscate their phones and footage of the incident, which led to more protests on- and offline.

Racial justice activists in Oakland and beyond quickly linked the murder of Grant to the 1991 police beating of Rodney King, which was also captured on video by a witness, who in that case filmed with a trendy-for-the-time 8mm Sony Handycam. The citizen-recorded video footage of the defenseless King being brutally beaten by four white LAPD officers spread quickly through national and international television broadcasts after being sent to local news station KTLA.[2] Despite this evidence, the acquittal of these officers in a suburban court a year later sparked the 1992 L.A. riots. The public debate over what these events in Los Angeles meant about race, policing, and journalism in America consumed not only mainstream media at the time but the Black press and other counterpublic outlets as well.[3] Eighteen years later the cell-phone videos of Mehserle fatally shooting Oscar Grant spurred a renewed public debate about police brutality and racism, but with user-generated YouTube content that went viral without requiring the attention or the mediation of traditional news outlets. These videos were viewed 500,000 times in the four days following the shooting, and once KTVU posted the video on its website, it averaged more than a thousand views an hour.[4] The shooting of Grant motivated spontaneous protests as people in the Oakland area took to the streets to express their outrage.

Organizers used Twitter, a fledgling platform at the time, to inform community members when and where to meet for the first protest of Grant’s death on January 7, 2009. A year and a half later, on July 8, 2010, Mehserle was convicted of involuntary manslaughter, not second-degree murder, which prompted yet more protests in the city of Oakland. Twitter was deployed again in the aftermath of Mehserle’s trial, this time to help demonstrators avoid run-ins with police. Using what Paolo Gerbaudo calls the “choreography of assembly,” which combines traditional on-the-ground activism with technology-based coordination, Oakland residents tweeted the positions of police blockades and helped those on the ground navigate the city streets.[5] Eighty people were arrested, but the number might have been higher were it not for fast-acting, Twitter-savvy organizers.

Since 2009, the #OscarGrant hashtag has been used in conjunction with other hashtags that mark the names of Black people subject to extrajudicial killings. The murders of Kiwane Carrington, Ramarley Graham, Aaron Campbell, Rekia Boyd, Aiyana Jones, and Raymond Allen were discussed and debated by means of co-occurring hashtags between 2009 and 2012, but it was the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin that solidified Twitter hashtags as a crucial organizing tool for racial justice activists. Within a week of Martin’s murder, Twitter users were comparing the case with that of Grant. That was just the beginning of what would become a resounding chorus calling for justice.

Making the Case for Trayvon Martin On- and Offline

On February 26, 2012, seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin walked to a convenience store near his father’s home in Sanford, Florida, for Skittles and a drink. On his way home, he was confronted by George Zimmerman, a member of a neighborhood watch group, who fatally shot him. It took six weeks and a coordinated on- and offline effort by Martin’s family, their legal team, and activists before Zimmerman was indicted.[6] Zimmerman’s acquittal the following year sparked the Black Lives Matter movement.

Figure 4.1

Users created early co-occurrence between #TrayvonMartin and #OscarGrant.

Trayvon Martin’s murder was initially covered, briefly, in local media outlets. The Orlando Sentinel reported on February 29 that a “boy, 17, [was] shot to death in Sanford during ‘altercation.’”[7] It was not until Martin’s family procured representation by civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump, who in turn brought in a local attorney with connections to a publicist, that they were able to increase the profile of the case through strategic media engagement. One consequence of the work of this publicist was that Kevin Cunningham, a white graduate of Howard University Law School, learned of the case and started a Change.org petition demanding Zimmerman’s indictment.

Change.org, a website that allows users to create petitions that can be spread via links on different internet platforms, was used by Cunningham to collect more than 10,000 signatures in just a few days. On March 8 the petition was turned over to Martin’s parents, whose grief, as articulated in their open letter on the petition, galvanized the public, making it the most popular petition on the site for several years. They wrote,

Figure 4.2

Janelle Monáe tweet of the Trayvon Martin Change.org petition.

It’s been nearly two weeks and the Sanford Police have refused to arrest George Zimmerman. In their public statements, they even go so far as to stand up for the killer—saying he’s “a college grad” who took a class in criminal justice.

Please join us in calling on Angela Corey, Florida’s 4th District State’s Attorney, to investigate my son’s murder and prosecute George Zimmerman for the shooting and killing of Trayvon Martin.[8]

It would take just six days for celebrities to begin tweeting the petition. After March 13 there was a significant uptick in petition signatures once celebrities, including Spike Lee and Mia Farrow, began to tweet about it. The petition had nearly a million signatures, for example, when singer Janelle Monáe tweeted the link and encouraged people to sign.[9]

Monáe’s tweet also coincided with the Million Hoodie March, organized by Daniel Maree and others in New York City. In coordination with the march, ordinary people and celebrities across the country showed their solidarity with Martin’s family by posting selfies donning hoodies, commenting on the banal nature of the clothing that was being discussed in the media by conservative pundits like Geraldo Rivera as “thug wear.”[10] The march spurred more celebrity support from rappers Nelly and Sean “Diddy” Combs. Additional Twitter sharing of the Change.org petition by celebrities like Cher and John Legend helped push the number of signatures past one million. On March 23, basketball star Lebron James tweeted a photo of himself and Miami Heat teammates donning hoodies and bowing their heads before gearing up for a game against the Detroit Pistons.

The Change.org petition was the most successful and visible one, but other petitions were created to demand justice for Trayvon Martin as well. Maria Roach created a MoveOn.org petition on March 17 that eventually received 500,000 signatures. In addition to petitions, Black organizations such as the Black Youth Project, Dream Defenders, and Color of Change began to champion Martin through other online and on-the-ground campaigns and actions. Independent and Black media such as Global Grind and the Tom Joyner Morning Show also became instrumental in making Trayvon Martin a household name. By March 26, Martin’s family was able to deliver 2.1 million signatures demanding action on the case to Sanford authorities. Zimmerman was finally charged on April 11, one month and seventeen days after he killed Martin.

While social media platforms were used to support Martin, they were also used to support Zimmerman, who created a website to raise money for his defense using PayPal in early April. And building on the popular #Planking and #Tebowing memes, the hashtag #Trayvoning was used by mostly white youth to post pictures of themselves posed as if dead with Skittles and AriZona Iced Tea in their hands. The Zimmerman camp’s use of PayPal and later Twitter, and the “trayvoning” meme, illustrate some of the ways hashtags and social media can be used to defend or dismiss injustices even as counterpublics work to resolve them.

Twitter also became a tool to protect Martin’s legacy. As Genie Lauren’s account shared in the Forward attests, when she learned that a juror on the Zimmerman case had procured a literary agent to write a tell-all about her experience, Lauren took to Twitter to encourage others to demand the rescinding of the contract. In less than twenty-four hours, Lauren and her network had successfully created enough pressure and negative press that the agent tweeted that the deal was over. This advocacy reflects the diversity of ways in which Twitter became a useful tool in the aftermath of Martin’s killing.

Our analysis of the #TrayvonMartin network focuses on the myriad ways that the hashtag was used in the moments before Zimmerman was charged, during his trial, and after his acquittal. We discuss how members of the #TrayvonMartin network made sense of the facts of the case and framed the story with counterpublic narratives that highlighted the epidemics of racial stereotypes, fear, and anti-Black violence that resulted in Martin’s death.

Networks and Narratives in the #TrayvonMartin Counterpublic

Between March 10, 2012, and February 15, 2015 (our data collection window), the hashtag #TrayvonMartin appeared in more than three million tweets generated by nearly two million unique users. To render this large network tractable, we limited our analysis to tweets generated by users who were retweeted or mentioned at least once (thus eliminating network isolates) and divided the data into three networks, each corresponding to important milestones in the history of Trayvon Martin’s death and the subsequent trial and acquittal of George Zimmerman.

Over the course of the evolution of the hashtag #TrayvonMartin, we identified several notable shifts in discourse and network leadership. While initially the story was framed as a personal one in an effort to construct Trayvon Martin as a legitimate victim, and African American celebrities and sympathetic mainstream journalists and commentators were centered in the network, eventually the story evolved into one in which the very concepts of legal justice and criminal liability were debated at both the local and national level, and then into a story in which Trayvon Martin became a cipher for larger critiques of widespread anti-Black violence and systemic inequality.

Precharges Network

The precharges network includes data from March 10, 2012, a little more than three weeks after Trayvon Martin’s death, through April 10, 2012, the day before George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder for the shooting. The largest of the three networks in our sample, despite spanning the shortest time frame, the precharges network includes 114,431 tweets generated by 83,588 users connected by 109,070 retweets and mentions in our sample. This precharges time period was characterized by intense and targeted efforts on behalf of the Martin family lawyers and others to publicize Martin’s story, including the Change.org petition described above, tweets about Martin by several highly followed celebrities and journalists, and significant press coverage of the incident in the mainstream media.[11] We see these efforts reflected in the emergent pretrial network leadership. The top twenty most retweeted accounts included those of Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton (@SybrinaFulton), the Martin family lawyer, Benjamin Crump (@attorneycrump), the journalist Anderson Cooper (@andersoncooper, @AC360), and Black celebrities, including Gabrielle Union, Taraji P. Henson, Tichina Arnold, and Diddy Combs (@itsgabrielleu, @TherealTaraji, @TachinaArnold, @iamDiddy).

The most retweeted accounts also included several parody accounts that exploited the opportunity for public attention by tweeting false promises of money or political action to garner retweets. Two of these accounts, @RealFerrellWill and @WeLoveTrayvon, were the most retweeted accounts in the pretrial network, collecting a combined total of more than 15,000 retweets over the course of several days in late March 2012. Both promised to donate $1 to the (at the time nonexistent) #TrayvonMartin Foundation for every retweet received, and as a result, both rapidly gained followers and retweets before Twitter users realized the promises were hoaxes. Although Twitter had a formal policy against such parody accounts and hoax tweets at the time, it was not until 2013 that the platform introduced mechanisms for easily reporting fake accounts and content. This, combined with retweets by highly followed (real) celebrities who did not initially recognize the hoaxes, allowed the accounts to sustain visibility, collecting followers and retweets for some time.

Because of their high number of retweets, these two parody accounts occupy unusually central positions in the network, in this way more closely resembling the accounts of journalists and celebrities (such as @andersoncooper, @TherealTaraji) than other parody accounts, which tend to appear along the periphery of the network. This suggests @RealFarrellWill and @WeLoveTrayvon, despite their disingenuous promises of charitable donations and their eventual suspension and deletion from the platform, may have played an outsized role in popularizing the #TrayvonMartin hashtag and, perhaps, awareness of Martin’s death more generally.

The Black celebrities central to this network, the majority of whom were Black women, expressed grief and outrage over Trayvon Martin’s death and combined advocacy efforts for justice in the case with personalized commentary that constructed Martin as an “every kid.” For example, actress Taraji P. Henson tweeted, “I worry about my son!!!! JUSTICE FOR #TrayvonMartin NOW!!!!!,” while actress Tichina Arnold, who tweeted daily the number of days that had passed since Trayvon Martin “begged for his young life,” also tweeted, “I Repeat: I WILL NOT let the death of INNOCENT #TrayvonMartin go until #GEORGEZIMMERMAN is brought 2 JUSTICE. That baby was MURDERED 4NOTHING,” and actress Gabrielle Union tweeted, “#TrayvonMartin case has exposed some ppl as monsters … not just Zimmerman but ANY1 who makes excuses 4 a man who kills an unarmed child.” In such tweets and others shared widely in the network sent by these women, we see Henson, Arnold, and Union using personal and familial appeals, calling Trayvon “baby” and comparing him to family members. Further, Martin’s innocence is continuously reentrenched through language that focuses on his youth (“young life,” “child”), as is the maliciousness of his death, both in descriptions of the individual actions of Zimmerman and in the characterizations of those who sought to defend him (“begged for his life,” “murdered,” “monsters”).

While less central to the network than these Black women celebrities, the rapper-producer Diddy Combs’s tweet sharing the previously discussed Change.org petition was popular in the network, along with a tweet from Real Time HBO host Bill Maher in which the comedian stated, “No probable cause in #TrayvonMartin murder? If a dead unarmed teen and an angry racist with a smoking gun is too subtle a clue, what isn’t?” From the Combs and Maher tweets we see how the network valued both action and outrage in relation to Martin’s murder.

Of note, Combs shared the petition only after ordinary people—noncelebrities—made a concerted effort to draw him into the network. Dozens of users tweeted messages directly at Combs asking him to use his platform to draw attention to the case, while others accused Combs of failing in his moral duties as a Black star who vacationed in Florida as the Martin family struggled to gain national attention. For example, @BritiniDWrites tweeted, “Dear @IamDiddy a FL man MURDERED a Black teen named #TrayvonMartin in Feb & still isn’t arrested. RT to get #GeorgeZimmerman arrested!” And @PonderonThat was one of many users who brought the Change.org petition to Combs’s attention, tweeting, “@iamDiddy pls sign &RT the petition to bring #TrayvonMartin’s killer to justice. His family deserves answers http://chn.ge/xc4oze.” Many users accused Combs of not caring enough about the case, advising him to “use your fame wisely” and “promote something that matters,” in tweets about Martin. The popularity of tweets directed at Diddy in the network illustrates the evolution of attention to the case whereby ordinary people succeeded in getting high-profile members of the public to broadcast their concerns, furthering the network and reach of the story and gaining more mainstream attention. It is thus clear that while figures like Combs and other celebrities became central to spreading information about the case, they did so at the behest of ordinary people, mostly African American members of an often ignored counterpublic who tweeted at them asking for support and help.

From the popularity of Anderson Cooper in the network we can see how the counterpublic selected which types of mainstream news narratives and frames about anti-Black violence to spread and support. Cooper’s most influential tweet in the pretrial network read, “What I question is why #TrayvonMartin’s shooter instantly called him ‘suspicious’ and said ‘these a..holes, they always get away.’ @AC360 8p.” Here Cooper reveals his own suspicion of racial bias, though he avoids naming it explicitly. His second most popular tweet in the network goes even further: “Do you think if #TrayvonMartin had been white would he have been labeled ‘suspicious’? Would his shooter have been arrested? @AC360 8p, 10p.” In this tweet, Cooper calls for reflection and response from his mainstream audience and shares his own perspective, framing the crime against Martin as one based in racial animus while still preserving the luster of objective journalistic inquiry.

It is notable that these two Cooper tweets were most frequently shared and responded to in the network, for Cooper also tweeted several tweets during the same time frame that received less attention and interaction. These included a tweet in which the anchor rephrased his initial reaction as a rhetorical question that did more discursive avoidance of blame attribution: “The shooting of #TrayvonMartin. Unarmed african-american teen. Was race the reason he was labeled suspicious by shooter? @AC360 8p, 10p,” and a tweet sent one week later that focused on Zimmerman’s version of the story: “Just interviewed #trayvonmartin’s shooter’s attorney. He says race was not a factor in George Zimmerman killing Martin. @AC360 8p, 10p.” Notably, the latter tweet received only about one-tenth the response of Cooper’s first-person, “What I question …” tweet, reflecting the prioritizing in the network of news narratives that legitimized Martin’s victimhood and connected it directly to racism. Also notable is that while the first two tweets reproduced here were largely shared (by retweets) and responded to (by replies) affirmatively in the network, the responses to and shares of the last two tweets were often corrections or proclamations re-centering racism as a cause for the crime against Martin and casting dispersion on the Zimmerman team. For example, users quoted Cooper’s last two tweets and followed up with their own exclamations, such as the snarky “of course!” and “of course he did, he was paid to!”

Trial Network

The next network we examine, the trial network, comprised nearly 70,000 tweets in our sample, sent by 37,588 users connected by 62,740 retweets and mentions. These tweets were sent during the year-plus that elapsed from the day George Zimmerman was charged with second-degree murder (April 11, 2012) through the day he was acquitted of all charges related to Trayvon Martin’s death (July 13, 2013). Relatively smaller in size than the networks covering the time periods before and after the trial, the trial network—perhaps predictably—is dominated by accounts tweeting from and about Zimmerman’s trial. The most popular account, with nearly twice the retweets and mentions of any other account in the network, belonged to Jeff Weiner, a central Florida journalist who live-tweeted the trial from inside the courtroom (@JeffWeinerOS, with 2,094 retweets and mentions). The next most retweeted and mentioned accounts were those of Robert Zimmerman, George Zimmerman’s brother and family spokesperson (@rzimmermanjr, 1,292 retweets and mentions), and Benjamin Crump, the lawyer representing Trayvon Martin’s family (@AttorneyCrump, 807 retweets and mentions). Although neither had formal roles in the trial proceedings, both Zimmerman and Crump commented on the trial frequently on Twitter and other media platforms. Other highly retweeted accounts discussing the trial included those of Black celebrities (such as Gabrielle Union, @itsgabrielleu, 551 retweets and mentions) and the Black media outlets BET and BET News (@BET and @BETNews, 387 and 451 retweets and mentions, respectively).

In addition to these accounts discussing the Zimmerman trial, the trial network also includes bots and other opportunistic accounts that exploited public interest in the trial to make money or promote products. For example, similar to the @RealFerrellWill and @WeLoveTrayvon accounts described above, a parody account masquerading as that of actor Will Smith (@realWillSmith) received more than five hundred retweets in exchange for promised financial donations to the (fictional) #TrayvonMartin Foundation. However, unlike the similar accounts in the pretrial network, the @realWillSmith donation-for-retweet promise was extremely short-lived, lasting only hours, compared to several days for the accounts that trended in the pretrial network. This suggests that users became relatively more savvy over time about identifying hoaxes, and consequently hoax accounts were less influential in the discourse during the trial network than they were previously.

In this period, the fact that only one Black celebrity, Gabrielle Union, held on to a top spot in the network shows that rather than spreading tweets from high-profile figures seeking to draw attention to the case, the network centered news about the legal case, particularly the ins and outs of the charges and trial, as well as the competing narratives coming from the Martin and Zimmerman camps. This is clearly illustrated by the top three accounts in the trial network, those of Jeff Weiner, an Orlando Sentinel reporter, who covered the trail from the ground at the local level; Robert Zimmerman, George Zimmerman’s brother and the family spokesman, who primarily appeared in the network as the result of replies from various users challenging his public assertions about the case and trial and denigrating him and his brother; and Benjamin Crump, the Martin family attorney who became central to the network as a result of retweets as other users shared his updates on the case and the general status of the Martin family. The difference in the kinds of engagement that made Robert Zimmerman and Benjamin Crump central to the network reveals the importance of looking beyond network data to the ways that publics and counterpublics use the technological tools available to them to elevate or challenge particular discourses.

Crump’s tweets like “For all asking here is the link to last week Motion and Court Transcript #TrayvonMartin” (which included several lengthy links to said documents) and “Be sure to follow the #TrayvonMartin legal team to stay abrest [sic] on all case updates. @NatJackEsq @parksesq and @JasmineEsquire” were retweeted widely in the network. Robert Zimmerman appears in the network because of all the @ replies he received as direct challenges to his contentions about his brother and the story of what happened the night of Martin’s death. In response to a tweet that received less than ten retweets in which Robert Zimmerman said, “Commemorate #TrayvonMartin NE way U like, but don’t slander my brother #GeorgeZimmerman in the process,” dozens of members of the #TrayvonMartin network responded with critiques of the logic of the tweet, critiques of Zimmerman’s general defense of his brother, and pure outrage at the circumstances of Martin’s death. Responses to the Robert Zimmerman’s tweet ranged from “@rzimmermanjr slander? Really?..everytime you speak you r slandering a young man who can no longer speak TRUTH. Murder is murder” to “@rzimmermanjr The Zimmermans think only they have the right to voice their opinions …” and “@rzimmermanjr Man Fuck your brother!” Here we see the interventionist counternarratives that arose from the network in response to the presentation of Zimmerman’s defense, as well as the outrage in the network directed at Zimmerman generally.

Journalist Jeff Weiner, the most central node in the trial network, maintained this position through his dogged reporting on the case and trial and his frequent posts. Notably, Weiner has a fairly modest following on Twitter but was elevated in this network owing to his close proximity and access to the case. For example, Weiner frequently tweeted breaking updates about the legal proceeding and statements made by both the Zimmerman defense team and the Martin family team, along with comments from the judge overseeing the case. Examples of Weiner tweets that circulated widely in the network include “Natalie Jackson: ‘A Black 17-year-old child should be able to walk home from the store & not be shot.’ #TrayvonMartin” and “Guy: #TrayvonMartin died after experiencing child’s worst fear: ‘to be followed on the way home in the dark by a stranger.’ #ZimmermanTrial.”[12] The popularity of these tweets in the network show how news reporting that amplified the arguments being made by members of the prosecution were favored over those made by Zimmerman’s defense team—which Weiner spent equal time reporting on, but which received far fewer retweets.

The trial network also included BET News and BET accounts, which became central to the network for reporting on the case. Notably, while BET is an entertainment, not news, channel, it is the only cable or broadcast network to appear in a dominant position in the trial network, revealing the sourcing preferences of the network during this period and a desire for news about the case that openly contextualized Martin within Black experiences with anti-Black violence and the criminal justice system. @BETNews reported details of the trial in the form of direct quotations from the prosecution against Zimmerman that tended to center Martin’s innocence and cast doubt on Zimmerman’s version of events, occasionally using all caps to emphasize parts the reporter found important. @BET also frequently tweeted about the inner workings of the trial but included reports on Martin’s family “asking for prayers,” tweets that highlighted inconsistencies in the way police handled Martin’s death, and comparisons of Martin’s death to that of Jordan Davis, the Black teen killed the same year as Martin by a white man after a dispute over loud music in a gas station parking lot.

Posttrial Network

The final network in our analysis, the posttrial network, includes tweets sent between July 14, 2013, the day after Zimmerman was acquitted, and February 15, 2015, the end of the data collection window for this chapter. This eighteen-month period allows us to examine themes that emerged immediately after Zimmerman’s acquittal, as well as those that surfaced after the initial media frenzy over the verdict dissipated. The posttrial network includes 85,914 tweets sent by 61,620 unique users connected by 79,627 retweets and mentions. Approximately three quarters of the tweets in the posttrial network were sent in the days immediately following Zimmerman’s acquittal as advocacy organizations like the NAACP, Black media outlets, and celebrities like Rihanna commented on the verdict, subsequent protests, and ongoing legal action against Zimmerman.

Following this initial surge of activity, there was a small uptick in tweets containing #TrayvonMartin when then president Barack Obama spoke about Trayvon Martin and racial profiling in a White House press briefing. Although President Obama himself never tweeted about Trayvon Martin, on July 19, 2013, his remarks about Martin were heavily quoted and linked by other Twitter users. These tweets, along with ongoing commentary about the Zimmerman verdict, yielded several thousand tweets per day, in our sample, until the end of July 2013, when the pace slowed to between several dozen and around one hundred tweets per day.

Tweets containing #TrayvonMartin continued to appear at a rate of approximately thirty to one hundred per day until the following February, when several thousand tweets appeared on February 5, 2014, the day that would have been Trayvon Martin’s nineteenth birthday. The #TrayvonMartin hashtag continues to trend each year on Martin’s birthday, as well as on the anniversary of the day he was killed. Apart from these dates related to Martin’s life and death, the #TrayvonMartin hashtag also trends during other events involving the extrajudicial killing of Black men and boys, including the August 2014 protests following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; the November 2014 protests following the death of Tamir Rice; and the December 2014 protests following the failure to indict the police officers involved in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner (we discuss these cases in the next chapter). Thus, over time, the hashtag #TrayvonMartin both reflects an ongoing commitment to honor the life and memory of Trayvon Martin himself and references a larger pattern of systemic injustice across the United States. Here we see a shift away from the individualized framing of Martin as child victim popular in the pretrial network and the legal details that were of interest in the trial network. Instead, Martin’s victimhood becomes a cipher for the larger experience of injustice among Black people, particularly that involving anti-Black violence, state-sanctioned violence, and neglect and abuses within the legal system. In the posttrial network Martin’s case is most frequently connected, through co-occurring hashtags, to cases of police brutality. In this discourse, although Zimmerman was not an officer of the law, users make the connection between the ideologies that support community watch initiatives and the criminalization of Black men generally, and name the complicity and guilt of police and courts in protecting not only each other but white vigilantes who use similar logics.

In this network we also see the rise of established advocacy groups to a central position including the NAACP and members of its board, and the hacker collective Anonymous. Though the NAACP, which is a legacy Black civil rights organization, and Anonymous, which at the time was one of the most followed radical activist accounts across different issue areas, may seem like strange bedfellows, here they both serve to communicate the all too common miscarriage of justice that the Zimmerman acquittal reflected.[13] On the day of the acquittal, for example, Anonymous tweeted, “No Justice for #TrayvonMartin. Not today,” and the NAACP tweeted a quote from the organization’s chair, Roslyn Brock, that read “Today, justice failed #TrayvonMartin and his family.” Both tweets reflect the deep disappointment and anger felt in counterpublic communities regarding the Zimmerman verdict. The NAACP followed up on its first tweet with an actionable one, asking those in the network to continue to “seek justice for #TrayvonMartin” by signing a petition asking for a Department of Justice inquiry, while @YourAnonNews levied a critique of the trial, tweeting “#TrayvonMartin was put on trial, in effect, for his own murder and found guilty,” while also sharing the Trayvon Martin tribute song released by Yasiin Bey, Dead Prez, and Mikeflo.

Also, in the posttrial network we see some carryover in types of popular accounts from previous periods. While the original group of Black celebrities central to the pretrial network are no longer influential here, they have been replaced in the posttrial network by singer Rihanna, producer NatStar, and BET’s 106 & Park, a live studio audience music video show in which hosts Terrence J and Rocsi Diaz discussed pop culture and news. Notably, this set of Black celebrity influencers is markedly younger than those that appeared in the pretrial network. While Generation X Black celebrity discourse in the pretrial network advocated for the justice system in a hopeful way that presumed it could serve Trayvon Martin’s family justice, these millennial Black celebrity accounts contributed to a discourse in the posttrial network that framed the justice system itself as impossibly corrupt and unable to value Black lives appropriately.

On the day after the acquittal, for example, Rihanna’s short tweet “Only in America! #TrayvonMartin” became enormously popular, the exclamation of exasperation and critique of the U.S. system as a whole resonating with members of the network. After the acquittal was announced, @106andPark began tweeting images of, and details about, the spontaneous protests occurring in response to the verdict in Times Square and other U.S. cities, ways for those who disagreed with the verdict to take action, and asked followers to “Tweet with us your reactions of the #ZimmermanTrial’s verdict using #106ForTrayvon today as we discuss #TrayvonMartin w/ experts.” The show dedicated an episode to Martin two days after the verdict in which it live-tweeted the reactions of hip hop stars like Young Jeezy to the verdict. NatStar released a song titled “Eureka” on SoundCloud that included a verse about Martin and was subsequently praised and retweeted in the network by NAACP board member Wanda Brendle-Moss in a show of intergenerational solidarity.

One account not like the others in content made it into a position of influence in the posttrial network. The user shared a meme suggesting that white victims of Black killers receive less media and legal attention than Black victims of white killers like Trayvon Martin. The meme does not delegitimize Martin’s victimhood directly, noting that he was unarmed and seventeen, but suggests that a white teen named Marley Lion met a similar fate and unfairly received no outcry or attention. The meme, which reflects the now widely discussed use of misinformation and misdirection online, lacks facts and accurate reporting—as is true of many narratives that arise online seeking to prove reverse racism or suggesting that crimes committed by Black perpetrators against whites are ignored.[14] Snopes, the crowd-sourced fact-checking site, quickly pointed out the false equivalencies in the meme, noting that in the Lion case the victim was not targeted for his identity or for “looking suspicious” but was robbed, the perpetrators were initially unknown, and as soon as law enforcement identified the perpetrators, which was swiftly, they were arrested, charged, tried, and found guilty. Regardless, this user’s centrality in the network is due solely to this meme, reflecting two responses to his tweet: first, some users, those who believed the Martin case was overblown and who were largely excluded from positions of influence in the pretrial and trial networks, used the meme to interject an alternative, dismissive narrative into the posttrial network, and second, members of the network who understood the unique injustices of the Martin case responded to the meme through a large number of replies in an effort to illustrate the false equivalency. These battling narratives elevated the single tweet to a position of prominence.

Setting the Stage for Black Lives Matter

From the death of Oscar Grant to the killing of Trayvon Martin, counterpublics, activists, and concerned citizens engaged digital technology in the long tradition of elevating untold stories and unfair conditions faced by African Americans. Here we see an ecosystem that includes not just Twitter but YouTube, online petition sites, and online and offline efforts to gain the attention of journalists and celebrities and to disrupt the business as usual narratives and spaces that normalize anti-Black violence. Within the #TrayvonMartin network, we can trace the way users respond to discourse that supports or diminishes the severity of this violence and the important role of narrative whereby hashtags are linked together to contextualize, memorialize, and make demands.

For example, in addition to the network data described above, we also captured a ranked list of the most common hashtags appearing in tweets with #TrayvonMartin during our data collection window. Here we extended the collection of tweets from the beginning of the Martin story’s visibility through the years following Zimmerman’s acquittal. Co-occurrence helps us tell the story of how members of the #TrayvonMartin network understood Martin’s killing in relation to other stories they deemed important both at the time and in the following years. Variations on George Zimmerman’s name (#Zimmerman, #GeorgeZimmerman) appeared most frequently and earliest, followed by the names of other African Americans killed by police and vigilantes. Taken together with the trend data observed in the posttrial network, this lends further support to the notion that #TrayvonMartin transformed over time from a signifier of Martin himself to a symbol of the broader condition of racial bias and injustice in America. Indeed, the twenty most commonly co-occurring hashtags also include calls for justice for Martin in particular (#JusticeForTrayvon) and the Black community in general (#BlackLivesMatter).

The ongoing visibility of the hashtag on Twitter is an example of how the narratives constructed by particular publics are lasting and how particular stories carry symbolic weight even when the events lie in the past. We see this in how the story was linked, in particular, to other cases of anti-Black violence that occurred both before and after Martin’s killing. Of the top one hundred co-occurring hashtag combinations, more than half, fifty-five, included the names of other African Americans killed by police violence or by white Americans. The names were those of other children, including Tamir Rice and Jordan Davis, and many men and women, including, most frequently, Michael Brown and Eric Garner, whose killings at the hands of police happened almost exactly one year after George Zimmerman’s acquittal.

Remarkably, after Rice, Davis, Brown, and Garner, #OscarGrant is the next most frequently hashtagged name beside #TrayvonMartin. We mark the digital documentation and activism around Grant’s January 2009 killing by Bay Area Rapid Transit police as a starting point for contemporary digital racial justice organizing. The linking of the Grant case to the Martin case despite intervening time and events reflects this connection. For example, the journalist and activist Abby Martin tweeted a week after the killing of Mike Brown, “Just like #TrayvonMartin & #OscarGrant, the media protects the status quo by framing #MikeBrown as the criminal, instead of the killer cop.”

Notably, other historical cases of anti-Black murder are hashtagged next to #TrayvonMartin as well, including #SeanBell and #EmmettTill. The linking of these cases, which span nearly sixty years, also indicates the role that collective memory plays in contemporary digital racial justice spaces. For example, user @MikeMooseBC tweeted a link to his personal YouTube channel to Rihanna, saying, “I filmed a webisode featuring #TrayvonMartin #EmmettTill #HipHop & Id LOVE ur opinion if U have time,” and the account for the TV One program Roland Reports featuring columnist Roland Martin tweeted “DON’T MISS @rolandsmartin’s NEW column, #TrayvonMartin Could Be This Generation’s #EmmettTill.”

Together, members of the #TrayvonMartin network argue that the fate that befell Martin, Till, and those in between reflects the glaring continuation of anti-Black violence and supremacy. Further, this linkage is used to make the point that little has changed in the treatment of Black bodies in U.S. society despite the supposed racial advances of post–civil rights America. Here we see the ways Twitter users and their networks concerned with ongoing instances of anti-Black violence locate themselves within larger histories of the Black freedom struggle and activism.

The frequency with which the hashtag #MarissaAlexander appeared alongside #TrayvonMartin further demonstrates the systemic critique levied by members of the network. The same year that Martin was killed, Alexander, a Black woman, fired a warning shot to scare away her abusive husband in Florida. Despite the Florida “stand your ground” law that Zimmerman’s defense successfully used, Alexander was found guilty of aggravated assault with a lethal weapon and sentenced to twenty years in prison. The juxtaposition of the treatment of Alexander, who had been physically threatened by her husband and who physically hurt no one, with that of Zimmerman was used in the network to point out the inconsistent ways in which laws are applied to Black and white victims and defendants.

Other names co-occurring with #Trayvon Martin include #RenishaMcBride, #FreddieGray, #WalterScott, #KendrickJohnson, #JohnCrawford, #AntonioMartin, and #RekiaBoyd. Together these hashtags work within the network to highlight a systemic problem that results in the unnecessary, frequent, and barbaric deaths of Black Americans. Together they make a case for a movement for Black lives.

5 From #Ferguson to #FalconHeights: The Networked Case for Black Lives

The Black Lives Matter movement not only relies on new technological infrastructures and potentials, it was birthed in the public consciousness by them. In the tradition of Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record, a hundred-page pamphlet describing the horrors of lynching faced by Black American communities in 1895, those working to tell stories of extrajudicial anti-Black murder have turned wholeheartedly to using public platforms.

In an age of digital media, globalization, and smartphones, the power of the dogged journalism Wells inspires has moved beyond individual Black journalists and African American publications to everyday people. As we have detailed throughout this book, social media spaces, Twitter in particular, have given ordinary people the power to report stories as they unfold and to contextualize these stories within marginalized experience and knowledge. Yet it is not enough for stories to be told. They must also be heard, and to be heard they must cross online and offline boundaries and silences, reach new audiences, and move on old and new media platforms.

Alicia Garza’s first digital utterance of #BlackLivesMatter occurred on Facebook in 2013 in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman. Yet it was the extrajudicial murder of Black people, particularly at the hands of police officers, in the years following that ushered in the uprising that made #BlackLivesMatter activism an unavoidable issue for mainstream journalists and politicians.

#FergusonIsEverywhere: The Matter of Black Life Goes Mainstream

After he shot dead eighteen-year-old Michael Brown on August 9, 2014, officer Darren Wilson alleged that the teen, having been stopped for “walking in the street,” had reached through his car window and attempted to grab his gun and then charged him. Tiffany Mitchell, who saw the events unfold, said that Brown had his hands up and was begging Wilson not to shoot.[1] Her account was supported by other eyewitnesses, making “Hands up, don’t shoot” a rallying cry and symbolic gesture that protesters later used to signal their outrage and resistance. Other accounts from neighbors and Brown’s friend Dorian Johnson also contradicted Wilson’s version of events, and community members quickly began to post live tweets and images from the scene. As Brown’s body was left by officials to lie in the street for over four hours, concerned community members moved in to monitor police and take stock of the horror occurring outside their front doors. Between the 2012 slaying of Trayvon Martin and that of Brown in 2014, Twitter had updated its display features, allowing pictures shared through the platform to be visible without viewers needing to click on a link.[2] This practice increased the number of images shared on the site and directly contributed to the spread of pictures associated with the slaying of Brown. The second most tweeted image among those tagged with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was that of Brown lying dead in the street as Wilson stood over him.[3]

As an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice later confirmed, the Ferguson Police Department had a long history of misconduct in its treatment of the residents of the town. Brown’s death proved to be the last straw for a community laboring under pent-up discontent.[4] Following a candlelight vigil the day after Brown’s death, a standoff between police in full riot gear and mourners boiled over, with police firing tear gas and discharging smoke bombs in an attempt to disperse the crowd. In the next days, a growing group took to the street in protest of Brown’s death and the police response to protesters. Officials attempted to create and enforce a curfew and limited the areas where protesters could gather, further agitating them. Over two weeks, the nation watched cell-phone videos and pictures shared on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites through the hashtag #Ferguson of a growing uprising and the draconian attempts to squelch it. Some journalists on the ground painted a sympathetic picture of the protests, calling into question the standard negative portrayals police used to frame the unrest.[5] With time, major news outlets began to question the necessity of the militarized police force as mourners and members of the press were arrested and the now iconic images of young and old protesters facing down tanks and tear gas went viral.[6]

As Deen Freelon, Charlton D. McIlwain, and Meredith Clark documented in their work with the Center for Media and Social Impact, in June 2014, a year after Zimmerman’s acquittal for the murder of Trayvon Martin, there were only forty-eight posted #BlackLivesMatter tweets. In August of that year, following the killing of Michael Brown, use of the hashtag “skyrocketed to 52,288.”[7] Analyzing nine time periods from 2014 to 2016, these researchers found six distinct groups of users engaging the hashtag: Black Lives Matter activists, the leftist hacktivist group Anonymous, conservative Twitter users, mainstream news outlets, Black celebrities, and young Black Twitter users, whom multiple works have shown to be an essential demographic.

According to Jelani Ince, Fabio Rojas, and Clayton A. Davis, the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was used largely in five ways: to garner solidarity or approval of the movement, to reference police violence, to mention movement tactics, to talk about Ferguson specifically, and last, to express countermovement sentiments.[8] They note the importance of “distributive framing” made possible by hashtags whereby evaluation of the problems and potential solutions discussed by way of the hashtags does not primarily originate with specific movement leaders. This ability of decentralized networks to eschew hierarchy is particularly helpful in spreading messages to diverse groups. Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa support this claim, reporting that #Ferguson allowed observers of the hashtag to see what “protesters were tweeting, what journalists were reporting, what the police was announcing, and how observers and analysts interpreted the unfolding events. You could also learn how thousands of users were reacting to the numerous posts.”[9]

How I Became a Black Lives Matter Activist

DiDi Delgado

In the past few years, we’ve seen a resurgence of activism and awareness surrounding Black liberation and antiracism work. Many of the newer activists—and I include myself in this group—can pinpoint a specific moment or event that prompted us to become more involved in organizing. These events are often tied to incidents of Black folks being killed by white supremacy, in one form or another—Aiyana Jones, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Sandra Bland, and so on. Their names are burned into our memories from chanting them in the streets for weeks and months on end, from painstakingly writing them on concrete and scrawling them onto ornate banners alongside the phrase “Black Lives Matter.”

In retrospect, I can pinpoint my jump into organizing to an exact day and time. It was the morning of November 29, 2014. This was a few days after the decision was announced not to indict the officer who murdered Mike Brown. Ferguson’s uprising was in full swing, and this was, coincidentally, the three-year anniversary of my mother’s death. Prior to that day, one could say I was passively involved in what was going on in my city and around the country. People were getting more and more incensed by the carnage, and local folks were pushing me to come forward and speak up in my community. I’m a poet. I was known for being bold and outspoken with my artistry. I’m also one of those speakers cursed with the ability to command attention, whether or not I have any idea what I’m talking about. This terrified me. I was afraid I wouldn’t do justice to the legacies of those lost to the struggle. And they’d already been deprived enough of justice. But on that day in November—as I was reflecting on my mother’s life, and my own, and Mike Brown’s, and what all of us had in common, and what we did not—I knew that I couldn’t remain passive any longer.

To me, Black Lives Matter wasn’t just a hashtag or a mantra. Black Lives Matter was a wake-up call to something that I knew deep down to be true, but that I knew deeper down isn’t true in the world today. I had been conditioned to see myself as “less than,” and in the span of three words, that phrase came to be an affirmation for me and so many others who needed to hear it—and needed to say it over and over and over again until it became our truth. Until we believed it. And once I believed it, I wanted everyone around me to believe it too.

#BlackLivesMatter gave way to a movement, and that movement gave way to more rallying cries—each with the purpose of guiding our path to liberation. From #SayHerName (which stressed the importance of centering women and femmes) to #TransLivesMatter and beyond, like mottoes etched into ancient sundials and tribal markings adorning indigenous structures, hashtags have become modern signifiers of what we as a society stand for, and what we’re willing to die for. And that is no small feat.

As we find elsewhere, the story of what happened in Ferguson began to circulate on Twitter, first through personal accounts from Brown’s neighbors, whose tweets set the stage for how the larger activist narrative around the events of August 9 would evolved.[10] The story was pushed along, and the network enlarged, by members of the local and national Black public sphere, including local alderman Antonio French, who was arrested while participating in the protests, and rapper Tef Poe, as well as MSNBC’s Goldie Taylor, a St. Louis native, and Johnetta Elzie and DeRay McKesson, who credit the events of Ferguson with turning them from concerned young citizens into activists. Together these Twitter users helped spread the story to a range of networks, documented on-the-ground efforts, and buoyed calls for aid from the general public as justice continued to be waylaid. Soon, increasing online attention to the events in Ferguson, and particularly the conflicts developing around unarmed protestors, journalists, and police, became unignorable even in the most mainstream of spaces.

#Ferguson also became more than a geographic descriptor of the town where Michael Brown was killed. It became a stand-in for Anytown, USA. Black Lives Matter activists across the country and the world were soon chanting, “Ferguson is everywhere” in demands for justice in the extrajudicial abuse and killing of Black people. The diverse conversations in, and uses of, the hashtag mirror what we have seen in both the intersectional hashtags created by Black feminists and the other hashtags that emerged after Ferguson. Ordinary people using #Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter contributed issue framing, prescriptions, and analysis in the network that extended far beyond the digital realm to penetrate national and international discourse.

For example, in acts of solidarity, Palestinian activists used the hashtag #Ferguson to share with Ferguson activists remedies for tear gas exposure and the inhalation of smoke from smoke bombs, as well as strategies for countering police escalation tactics.[11] Like the iconic images of Bull Connor’s police dogs attacking Black protestors in a segregated Birmingham, Alabama, the images and tweets from Ferguson allowed a counternarrative to emerge that exposed the racist underpinnings of responses to the protests. The most tweeted image during the August unrest signaled by #Ferguson was a side-by-side comparison of police officers in riot gear standing opposite 1960s civil rights protesters and a hauntingly similar image of police officers in riot gear facing Ferguson protestors.[12]

After #Ferguson, the names of more Black men, women, and children became hashtags, popularized in death because of the state-sanctioned violence that took their lives; the locations of their deaths hashtagged as a sort of geography of violence and resistance; their last words, their clothing, and their loved ones digitally documented by everyday people as part of a twenty-first-century citizen-driven Red Record. These hashtags also spurred others, such as #IfTheyGunnedMeDown and #CrimingWhileWhite (which we discuss in chapter 6), that were used to critique media representations of Black victims and to point out racial hypocrisies in police response and engagement.

We Can’t Breathe

Three weeks before Michael Brown was killed and the nation became forever familiar with Black Lives Matter activists and activism, forty-three-year-old father and grandfather Eric Garner died after being put in a chokehold by NYPD officers during an arrest for selling “loosies,” or single cigarettes. As Garner lost his ability to breathe, he pleaded with the officers, “I can’t breathe,” a phrase subsequently taken up by activists and hashtagged as they demanded justice for his death.

#EricGarner began trending on Twitter, with thousands of tweets containing his name appearing immediately after his death on July 17, 2014. In the days and weeks following, #EricGarner stayed visible, but modestly, as video of his death taken by his friend, Ora Ramsey, was released and Garner’s funeral was held. According to our data, the largest upticks in the use of #EricGarner began after the death of Michael Brown. In particular, #EricGarner trended in the week following Michael Brown’s death, a month after Garner’s, and #EricGarner trended most significantly after the nonindictment of the officer who choked him, which occurred simultaneously with the organized December 3, 2014, protests in response to Darren Wilson’s nonindictment for the death of Michael Brown one week earlier. In fact, most of the top tweets in the #ICantBreathe network were sent on the day of these protests, as indicated by the popular examples in figure 5.1 from Bishop Talbert Swan, the leftist news account Bipartisan Report, and Anonymous. Here we see #EricGarner and #ICantBreathe used alongside hashtags that specifically reference the events in Ferguson, such as #Ferguson and #HandsUp, along with broader movement hashtags, such as #BlackLivesMatter.

Thus, millions of #EricGarner tweets during the first week of December 2014 were in part enabled by the visibility of the Brown case, which helped activists in Long Island draw attention to the Garner case weeks and months after his July death. Together the multiplatform protest ecology whose foundations were laid in response to the killing of Oscar Grant, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag, which coalesced for Trayvon Martin, and the response to the killing of Michael Brown made Eric Garner’s death not only more visible than it might have been otherwise but central to the movement. #EricGarner and his last words, #ICantBreathe, continue to trend in Twitter accounts of other high-profile cases of police brutality and with the ebb and flow of notable #BlackLivesMatter activism.

Through the use of hashtags, users link similar cases, illustrating how each is not an isolated incident but rather part of a system of violence enacted against Black people. Among the top fifteen hashtags most commonly co-occurring with Eric Garner’s name in our data were the names of other victims of police violence, including, in descending order, Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, John Crawford, Freddie Gray, and Walter Scott. These connections are also rendered visible in the most frequently shared links in the hashtag networks. In #EricGarner tweets, the link that appeared most often was a 2016 Instagram post by actress/singer Zendaya that read, simply, “Another day … another hashtag. …”[13] Posted nearly two years after Garner’s death, Zendaya’s caption on the image reads, “#EricGarner #SandraBland#OscarGrant #AltonSterling #WalterScott#PhilandoCastile to think … that’s not even the beginning of it, these are just the few we got on video … makes me sick.” Like others who digitally connected similar cases through hashtags that came before, we see Philando Castile, the most recent case on Zendaya’s list, linked to a hashtag narrative that begins with #EricGarner.

Figure 5.1

Examples of hashtag co-occurrence in #EricGarner and #ICantBreathe tweets.

After Ferguson: The Ongoing Evolution of Black Lives Matter Networks

Following the summer 2014 police killings of Eric Garner and Michael Brown, the news media began reporting regularly on similar cases. While some perceived an uptick in police brutality as a result of this coverage, similar events are old news in communities on the front lines of the militarization of local police forces and entrenched race and class biases. Yet new technologies used by activists, the increasing power of ordinary people to influence the news cycle, and the mainstream attention that has resulted from the cases of Oscar Grant and Trayvon Martin to those of Michael Brown and Eric Garner have created a renewed (or for some Americans, a brand-new) interest in instances of state-sanctioned anti-Black violence.

Among the most notable cases in the period from 2014 to 2017 in addition to Garner and Brown are those of twenty-two-year-old John Crawford III, who was killed by police in a Walmart store outside Dayton, Ohio, while holding a BB gun he had taken off the store’s shelf; twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed by Cleveland police officers while playing with a toy gun on a playground; fifty-year-old Walter Scott, who was shot in the back and killed during a daytime traffic stop in South Carolina; twenty-five-year-old Freddie Gray, who sustained life-ending injuries during an excessive force arrest and “rough ride” by Baltimore police; twenty-eight-year-old Sandra Bland, whose suspicious death in a Texas jail after a routine traffic stop we discussed in depth in chapter 2; thirty-seven-year-old Alton Sterling, who was shot at close range by Baton Rouge, Louisiana, officers responding to a complaint that he was selling CDs on the street; thirty-two-year-old Philando Castile, a beloved elementary school staffer who was shot by police in Minnesota during a traffic stop, with his girlfriend and her toddler in the car; twenty-three-year-old Korryn Gaines, who was shot while holding her five-year-old son by Baltimore police serving a traffic warrant; fifteen-year-old honor student Jordan Edwards, who was shot in the back by a Dallas, Texas, officer who opened fire on a car of unarmed teens; and thirty-year-old Charlena Lyles, who was pregnant when she was shot by Seattle police after calling them to respond to an attempted burglary at her home.

This macabre list is nowhere near the full number of African Americans killed by police during the period but only a sampling of the highest-profile cases Americans learned about, often first through Twitter and other social media outlets and then from the mainstream media. Below we examine the network and discourse trends of three of these cases in addition to the work we have previously discussed on #TrayvonMartin (chapter 4), #SandraBland and #SayHerName (chapter 2), and #Ferguson, #MikeBrown, #EricGarner and #ICantBreathe as part of the larger narrative and demands of the Black Lives Matter movement.

#TamirRice (2002–2014)

On November 22, 2014, the weekend before Thanksgiving, police in Cleveland received a concerned call about someone with a gun on a playground. “It’s probably fake,” the caller said. Two officers responded and, according to reports, shot twelve-year-old Tamir Rice, who was playing with a fake gun, within two seconds of arriving on the scene.[14] He died the next day.[15]

The hashtag #TamirRice trended almost immediately, with thousands of tweets appearing November 23, 2014, and over a million tweets during our one-year data collection window (November 22, 2014–November 22, 2016). The top co-occurring hashtags in the #TamirRice network speak to the interconnectedness of the cases discussed here amid larger #BlackLivesMatter activism. In addition to #BlackLivesMatter and #Cleveland, the other most popular hashtags in the network are the names of victims of anti-Black violence, including #EricGarner, #MikeBrown, #SandraBland, #TrayvonMartin, #FreddieGray, and #JohnCrawford.

At the root of #TamirRice tweets are mournful, angry, and often desperate questions of innocence. Who, these tweets ask, has access to the benefit of presumed innocence if a child on a playground does not? What is justice, they proclaim, in the case of a child murdered by the state? These tweets offer specific critiques about the ways anti-Black racism denies childhood—both experientially through a lack of perceived innocence and literally through death—to Black children. These tweets tell a story about how familiar the African American community is with violence against innocents and the intergenerational grief and rage that exists in response to the state treating Black children’s lives as disposable rather than precious.

For example, one widely shared tweet in the network bemoaned, “A 12 y.o. With a toy gun. A child. With a toy. Killed. For no reason … other than the fear of Blackness. Even in childhood … #TamirRice.” Another observed, in response to a CNN story on the shooting, “White kids don’t have to worry about being killed at the playground because of a toy gun & I hope they never do. #TamirRice #Ferguson @CNN.” Activist Shaun King tweeted, “I don’t say this lightly but #TamirRice is the closest thing to #EmmettTill we’ve had in this generation”—a comparison that was also applied to Trayvon Martin. Filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s one-word, one-hashtag tweet, “Innocent. #TamirRice,” which was shared and liked almost 20,000 times, speaks to the resonance of discourses of innocence in the network.

In an example of how influential members of the networks we have examined throughout this book overlap with journalists and ordinary people in the larger #BlackLivesMatter network, African American journalist Jamelle Bouie (@jbouie) shared a story about the officer who killed twelve-year-old Rice reporting that the child was twenty years old, to which Mikki Kendall (@Karnythia) of #FastTailedGirls expressed exasperation and various other Twitter users responded by noting the ways in which Black children’s lives are neglected because of racism. These kinds of exchanges are common throughout the #BlackLivesMatter networks, with both central and peripheral members of the Black public sphere playing varied roles in reporting on, reacting to, and organizing around anti-Black violence, all in the context of a sometimes unspoken indignation about the details of these cases.

#FreddieGray (1989–2015)

On April 12, 2015, Freddie Gray, like many young Black men who have reason to fear the police, ran when he encountered Baltimore officers. The officers chased him down for “flee[ing] unprovoked when noticing police presence,” though later would use Gray’s possession of a knife found after the chase as the reason for arresting him.[16] Witnesses reported that officers aggressively forced Gray to the ground, bending his legs at an unnatural angle. Once loaded in the police wagon, Gray was subjected to what is infamously known in Baltimore as a “rough ride,” in which officers purposely stop short, drive erratically fast, and turn corners sharply to cause discomfort to the arrestee in the wagon. Because Gray was not secured with a seat belt and was handcuffed and could not steady himself, he sustained a serious spinal cord and brain injury that resulted in a coma and his death a week later.

Figure 5.2

Filmmaker Ava DuVernay’s tweet on Tamir Rice the day a grand jury declined to indict the officer who killed him.

Figure 5.3

Mikki Kendall’s reaction to Jamelle Bouie’s reporting spurred comment from less high-profile followers of the two online.

With Gray’s life slipping away on April 18, hundreds of protestors surrounded the Baltimore Police Department’s Western District precinct to demand information about the circumstances leading to his injuries. The protests continued for several days, even as the police department erected barriers to limit access to the precinct. On April 25, thousands of protestors marched from the Western District precinct to City Hall to demand justice for Gray’s death. Later that evening, a fight broke out between some attendees of the protest and patrons of a nearby bar. During that clash, several young men smashed the windows of a police car, resulting in a widely circulated photograph of protesters standing on a Baltimore police car, with the superimposed text, “All HighSchools Monday @3 We Are Going To Purge From Mondawmin To The Ave, Back To Downtown #Fdl” (sic), an apparent reference to the 2013 movie The Purge, in which lawlessness ensues following the legalization of all crime for a twelve-hour period in a fictionalized, dystopian United States. In response to what they claimed was a credible threat, on April 27, the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral, the Baltimore Police Department proactively shut down a shopping mall and metro station in the Mondawmin area, leaving nearby high school students stranded at the end of the school day. The details of events immediately following the students’ release from school are contested, with some reports suggesting police officers accosted students who were peaceably assembled and others suggesting students initiated a confrontation by throwing rocks and bricks at officers. In the hours and days that followed, unrest escalated and spread throughout the city, resulting in significant property damage and dozens of arrests as students and protesters were met with a violent police response. Local political leaders declared a state of emergency, called in the National Guard, and instituted a citywide curfew, effectively ending the protests on April 28.

The hashtags #BaltimoreUprising and #BaltimoreRiots alongside #FreddieGray make this network unique as they reveal the explicit awareness and debate by Twitter users of two competing narratives about the protests. While critiques of police violence and racism levied with hashtags like #Ferguson and #ICantBreathe were sometimes challenged by those seeking to justify police use of force or demonize victims of police violence, attempts at hijacking those hashtags for discourse that might undermine the Black Lives Matter movement was largely drowned out on Twitter by the popularity and frequency of tweets reinforcing the movement’s message.[17] In contrast, #BaltimoreRiots and #BaltimoreUprising both trended during the protests and offered competing accounts of events as they unfolded.

While #BaltimoreRiots was the first to be adopted by the network, activists and community members soon observed that the hashtag was being used to frame protestors as violent, unreasonable, and uncivilized—popular tropes used to represent and undermine Black rage in the wake of oppression and neglect.[18] For example, in the #BaltimoreRiots network, popular @FoxNews tweets overwhelmingly focused on “violent riots,” “looting and burning,” and the “state of emergency” in Baltimore, using sensational language like “totally insane” and “cops led into slaughter” to describe the conditions on the streets during the unrest. In this framing, Fox News described events in militaristic language that placed protestors in the position of powerful and dangerous enemy combatants, characterizing police as “outnumbered and outflanked.” In response to such narratives, many in the network shifted toward using the #BaltimoreUprising hashtag with which they reported from the ground in Baltimore about the protests. In the Gray case they offered narratives legitimizing Black rage and contextualizing urban uprisings. Popular members of the #BaltimoreUprising network framed the community’s eruption after the death of Freddie Gray as part of a righteous struggle. @Deray described the protests in Baltimore as “organized struggle” in his tweets and frequently commented on the “beautiful sense of community” in Baltimore, describing meetings between protestors and Baltimore clergy and the distribution of snack bags to protestors by volunteers. McKesson also highlighted the work and experience of “peaceful protestors.” Likewise, fellow activist Johnetta Elzie (@Nettaaaaaaaa), who became well known, like McKesson, for her work in Ferguson after the killing of Michael Brown, frequently tweeted about solidarity protests that were occurring around the country in response to events in Baltimore and tweeted photos of protestors holding signs reading, “It is civil disobedience that will give us civil rights” and “Not a riot a revolution.”

Users tweeting with hashtags #BaltimoreRiots and #BaltimoreUprising more commonly interacted with others using the same hashtag, creating a polarized network structure. But tweets incorporating both hashtags and conversations between those using different hashtags were not uncommon. Those who rose to prominence among people using both hashtags included stokers, who, in response to contested discourse signaled by the competing hashtags, held fast to the ideological polarization of their preferred hashtag and often shifted to more extreme versions of the messages represented on each side of the polarized network. For example, while #BaltimoreRiots was frequently attached to implicitly racist messages about rioting and looting, the #BaltimoreRiots stokers made explicitly racist comments about Black neighborhoods, Black families, and, tangentially, President Barack Obama.

In contrast, a second set of prominent users were brokers, who used both hashtags to engage with those who differed in their understandings of the Gray case and the resulting unrest. Brokers engaged in conversations across the polarized network, clarified misunderstandings, and provided informational content about the protests as they unfolded and the broader history and policy concerns that contextualize urban unrest as a symptom of racist structures and policies. Ultimately, thanks to these brokers it was the critical “uprising” frame that most helped the #FreddieGray network proliferate and that became most visible on Twitter as a mourning and angry community demanded answers and justice in the Gray case.[19]

#PhilandoCastile (1983–2016)

On July 6, 2016, Philando Castile was pulled over in Falcon Heights, Minnesota, in an apparent case of racial profiling following a bank robbery in the area. Castile, who worked at a nearby elementary school, was accompanied by his girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, and her four-year-old daughter. After disclosing to the officer that he had a registered firearm in the car and explaining to the officer that he was reaching for his license, Castile was shot seven times. Reynolds began livestreaming on Facebook in the aftermath of the shooting, pleading with the blood-covered Castile to “stay with me,” and attempting to talk down the officer while comforting her four-year-old daughter. This video was viewed and shared on social media sites millions of times.

On Twitter, news of Castile’s death spread quickly, with more than a million tweets containing his name appearing on July 7, 2016, alone. In just one week, #PhilandoCastile was tweeted more than two million times. Many of these tweets either shared Reynolds’s shocking Facebook Live video or referenced it. For example, one user’s popular tweet sharing the link reported, “The original video was taken off of Facebook, so here it is. #PhilandoCastile #FalconHeightsShooting,” and included a now defunct hyperlink to an archived version of the video. Similarly, activist Shaun King tweeted, “#PhilandoCastile was the brother shot by police in the Facebook Live video. He died tonight,” with a link to the developing story on the local Minnesota CBS affiliate, and radio personality Alex Gervasi shared a link to the video, noting, “The video keeps getting taken down. Keep it spreading. #FalconHeightsShooting #PhilandoCastile.” Here we see how overlapping social media infrastructure and networks were used to draw attention to and build outrage around the case. While Twitter, at that time, had no live video streaming capabilities, linkages across Facebook and Twitter not only allowed Reynolds’s video to spread rapidly but also helped preserve it even as it was removed from one platform or the other. Seven years after the cell-phone video of Oscar Grant’s murder by police in Oakland was posted to YouTube and shared with news networks, the shifts in technological capabilities, and the overlapping uses of these technologies, are clear.

Other popular tweets about #PhilandoCastile openly pointed out the hypocrisy of gun rights advocates who insist on the right to conceal carry but who were silent on an innocent Black man being murdered by an officer who felt threatened after being informed that there was a permitted gun in the vehicle. For example, one popular tweet in the network offered, “I want @NRA to defend #PhilandoCastile and #AltonSterling. Let’s go, y’all. Second Amendment sanctity and the whole bit. Go. Now,” connecting Castile to another recent case in which police justified shooting Alton Sterling at close range because they believed he had a gun in his belt. The call on the National Rifle Association (NRA) to defend Black men who are ordinary citizens and gun owners as rigorously as they defend the Second Amendment is a rhetorical and ironic request, in light of the organization’s history.[20] Likewise, @MamaBKrayy tweeted, “#PhilandoCastile told officers he had a permit to carry BEFORE they murdered him. Where is the #NRA to defend him and his rights??” These calls remained popular in the network over the course of our data collection, including after the June 2017 acquittal of the officer who killed Castile and larger public debates and events about guns, the NRA, and the Second Amendment. For example, the science fiction author Patrick S. Tomlinson tweeted in response to an NRA TV spot that denigrated the Black Lives Matter movement, “An @NRA that cared about the rights of gun owners would have raised hell over #PhilandoCastile’s murder.”

Users also mourned with, praised, and expressed concern for Diamond Reynolds and her child, who were in the car with Castile when he was shot. In particular, people remarked on the devastating cool with which Reynolds filmed the murder of her partner and efforts to manage an unimaginable situation. Some users noted the lifelong trauma Reynolds and her daughter will have and used the hashtag to discuss the impact of anti-Black state-sanctioned murder not only on those whose lives are ripped from them but also on the surviving family members and communities who experience such traumatic loss. These tweets focused particularly on the inhumane behavior of police to not only kill Castile but also to victimize his partner and her child. A popular user, for example, reported, “#PhilandoCastile bled to death. No cops tended to him. Instead they cuffed his girlfriend. #FalconHeightsShooting.”

Finally, the hashtag was used to celebrate and commemorate Castile, particularly as a beloved educator and friend of children. For example, the tweets below from Minnesota resident @WendyRMonkey, who shared a screenshot of a mournful Facebook comment from a parent of a boy Castile worked with at the J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School and a smiling photo of Castile with a colleague in the school’s yearbook, were shared thousands of times. While these commemorative tweets initially appeared on local accounts close to Castile’s community, as the network expanded and time passed, their tone was picked up by advocacy accounts and other national users. For example, an account that was started to promote and document the 2017 Women’s March protests in response to the inauguration of Donald Trump also regularly tweets about various social issues and advocacy concerns. In July 2017 the organization helped organize and promote an action called #NRA2DOJ, in which it pressured the NRA and the Department of Justice to speak out against and take more action on police profiling and gun violence against Black people. As part of this, @WomensMarch shared a commemorative hyperlapse video of artist Demont Pinder’s rendering of Castile, tweeting with it “A powerful tribute to #PhilandoCastile by @DemontPinder caught in hyperlapse at today’s #NRA2DOJ vigil.”

Shaping Change for Black Lives

In tracing these cases of anti-Black state-sanctioned violence, the Twitter networks they inspired, and the discourse that made them visible in mainstream America, we see important shifts in the visibility of racial justice issues in America. From the time of activism around the killing of Michael Brown in 2014 to the killing of Philando Castile in 2016, just two short years, our data reveal several important trends.

Figure 5.4

Commemorative #PhiladoCastile community tweets.

First, we see the birth of “celebrity activists.” Some Black activists, such as DeRay McKesson and Shaun King, became quite visible because of their on-the-ground or discursively compelling tweets during a particular protest. They continued to occupy central roles in subsequent protest networks as individual Twitter users and mainstream media outlets looked to them as sources. This centering of celebrity activists in online and offline spaces undoubtedly helped spread discussions of anti-Black state-sanctioned violence into the mainstream, but it is not uncontroversial. From within movement ranks, Black Lives Matter cofounders Alicia Garza, Opal Tometi, and Patrisse Cullors and others in allied organizations have critiqued the importance and capital heaped on outside figures like McKesson and King by media-makers and politicians who do not understand the movement’s leadership or offline organizing practices. To further complicate matters, some celebrity activists fail to correct media-makers for misattributions of leadership, and others engage in actions that do not appear to fully align with the spirit of the movement. For example, King was accused of (and vehemently denied) embezzling funds he had helped raise in support of families of victims of police brutality, and New York activist Hawk Newsome drew the criticism of other Black Lives Matter organizers when he took the stage at a Trump rally to explain the Black Lives Matter platform.[21] Many of the figures who have claimed or had bestowed on them the mantle of leadership in the movement are men, even though the founders and many organizers central to Black Lives Matter and the coalition Movement for Black Lives are women.

Of course, the widespread reach and distributed organizing of the various networks taking part in Black Lives Matter discussions online make it possible for many different voices to rise to prominence, which means that no single person or group of people is representative of the whole movement. Mainstream news outlets continue to appear confounded by this organic and diffuse leadership structure and often either appoint leaders and find spokespersons for the movement or deem it unorganized and leaderless. Movement historian Barbara Ransby, however, has noted that Black Lives Matter functions similarly to the vision of the Black Freedom Movement espoused by civil rights organizers like Ella Baker, whereby organizers “help everyday people channel and congeal their collective power to resist oppression and fight for sustainable, transformative change.”[22] Likewise, Black Lives Matter cofounder Patrisse Cullors has described the movement as not leaderless but rather “leader-full.”

Other shifts in networked discussions of cases we have explored in this chapter reflect the changes in attention and newsworthiness with which stories of racialized police violence have been treated in recent years. In the two years that elapsed between the deaths of Michael Brown and Philando Castile, there was a marked shift in the type of news organizations appearing as influencers in each network, from the regional, alternative, and specialty news sources that first covered Ferguson to the larger mainstream outlets, such as CNN, that played a central role in conversations following Philando Castile’s death. Thus we see that the early frames, issues, and demands of Black Lives Matter activism moved from ordinary people and media connected to them to the moderation of mainstream news media. This mainstream attention is important as it draws more Americans into conversations about police profiling and racial violence. Yet it also poses a danger for activists as since 2012, and especially since 2014, law enforcement bodies have developed increasingly sophisticated ways of tracking Black activists organizing online—a continuation of the anti-Black surveillance documented by such scholars as Simone Browne.[23]

In the end, it is important for activists and ordinary people in these networks to read and give firsthand and community-specific accounts. As the #FreddieGray network reveals, mainstream newsmakers and representatives of the state continue to fall back on narrow and often stereotypical representations of African American communities, their issues, and their activism—something Twitter activism actively resists.

Relatedly, we see a shift in the range of users’ racial identities within these networks. From the Trayvon Martin case (discussed in chapter 4) and the Michael Brown case to more recent cases like that of Philando Castile, network influencers transitioned from being primarily African American—both ordinary people and celebrities—to including an increasing number of white people, both ordinary and celebrity. This suggests, just as the measurable shift of these stories into mainstream media does, that sustained and compelling #BlackLivesMatter activism around various cases succeeded in drawing in new supporters and communities. Those not directly affected by the issues appear, through social media networks, to become better versed in raising and discussing issues of racial inequality.

In a nod to how timely conversations about Black Lives Matter have become to media-makers, Time magazine used African American photographer Devin Allen’s 2016 photo of a Baltimore protestor running away from police to consider “What has changed. What hasn’t” since the 1968 uprising in the city following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.[24] As if inspired by the comparative side-by-side photos from the two eras that ordinary people tweeted during protests in Ferguson, Baltimore, and other cities, the cover, on one of the most widely circulated news magazines in America, seemed to acknowledge that, despite claims by some that the United States had entered a “postracial” era, some things are very much the same.

Figure 5.5

Time magazine cover featuring photograph by Devin Allen.

In popular culture, Black Lives Matter cofounders Cullors, Garza, and Tometi were honored at the 2016 annual Black Girls Rock Award show broadcast on VH1, and Black and white celebrities have taken up Black Lives Matter issues on- and offline. NFL Quarterback Colin Kaepernick famously took a knee during the national anthem in a silent protest against police brutality, a move that led to his Blacklisting by the NFL but has since inspired countless other NFL players and professional athletes to do the same or to speak out on the issue despite public censure from President Donald Trump.[25] White actor Matt McGorry, best known for his roles in Orange Is the New Black and How to Get Away with Murder, live-tweets from Black Lives Matter protests he attends. Women athletes from college basketball to professional soccer players have also been outspoken on the issue.[26] With considerable team solidarity and eventual league support, WNBA players remain steadfast in their demonstrations for Black life.

In February 2016, the Fraternal Order of Police in Miami announced a national police boycott of Beyoncé tour dates because of the Black Lives Matter “themes” in her halftime performance at the 2016 Super Bowl and in the video for her song “Formation,” which features her atop a partially submerged New Orleans police car and a wall with the graffito “Stop shooting us.”[27] Such examples illustrate the reach and impact of the movement on politics, popular culture, and everyday life in the United States.

In this chapter we have illustrated the profound ways hashtags emerging before and after Ferguson were infused with life because of connections, overlaps, and co-occurrence in the network that functioned both to build a timeline and context for anti-Black state-mediated violence and simultaneously to insist on justice in every case, even as time passes. In this regard, Ruha Benjamin (discussed in chapter 2) and Kashif Jerome Powell have made the case that not only do Black lives matter, so do Black afterlives, as evident by the reanimation of such hashtags as #EricGarner and #ICantBreathe long after the events to which they refer moved into the past, as well as the ability of these hashtags to incite protests that propel a movement forward. Powell has argued that the specters of these hashtagged Black lives have “transitioned from flesh to force,” compelling a search for justice by those who survive.[28]

6 The Utility of Digital Allyship: #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite

Features such as hashtags and retweeting offer Twitter users ways to signal support for any issue with a few keystrokes. The research on online racial and gender justice activism presented in this book brings to the center the voices of people of color and women, especially by unpacking the technical and discursive processes that have facilitated marginalized citizens’ influence on mainstream discussions of racism and sexism in the United States. We have explained throughout why it is important to making visible the digital labor of these often ignored groups. Yet the question of how members of dominant groups do (or do not) show up to support this labor is ever present. How do white allies to racial justice struggles and male allies to feminist projects engage digitally? Focusing only on people of color when one is considering solutions to racial inequality or only on women when considering gender oppression risks perpetuating the myth that the struggle for justice is a minority struggle alone, that majority white and male citizens bear no responsibility for grappling with and dismantling the systems of white male supremacy. In this chapter, we ask what allies do to support social justice causes on Twitter. Naturally, allies play integral roles in broadcasting the hashtags and networks created by marginalized groups, as we have seen in cases like that of #TheEmptyChair, discussed in chapter 2. However, allies can also (theoretically) advance causes through their own supportive organizing. Here we consider the effectiveness of two visible hashtags that laid claim to allyship—#AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite.

Allyship refers to the practice of individuals with some form or forms of social privilege uniting politically and publicly with marginalized groups to forward liberatory projects. Allies leverage their privilege to bring attention and resources to issues that do not directly affect them, with the understanding that this practice is useful not only in uplifting more vulnerable groups but also to creating a more just society on the whole. Examples of individual acts of allyship are diverse, from straight and cisgender people marching and lobbying for LGBTQ rights to male doctors performing abortions in locations where women’s reproductive rights are stigmatized or outlawed. These individual acts, in the context of social movements, are built on organized practices of solidarity. For example, during a 1977 action in which people with disabilities blockaded San Francisco lawmakers in their offices for refusing to enforce the precursor to the Americans with Disabilities Act, able-bodied members of the Black Panther Party delivered food to the blockaders and published articles in solidarity in the party paper.[1] This act of solidarity was predicated on the understanding that, while the primary issues of the two groups appeared to differ, the impact of oppression on both created a sense of shared experience. In its most useful and radical form, allyship then draws from the idea that no one can be truly free unless everyone is free.[2]

In social justice and activist spaces online, allyship has been hotly debated. Performative allyship, the practice of announcing or demonstrating allyship for an audience, is highly contested. In a 2015 blog post on the now archived blog Black Girl Dangerous, founder Mia McKenzie described digital “ally theater.” She wrote, “A LOT of people perform ‘allyship’ in ways that are actually really harmful. This, folks, is ally theater. And there is a big difference between it and real solidarity.” She continued, “Real solidarity doesn’t require an audience to witness what a good ‘ally’ you are.”[3] As McKenzie’s post reflects, self-proclaimed ally status, or performing allyship in online, low-risk contexts, does not amount to concrete actions of political solidarity or confirmation from the group with which one claims to be forming an alliance. As a result, some activists prefer the term accomplice to ally because it signals that some social risk is to be taken by those with privilege.

Allyship can also become a coveted identity, whereby being recognized as an ally becomes paramount to acts of solidarity. Here we recall the sudden popularity of safety pins in the United States in 2016. An American living in Britain and tweeting as @cheeahs suggested that people wear safety pins to show solidarity with those being harassed as a result of the heightened xenophobia following the Brexit referendum. Her suggestion was taken up by British celebrities, including Star Trek’s Patrick Stewart, who posted a picture on Twitter of himself donning a safety pin.[4] While some have suggested that the safety pin is indeed an antifascist symbol in the British context—tracing it as a method to signal subversion of Nazism in World War II and to the accessories of antiracist punk rockers in the 1970s—it has never carried this meaning in the U.S. context.[5] Despite this, the idea crossed the Atlantic, and many progressive-minded white Americans embraced the safety pin as a symbolic form of disagreement with the anti-immigrant and Islamophobic discourse of the 2016 presidential election. Wearing a safety pin was supposed to mark the wearer as an ally, someone safe whom members of marginalized, under-threat groups could trust.[6] Safety pins were quickly commodified and marketed—on sites ranging from Etsy to Amazon—as an allyship accessory, with companies selling diamond-encrusted and gold-plated safety pins for over a thousand dollars.[7] The neoliberal impulse to monetize allyship perfectly illustrates the emptiness of a solidarity strategy based on the sartorial choices of the so-called ally.[8] The fact that passively wearing a pin did not embody the sometimes risky or uncomfortable actions of solidarity that should accompany allyship became fodder for many think pieces in the days that followed.[9] Thus hashtags that claim to move privileged members of society toward solidarity with those less so are often regarded with skepticism as a kind of faux allyship that recenters privileged groups.

Yet evidence has long pointed to the need for white people—specifically, Americans of European descent who have benefited from systems of white supremacy—to actively reject racist ideologies and structures in order to eliminate them.[10] There is no reason to believe that the contemporary online struggle for racial justice is any different. Indeed, in light of the tendency toward demographic clustering online and algorithmic filtering online, and the finding that online activism works best when a committed core of activists and a large periphery of supporters work together, supportive white allies that help advance messages of racial justice across demographic and ideological groups may be more important than ever.[11]

The same can be said for the usefulness of male allies in feminist causes on- and offline, yet in recent years, hashtags that evolved to encourage men to acknowledge their role in gendered systems of oppression have floundered. As we discussed in chapter 1, #MeToo, a hashtag that had a resurgence of popularity in October 2017, was used to signal solidarity among survivors of sexual harassment, assault, and rape, as in “it happened to me too.” In the wake of #MeToo, hashtags like #IWill were spurred by women hoping to inspire men to become allies in efforts to stop violence against women. Two lesser-known hashtags that grew out of the #MeToo movement, #IWillChange and #IveDoneThat, were started by men to prompt other men to acknowledge their sexist behavior and hopefully foster an impetus for change. However, these hashtags failed to garner widespread use, and many women found them disingenuous and ultimately unhelpful. Journalist Taylor Lorenz tweeted, “Kind of can’t deal with all the men sharing heartfelt admissions of how awful they were to women via #IveDoneThat et al.”[12]

#IveDoneThat tweets included far more performative allyship than solidarity. Men were able to admit to the world what violence they had done to women, releasing their feelings of guilt or seeking solace in knowing they were not alone in their problematic behavior. These tweets may have served as a form of catharsis for the men using the hashtags, but women did not benefit directly from witnessing this perverse navel-gazing and accounting of men at their worst. Thus questions of audience and demand become important factors when one considers the efficacy of digital allyship: whom are allyship hashtags for, and what political change, if any, do they forward? Certainly, allyship hashtags that seek to educate members of privileged groups about methods for creating change or about the experiences of those with less privilege are useful to larger projects of political consciousness raising, as are those making demands of particular individuals or systems with power, but if the primary purpose of online allyship is for the privileged group to achieve catharsis, it is not solidarity.

These considerations are among those taken up in this chapter as we analyze the hashtags #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite.[13]

#AllMenCan, But Will They?

Elliot Rodger’s deadly, misogyny-fueled violence of the Isla Vista shootings was described in detail in chapter 1. His rampage sparked a national debate about men’s violent behavior toward women and spawned the hashtags #NotAllMen and subsequently #YesAllWomen. Spurred by the success of #YesAllWomen, and hoping to push back against the derailing narratives of #NotAllMen, Elizabeth Plank, a journalist at PolicyMic (now Mic.com), was the first to report on the #AllMenCan hashtag, along with the photos and words of thirty-plus men. By embracing the idea that all men can enact strategies that undermine misogyny and gendered violence, these men positioned themselves as allies to feminism and sought to counteract the harm and defensiveness they saw being done by others who jumped quickly to narratives of male persecution in the face of critique. After the release of these photos, which were of a diverse group of men, mostly affiliated with new media organizations and progressive causes, the hashtag was adopted by others.

The #AllMenCan Network

We collected tweets containing the #AllMenCan hashtag beginning on May 23, 2014, the day of the Isla Vista shootings. Tweets containing the hashtag began appearing rapidly in the overnight hours of May 28 through the morning of May 29, 2014, the day that Liz Plank’s article popularizing the hashtag appeared on the online news site PolicyMic.[14] In the days that followed, #AllMenCan was tweeted over 25,000 times by more than 10,000 unique Twitter users. Our data include a sample of 1,047 of these users connected by 1,292 retweet and mention links. The network takes a form similar to those discussed elsewhere in this book, being centered on several key users who were retweeted hundreds or thousands of times.

Figure 6.1

Visualization of #AllMenCan retweet and mention network. This graph was generated in Gephi, using the Fruchterman-Reingold force-directed layout algorithm.

A closer investigation of the timing of the tweets reveals three distinct periods during which the hashtag spread. The first aligns with the release of Liz Plank’s #AllMenCan article and is pictured in the center of the graph. This portion of the network consists primarily of the users who tweeted about the original article, including Liz Plank herself (@feministabulous), PolicyMic (@PolicyMic), and Michael Skolnik (@MichaelSkolnik), a notable media personality who appeared in Plank’s article holding a sign reading “Female students are twice as likely to be victims of school shootings than male students. Let’s stop the violence.” Skolnik’s centrality in this portion of the network is driven in roughly equal measure by his own participation in the conversation (he authored a highly retweeted tweet containing the hashtag on May 30) and because Plank tagged him in a popular tweet about her article. During this same period, the article and its themes were picked up by other Twitter users, including @cmclymer who authored ten #AllMenCan tweets on May 29, 2014, on a variety of feminist topics such as street harassment, consent, and women’s leadership, and Planned Parenthood (@PPact), which issued a tweet praising the hashtag and its value for subverting misogyny.

Following the set of tweets surrounding Plank’s article, the hashtag continued to spread for a week as digital media outlets, such as the Huffington Post, E! News Online, and BuzzFeed, picked up the trending topic and reproduced some of the most popular #AllMenCan tweets in articles and listicles. Nearly two months later, on September 1, 2014, the hashtag trended a second time when it was attached to several tweets speaking out against the unauthorized release of nude celebrity photos on August 31, 2014. Matthew Dominguez (@Matt_Dominguez), an animal-rights activist and women’s and LGBTQ rights supporter, authored a tweet critiquing men’s response to a nude photo of actress Jennifer Lawrence, saying, “I’m disgusted by all the guys tweeting about Jennifer Lawrence’s private life! What if it was your sister? #AllMenCan.” Following considerable pushback in the comments on that tweet, including men suggesting that Lawrence herself was responsible for enabling the hackers who stole her photo, Dominguez paraphrased Sir Patrick Stewart, tweeting, “Dear Men of this World, ‘it’s in our hands to stop violence towards women,’” and tagging Stewart in the post (@SirPatStew). This tweet was retweeted over a thousand times, resulting in the somewhat unusual connected cluster of Dominguez and Stewart that appears on the left side of the graph. Although Stewart himself never engaged with the hashtag, Dominguez’s popular tweet that tagged Stewart linked the two together and elevated their dual prominence in the network overall.

The final set of central nodes in the network, @WeNeedFeminlsm and @feministculture were not active in the network until nearly a year after Plank’s original tweets. Both accounts, which aggregate and retweet feminist content, tweeted out composite images containing several original #AllMenCan photos between March and May of 2015. Although these tweets did not appear at the time of particular events or in circumstances that might otherwise have caused the hashtag to trend, they created temporary surges in activity around the hashtag as thousands of feminist followers retweeted the accounts’ content.

Two types of discourse emerged from the tweets in the #AllMenCan network: directive and instructive. Directive tweets drew users’ attention to #AllMenCan by connecting it to the #YesAllWomen network or by calling on particular user accounts to pay attention to the work the hashtag was doing. These tweets were popular in the network as a direct attempt to shift conversations about men’s defensive responses to #YesAllWomen (#NotAllMen) to those that were proactively engaged in allyship (#AllMenCan). These tweets overwhelmingly shared Plank’s PolicyMic article on the hashtag or shared screenshots of the images of men featured in the article holding signs with various #AllMenCan sentiments.

Figure 6.2

Examples of directive tweets.

It is clear that the directive tweets were a response to the defensiveness and toxic rhetoric of so-called men’s rights activists and others who worked to silence women in the aftermath of the Isla Vista shootings because they engaged in a counterappropriation of MRA language. In particular, tweets employing the phrase “real men,” to suggest that “real men” are allies to feminism and “real male activists” advocate for gender equality rather than toxic masculinity, were popular in these directive tweets. This attempt at subversion is not unproblematic as it freezes manhood and masculinity in ways that are still exclusive. While certainly an attempt to appropriate and redefine a largely toxic concept, such tweets continue to suggest that manhood can be successfully attained in relation to performative “nice guy” acts toward women.

Figure 6.3

#AllMenCan tweets attempting to subvert the construction of “real men.”

More usefully, instructive tweets in the network expanded the work of directive tweets (which mostly drew attention to the hashtag and those participating in it) by proposing concrete forms of allyship men can engage in to dismantle ideologies and behaviors that further violence against women. Rather than informationally sharing the Plank article or images, the text of these tweets made concrete suggestions for how men can proactively support each other and women. These tweets included suggested methods for bystander interventions, language for having conversations about sexual assault among men, and how to critique toxic behaviors. For example, user @AutistLiam wrote, “#AllMenCan Refuse to accept ‘boys will be boys’ as an excuse for sexist or violent behavior from themselves or others.” These instructive tweets drew clearly from knowledge and rhetoric developed and popularized by feminist activists around rape culture and toxic masculinity and asked men to take responsibility for incorporating these ideas into their daily interactions. They offered concrete examples of what allyship can look like in action, including the social risk of calling out other men.

Unfortunately, some #AllMenCan tweets, particularly those written by members outside the original PolicyMic-connected network or feminist accounts, reproduced problematic ideologies of chivalry in the name of allyship. Such tweets missed opportunities to dismantle and deconstruct the systemic reasons for women’s vulnerability, falling back on paternalistic ideologies about women’s fragility. Tweets calling on men to “shelter and protect women!” reflect less familiarity among members of the network with feminist frameworks and the growing pains of an allyship that lacks full political analysis.

Figure 6.4

Examples of instructive #AllMenCan tweets.

Figure 6.5

Chivalry tweet in the #AllMenCan network.

Together, directive and instructive tweets indicate a proactive attempt at allyship, yet the limited number of men who spontaneously created tweets in the network, rather than sharing the original images or retweeting only a few users who depended on memes or quotes, indicate a lack of widespread engagement with the hashtag. Thus the possibilities for complex conversations about how men can enact liberatory gender politics, and the necessary struggle in these conversations, is limited in the network. We also note that the most active men creating original discourse in the #AllMenCan network were self-identified members of the LGBTQ community who, by cisheterosexist definitions, are generally excluded from the very definitions of “real” manhood that the original campaign sought to appropriate. Thus the network struggled to attract original content, multidimensional discourse, and active users—characteristics that made it far different from the hashtags created by the counterpublics we discussed earlier in this book.

#CrimingWhileWhite

As we detailed in chapter 5, on July 17, 2014, NYPD officers approached Eric Garner and accused him of selling loosies, or single cigarettes. Officers escalated the situation by putting Garner into a deadly chokehold, which elicited his last words, immortalized in the hashtag #ICantBreathe. The hashtag #DyingWhileBlack was also used to illustrate the many minor infractions for which Black Americans face extrajudicial death sentences at the hands of police. It was against this backdrop that Jason Ross, an Emmy Award–winning television writer working at the time on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, started the hashtag #CrimingWhileWhite to call attention to the privilege white people have to engage in illegal activities without losing their lives or freedom. We have included Ross’s own account of the significance of this hashtag below.

Criming While White

Jason Ross

In politics you try to destroy your opponent by finding a dark fact from his past you can turn into the central pillar of his identity. Didn’t go to Vietnam? Coward! Or you went, but received a suspiciously high medal count? Fraud!

They call it oppo research. We know it’s not fair, but these guys asked for it when they ran for office.

In 2014 we saw oppo research performed on Black corpses. Dead men and boys who most certainly did not ask for it. We were made privy to the juvenile arrest record of Michael Brown. Someone made sure we learned about the time Trayvon Martin got caught with weed at school. And, on the morning of December 4, the day the cops were cleared in Eric Garner’s chokehold death, I was informed that the deceased’s mugshots from past arrests numbered into the dozens. And in that moment, something in me snapped.

These facts had no bearing on the circumstances of their killings. They bore only on our perception of who got killed. The leakers hoped we would conclude that these dead Black people were thugs. And who cares if the cops kill a thug?

Of course, by that standard a great many of us are thugs. Our records are not spotless. Haven’t we been warned for millennia of the danger of judging others? Admonished by everyone from Jesus to Bo Diddley? These campaigns of posthumous character assassination formed a nexus of bad logic and bad morals that added up to bad citizenship.

So I attempted to make that point as briefly and powerfully as I could: I did the oppo research on myself.

[TWEET: Busted 4 larceny at 11. At 17, cited for booze + caught w gun @ school. No one called me a thug. Can’t recommend being white highly enough.]

That wasn’t easy. I had never before written about that record on Twitter or anywhere else. There was no need to; it had been sealed. My comedy career dealt with heady political stuff, not personal baggage. But now baring it felt like a duty. And I thought maybe I wasn’t the only one who would feel that way. A few minutes later I posted what seemed to me the obvious extension of that idea.

[TWEET: OTHER WHITE PEOPLE: Tweet your stories of under-punished f-ups! It’s embarrassing but important! Let’s get #CrimingWhileWhite trending!]

For much of the day, #CrimingWhileWhite was Twitter’s number-one trending topic in America and made the worldwide list as well. I had hoped to prompt the creation of a noticeable body of evidence of white people’s invisible criminality. That hope was exceeded many times over.

But it came at a significant cost. This tsunami of unharmed white people dominating a discussion about the perils of being Black led many to express annoyance and even emotional pain.

They had a point. But it’s a paradox: How can white people deploy our numbers and our privilege to help others without becoming—if only briefly—the protagonists? And if we don’t use those assets, then what?

I couldn’t answer that then, and I can’t answer it now.

#CrimingWhileWhite represents an attempt to use digital media to acknowledge white privilege in a response to a social moment in which race and privilege are being openly debated in the public sphere in new ways. As Ross suggests, and as we discuss in more detail below, the jury is still out on the utility of this particular strategy—in no small part because so many white Americans continue to resist the idea of privilege, or even believe that there is bias in basic systems like policing, and because those who are not resistant have been offered so few models of white allyship in American education, popular culture, or politics.[15]

It is important to note that online white allies appear in, and as a part of, the counterpublic discourses we have examined: white users played a role in the proliferation of hashtags about Philando Castile and other #BlackLivesMatter hashtags that evolved in recent years, for example. In such cases they have been drawn into the counterpublic through the circulation of discourses and dissent arising from African American users. In the case of hashtags created by and for allies in this chapter, we see something different—an attempt by those with social power to not only talk about and share their concerns regarding race and gender inequality but to recognize their own individual positionality and ability to dismantle these phenomena through counternarratives that challenge dominant discourses that normalize their privilege and power.

#CrimingWhileWhite Network Characteristics:

The #CrimingWhileWhite hashtag was tweeted almost 400,000 times by 300,000 unique users. Of these, our sample included 37,0880 tweets sent by more than 30,000 unique users connected by almost 35,000 retweet and mention links. Sixty percent of these tweets were sent in a single day, December 4, 2014, the day after Pantaleo’s nonindictment for the killing of Eric Garner and the related protests. Constrained in duration to little more than a week in total, the network is more diffuse than others studied in this chapter or elsewhere in this book. The network has nearly ten times the number of discrete components, or sets of users not in conversation with others, as the #AllMenCan network described in the previous section. Further, rather than being focused on a small number of highly retweeted users, the #CrimingWhileWhite conversation (to the extent that it can be characterized as a conversation at all) resulted from many discrete users making use of the hashtag to share stories, none of which were retweeted disproportionately more often than others in the network.

This combination of features creates a somewhat novel network relative to others discussed in this book. Rather than the broadcast structure observed elsewhere, this network is more similar to what Smith and colleagues would characterize as brand clusters.[16] Typically observed in discussions of celebrities or popular products, brand clusters emerge when exogenous events (such as the release of a new model of iPhone) cause many people to independently tweet about the same topic at the same time, but not in conversation with one another. Although it is uncommon to find such a structure in a hashtag activism network, a cursory analysis of the top ten most retweeted messages (which are not disproportionately more popular than the next hundred or so) suggests an explanation for the pattern in this case. Popular users in this network are almost all white people tweeting stories of their own unpunished criminal behavior. For example, @Cecilyk, a white woman, tweeted about getting away with stealing a car, and @Joe_Schmucc, a white man, tweeted about several incidents involving guns and drugs for which he was arrested but released without being charged. To the extent that retweeting implies an endorsement, it is not clear what retweeting these messages might mean. That users endorse the criminal behavior? That they find the tweets valuable examples of white privilege? That they are surprised? Disgusted? Annoyed? Confusion over how to respond to these messages and their subtext may have limited retweeting activity, particularly as members of racialized counterpublics likely watched with skepticism as the hashtag evolved.

Figure 6.6

Visualization of #CrimingWhileWhite retweet and mention network. This graph was generated in Gephi using the ForceAtlas2 force-directed layout algorithm.

For a small number of messages, we see another unusual pattern in the #CrimingWhileWhite network structure. Rather than multiple retweets of a single message, we see some long cascades, or retweet chains, in which one user retweets a message, which is then retweeted by another user not connected to the first, then another, and so on. These sorts of chains are exceedingly rare on Twitter, where fewer than 5 percent of tweets move past a single retweet.[17] Writing about information diffusion on Twitter, Sharad Goel and colleagues distinguish between two theoretical pathways for diffusion: broadcast diffusion, in which a key node is retweeted many times (as we typically find in the hashtag networks in this book), and viral diffusion, whereby information cascades from node to node through consecutive rounds of retweets.[18] In practice, these two patterns of diffusion often work simultaneously to spread messages, although #CrimingWhileWhite is the only case in our hashtag activism network data where we see both patterns clearly present.

Following these viral chains reveals a pattern of exchange that may account for the presence of these long retweet chains here, but not elsewhere in the book. The chains originate with white users sharing examples of criminal behavior, which get picked up by media outlets, or occasionally Black Twitter users, who tweet them out with added commentary about the hashtag. These tweets are then in turn retweeted by other users struggling to make sense of the merits of the hashtag as an example of racial injustice, white allyship, or something else. Thus the virality appears to stem from the hashtag jumping between otherwise unconnected communities having different conversations about the hashtag’s efficacy.

The last novel pattern of note in the #CrimingWhileWhite network is the presence of a disproportionately high out-degree node. Links in a Twitter network can be represented as ingoing, directed at a focal node (corresponding with retweets and mentions), or outgoing, directed away from a focal node (corresponding with replies). This results in two ways to measure “popularity” in the network, in-degree, or by number of ingoing ties for each node, and out-degree, or by number of outgoing ties for each node. In practice, retweets and mentions are so much more common than replies on Twitter that we typically rank popularity using the in-degree metric only. That is the case with the #CrimingWhileWhite network except for one unusually high out-degree node. This user received several hundred replies to a series of #CrimingWhileWhite retweets. We initially suspected the account might be a bot, or automated account, although the temporality and content of the account’s tweets were consistent with real human behavior.[19] A manual investigation of the account’s history and activity further confirmed the “humanness” of the account, which appears to be run by a Black man. Typically, he tweets about (American) football—the New England Patriots especially—and has a modest following of fellow football fans. Occasionally he tweets about racial justice issues, including several tweets about #CrimingWhileWhite. Because he is connected primarily to folks who follow his main hobby, football, he is positioned on the outer edge of the core #CrimingWhileWhite network, suggesting that his #CrimingWhileWhite retweets may have engaged a distinct group of people in the conversation—football fans who replied to his tweets but who otherwise did not engage with users or messages elsewhere in the network.

#CrimingWhileWhite: Consciousness Raising or Ally Theater?

In #CrimingWhileWhite tweets we see further complications of digital allyship emerge, but somewhat different from those of #AllMenCan. Some users engaging with the hashtag were clearly familiar with counterpublic discourses about discriminatory policing that emerged from #BlackLivesMatter networks and engaged in conversations and advocacy around these issues alongside the hashtag. These users produced a high co-occurrence in the network of #CrimingWhileWhite with #ICantBreathe and #BlackLivesMatter. While some such users were white, many were African American members of the larger #BlackLivesMatter interconnected counternetworks who found and shared #CrimingWhileWhite tweets via retweets or shares in which they added other racial justice hashtags to call their networks into the conversation. Rapper 9th Wonder, for example, became popular in the network because he actively retweeted white users’ #CrimingWhileWhite tweets to his hundreds of thousands of followers. Most users in the network, however, engaged with the hashtag but not at all with the themes or hashtags of larger conversations about racial justice online, reflecting either limited knowledge or limited interest in the larger #BlackLivesMatter and anti–police brutality networks.

While one reading of #CrimingWhileWhite tweets might locate them in the tradition of activist consciousness raising—that is, educating potential supporters and legitimizers of a movement about the political and collective meanings of their experiences (in this case, experiences with privilege)—other tweets suggest a navel-gazing that recenters (and borders on celebrating) whiteness. Within both the network and the discourse of the hashtag it is often difficult to tell whether particular users are, in fact, allies of the larger movement for Black lives and familiar with the Eric Garner case (which spurred the hashtag’s creation). Certainly, some users are, and the co-occurrence of such hashtags as #EricGarner, #ICantBreathe, and #BlackLivesMatter among some #CrimingWhileWhite tweets, along with some users’ connections to the larger #BlackLivesMatter twitter network, illustrates intentional allyship. Yet most #CrimingWhileWhite tweets do not contain these co-occurring hashtag nods to the larger movement, and most users do not connect with or engage larger questions and networks around issues of police brutality and racism. This observation illustrates (1) the limits of allyship hashtags in the larger digital public sphere, such that the hashtag may be adopted and put to use by individuals neither particularly invested in nor informed about a pressing political project, and (2) the limits of allyship tweets that do not amount to a direct call to action. While conversations about white privilege are encouraged by the hashtag, there was no call to action, and the question of what to do about that privilege, or, rather, with it, is not addressed.

Ultimately, #CrimingWhileWhite tweets perform two discursive functions, as memoir and to juxtapose experiences. Both these functions work to illustrate the benign or obliging role white Americans are accustomed to police playing in their lives—sometimes alongside implied or explicit commentary of the very different and more nefarious role of police for African Americans.

Memoir tweets in the #CrimingWhileWhite network recount compelling personal narratives about criminal behavior and interactions with police that are dramatic, emotional, and at times astounding. Every memoir is formulated similarly: the white person tweeting confesses to his or her own, often youthful, mischievous, or criminal behavior and then describes the fairly benign interactions with law enforcement that resulted (or did not result) and the few if any consequences the person ultimately faced. These tweets paint a picture of the normalcy of “acting out” and breaking rules for white people, particularly young white people, and highlight the fact that these young people are able to mature, grow, and live full lives thanks to an understanding society that does not criminalize them.

Figure 6.7

Examples of #CrimingWhileWhite memoir tweets.

What these memoir tweets generally fail to do is directly engage networks focused on police brutality or suggest proactive ways white allies can intervene in the system whose privileges they describe. Rather, they seem to function as a type of catharsis, allowing users to acknowledge and confess to benefiting from white privilege without clearing engaging systemic battles with white supremacy.

Juxtaposition tweets employ discourse differently. These tweets generally include an image, meme, or link to a news story about a high-profile or notorious white person’s criminal behavior, and either directly or through implicit construction contrast laissez-faire law enforcement’s (and society’s) treatment of the person with the punitive treatment of African Americans. For example, we see the results of actions of actor Mark Wahlberg, former vice president Dick Cheney, and Ethan Couch, a young man who killed six people while drunk driving and who faced few consequences after his lawyer argued that Couch could not understand the consequences of his actions, contrasted with those of football player Plaxico Burress, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford, and John Crawford.

In #CrimingWhileWhite juxtaposition tweets, white men who committed extreme acts of violence are frequently contrasted with Black men who were killed by police for minor infractions or simply by mistake. The implications are clear: white men face few, if any, consequences for bad, even extremely violent and criminal, behavior. Further, they are able to live not only productive but successful and powerful lives despite this behavior, while Black men are killed by police for far less.

In these tweets, white users move away from personal narrative, seemingly hesitant to directly compare their more generous experiences with the experiences of victims of police brutality and draconian criminal proceedings and preferring to use high-profile and egregious examples of other white people’s behavior. Here, users call out the unequal application of the law through proxy examples that remove their own experiences from the equation. These contrasting tweets do more to directly engage the larger network of racial justice tweeters by regularly using the #BlackLivesMatter and #EricGarner hashtags, yet they also seem to deflect personal accountability, making white people with extreme privilege the obvious “bad” guys and the police the obvious “racists,” rather than implicating themselves in the problem (or the solution).

Figure 6.8

Examples of #CrimingWhileWhite juxtaposition tweets.

While #CrimingWhileWhite tweets explicitly illustrate racial inequality in the legal system and white privilege through anecdotal examples, what is missing in both memoir and juxtaposition tweets is a call to action or acknowledgment of personal or group accountability and power to dismantle white supremacy. This makes the hashtag, while more organic and more popular than #AllMenCan, difficult to truly define as allyship, if allyship requires enactment of, or at the very least a call to action for the enactment of, behaviors that actively work to dismantle inequality. Of course, we cannot know what forms of activism users engage in offline, yet what we do know from #CrimingWhileWhite tweets is that personal accountability never became part of the discourse within the network.

#CrimingWhileWhite succeeded in expanding a narrative about double standards in the criminal justice system to a new audience, allowing white users and observers, some without connections to racial justice networks, to see the lack of severity in the policing and legal systems’ response to white people’s infractions as a common phenomenon, and begin to normalize a narrative about the differential treatment of African Americans. Yet at no point do tweets in the #CrimingWhileWhite network offer sweeping or systemic recommendations, solutions, or action responses to the phenomenon they identify, and thus they fall short of embracing the strategies for dismantling white supremacy that are popular in antiracist activist spaces. This reflects one of the greatest challenges in white allyship work in which white citizens see individual stories (such as memoirs and juxtapositions) and individual solutions (such as treating African Americans as they are treated or firing racist police) as more comfortable than acknowledging group complicity and responsibility for reimaging racist systems. Thus the consciousness raising and navel-gazing in the hashtag reveal the messy realities of online activism, in which ordinary users can take up hashtags and particular political narratives to be not either/or self-serving or reparative but both, in greater or lesser degrees.

Action over Allies

While the other chapters in this book illustrate how decades of mass organizing, activism, and theorizing of racial and gender justice causes by the groups most affected by inequality inform the discourse, reach, and impact of their online networks, here we see the significantly underdeveloped nature of public allyship. In both cases, that of #AllMenCan and that of #CrimingWhileWhite, good intention and a recognized need for change are limited by (1) a lack of nuanced calls for action and systemic political analysis, (2) navel-gazing and performativity, (3) lack of engagement or presence in smaller networks, and (4) the tendency of allyship hashtags to respond to a viral hashtag stemming from a marginalized group, rather than erupting independently and becoming self-sustaining. This pattern results in allyship hashtags being relatively superficial and derivative and thus potentially appropriative of the attention garnered by the group with which their authors hope to be in solidarity. #AllMenCan does offer some directive toward action by acknowledging the need for individual behavioral change, while #CrimingWhileWhite is story-driven, allowing self-reflection, yet neither clearly embraces a discourse of systemic change outside individual good acts and experiences. It thus appears that the well-developed and nuanced themes of identity, inequality, and action that arise from counterpublics are picked up clumsily by ally networks, which struggle to offer models of coalitional politics.

This observation aligns with polling evidence and scholarship that suggest that white Americans, for example, are increasingly aware of racial inequality yet often are unclear about what to do with that awareness.[20] Stories of white allies, such as those documented by Cynthia Stokes Brown, William Ayers, and Theresa Quinn, in which individuals as members of larger social movements take tremendous personal risk—financial, physical, and reputational—to respond to and support the expressed needs of African American liberation actions, from abolition to civil rights, and in which systems and power analysis are central, offer valuable lessons for those seeking to transform their awareness of racial inequality into action.[21] Notably, these examples also normalize the often painful experience of grappling with one’s own role in systems of white supremacy as a necessary part of supporting efforts for lasting change.

Likewise, we can see one example of feminist allyship that offers a model that appears to be working toward actionable and systemic change. The #HeForShe hashtag and campaign, launched in September 2014 by United Nations Women, endeavors to highlight men’s role in ending gender inequality and fighting for women’s rights. Actress Emma Watson of the popular Harry Potter film franchise was advanced as the Goodwill United Nations ambassador for the initiative, and her speech announcing the project went viral. The campaign was endorsed by many world leaders and is accompanied by dedicated staff and a United Nations Women budget line. The hashtag is bolstered by an extensive and robust plan of action that fundamentally assumes offline action and solidarity beyond simply using #HeForShe in tweets. Notably, the campaign was started by a powerful institution rather than organically on Twitter. Thus, allyship hashtags may be most successful when they are grounded in allyship theory and practical expertise from the start and supported offline, like the counterpublic hashtags we have examined elsewhere, by concrete organizing.

While neither #AllMenCan nor #CrimingWhileWhite was begun by an entity as powerful as the UN, and though both are more spontaneous, both were created by people with deep knowledge of entertainment and news media. Ross, a media insider, and Plank, a digital media insider, both had larger platforms and connections than any of the hashtag originators we have studied in other chapters. Despite their limited reach on Twitter, both hashtags were covered in mainstream media. Write-ups on the viral spread of #CrimingWhileWhite appeared on CNN, in the Washington Post, in Huffington Post, and elsewhere, all within days of its trending on Twitter.[22] And as noted, E! Online, BuzzFeed, Feministing, and other popular viral sites spread the #AllMenCan hashtag. That these hashtags did not experience more virality at the time perhaps speaks to the opaqueness of the hashtags in terms of the particular actions or political narratives they took up, or, perhaps simultaneously, the discomfort they likely made their intended audience feel as they required recognition and discussion of privilege. We looked but could not find any widely visible allyship hashtags begun by nonelites.

Ultimately, emergent allyship hashtags that riff off the viral circulation of an incident of racial or gendered violence, such as those discussed in this chapter, have the potential to shift attention away from the incident and engender a level of self-centered reflection that does not contend with the systemic nature of the problem. Yet these hashtags also welcome new audiences into conversations about power and privilege and may reach members of dominant groups who are not as likely to engage with the narratives arising from counterpublics. There are clearly limits to the utility of organic allyship hashtags in creating the kind of solidarity that brings about measurable social change, but these hashtags nonetheless promulgate important conversations online and in the larger media ecosystem.

Conclusion: #HashtagActivism: Here to Stay

In this book we have illustrated how hashtag activism works to naturalize and center the politics of counterpublics, develop repertoires of political contention, and attract allies. Our analysis leaves us convinced of the efficacy of hashtags in aiding progressive efforts as ordinary people and those without access to traditional forms of power create compelling, unignorable narratives. While we do not claim that hashtags are all-powerful (no single communication strategy is) and have noted the limitations placed on networked counterpublic actors, we are keenly aware that the political and cultural power of counterpublics is leveraged and bolstered through the shorthand of hashtags.

We push back against the notion promulgated by some that the real work of change only happens offline. Networks and narratives matter, and both are built digitally and corporally. In every era, media technologies have been central to the maintenance of counterpublics and the safe development of counterpublic identity and politics. For the networks we study, Twitter represents a very real opportunity to work toward change by reintroducing and reframing issues for the public that have been either misrepresented or ignored in the mainstream public sphere. At the same time, Sasha Costanza-Chock and others rightfully caution against focusing wholly on advocacy in online spaces when considering mechanisms of social change.[1] We agree that true social change requires coordinated action that extends well beyond the internet. Indeed, the issues we study here all involve a complex interplay of events and responses that occurred online and offline, often simultaneously.

Further, though we focus on Twitter hashtags in this book, we recognize that the political work of hashtag activism has spread and continues to proliferate on multiple platforms across the media ecosystem. It was the cell-phone video footage uploaded to YouTube of the murder of Oscar Grant that initiated the use of hashtags to mark a movement against the extrajudicial killings of Black people. #BlackLivesMatter had its debut not on Twitter but on Facebook. Activist hashtags are frequently reported on in the news, and Twitter use is encouraged in entertainment television and film content through specific promotional prompts and actor-fan connections.[2] Each chapter of this book has shown how Twitter activism, within this interconnected environment of media and platforms, influences journalistic and political narratives in the United States.

A good example is the impact that #BlackLivesMatter organizers have had on conversations about race and racism in the United States since 2012, not just online but offline. They have organized freedom rides to places such as Ferguson that draw inspiration from the Mississippi Freedom Ride of the civil rights era. They met with a sitting president, have influenced campaign cycles and rhetoric, have become advisers for policy institutes, think tanks, and universities, and have moved criminal justice reform measures not just into the public consciousness but onto the ballots of voters nationwide. They have inspired scholars to engage outside the academy in new ways—as in the case of Marcia Chatelain, who ushered in the practice of creating public bibliographies by way of a hashtagged syllabi (some examples are #CharlestonSyllabus, #SayHerNameSyllabus, #LemonadeSyllabus, and #FergusonSyllabus) that include links to and titles of important texts to provide context for trending social events.

In Ferguson alone, the place that activists worldwide regard as a stand-in for Everywhere, an upsurge in registering and organizing Black voters led to the April 2015 election of two new Black city councilors and record voter turnout. Likewise, in 2018, Bob McCulloch, the seven-term, white incumbent county prosecutor who failed to produce an indictment of Darren Wilson, was voted out of office, to be replaced by Wesley Bell, a Black Ferguson councilman and former public defender. Lezley McSpadden, the mother of Michael Brown, announced her intention to run for a seat on the Ferguson City Council on August 10, 2018, just one day after the four-year anniversary of her son’s murder. Her platform, informed by the needs of the community, has three prongs: “community policing, economic equality and access to health care for Ferguson’s young children.”

Likewise, gender justice hashtags and offline feminist organizing have proliferated, resulting in measurable backlash and change. As the New York Times has reported, more than half the powerful men who have been brought down by #MeToo have been replaced by women.[3] The last months of 2018 saw a record-breaking number of women elected to office, many of whom directly addressed the demands of hashtags like #MeToo and #StopKavanaugh in their campaigns. And related hashtags and actions continue to proliferate, such as the November 2018 walkout by Google employees protesting sexism in the company, accompanied by the hashtag #GoogleWalkout.

#MeToo has generated so much attention that corporate entities have strategized on ways to capitalize on the movement across media content and platforms. In a widely circulated 2019 commercial, the Proctor & Gamble razor subsidiary Gillette used the #MeToo movement as fodder to reinvent their classic tagline, “The best a man can get.” In the ad, diverse men and boys look into the mirror as they listen to montaged news reports on the #MeToo movement and toxic masculinity. Following a video mashup of men and boys sexually harassing women, bullying each other, and otherwise participating in toxic behavior, Gillette offers visions of men intervening in these behaviors, along with real-world examples of men such as actor and survivor Terry Crews speaking out against sexual harassment. Gillette then offers a revised slogan: “The best a man can be.”

In October 2018, writer and producer Lee Daniels announced his intentions to co-create a #MeToo comedy set in a college ombudsman’s office where staff struggle to negotiate “PC culture.” #MeToo founder Tarana Burke spoke out against the show, saying, “To put Me Too and comedy in the same sentence is so deeply offensive and not because I’m uptight and I don’t see comedy in things. We’re not ready for a comedy and it’s just so offensive that you think in this moment when we’re still unpacking the issue that you can write a comedy about it.”[4] The Gillette commercial and Lee Daniels’s project raise questions about how advertisers, brands, and media-makers can embrace hashtag activism but also potentially co-opt it.

In 2019 the Lifetime Television docuseries Surviving R. Kelly featured the creators of the hashtag #FastTailedGirls, Jamie Nesbitt Golden and Mikki Kendall (discussed in chapter 2). Their voices were instrumental in explaining why the singer was able to abuse Black women and girls for decades with little to no consequence. This renewed focus on R. Kelly’s actions spread the #MuteRKelly and #SurvivingRKelly campaigns that worked to get Kelly’s music off the nation’s airwaves, taking hashtag activism out of the digital universe and into the analog. The campaign continues to grow and has prompted Sony to sever its ties with the singer, as well as consumer boycotts of concerts, streaming services such as Spotify, club spins, and more.[5] From Twitter to TV, from radio to records, hashtag activism that addresses misogynoir is being cultivated by Black feminists.

Janet Mock, the creator of #GirlsLikeUs (discussed in chapter 3), has leveraged her media savvy into an entertainment career. Her #RedefiningRealness hashtag and the subsequent book of the same name launched her into a media sphere with enormous reach, and as she has become more famous, so too has #GirlsLikeUs. In addition to connecting the creators of the web series Her Story, #GirlsLikeUs proved instrumental in Mock’s work with MSNBC on her digital show SO Popular! and her podcast Never Before on the feminist outlet, Lenny Letter. These forays into media production allowed Mock to return to her heart’s work of doing trans entertainment advocacy in the form of the FX series Pose about the trans women of color who were central to the creation of the 1980s ball scene in New York City. The show is groundbreaking in that it is the first prime-time drama to feature a predominantly trans person of color cast. She and her fellow writers on the series were nominated for a 2019 Writers Guild Award.[6] Through Twitter, web series, and TV, #GirlsLikeUs has found a home on the television and phone screens of a generation.

Elon James White’s allyship with the #EmptyChair continues to show up in his various media platforms, and the debates over who is served by feminist hashtags have challenged the way people enact allyship both on- and offline. White actresses, for example, are acting increasingly in the spirit of #TimesUp to show solidarity with their women of color counterparts in the entertainment industry. Jessica Chastain said at the 2018 Sundance Film Festival that she would insist Octavia Spencer be paid equally to her on joint projects in light of the raced nature of the gender pay gap in Hollywood. Their resulting negotiations with Universal Pictures on a film in-development led to the actresses receiving equal salaries five time higher than initially offered.[7] Such acts reveal the offline solidarity that is fostered through hashtagged discourse and debate.

#HarassedAndSurveilled

While we celebrate the real impact that digital counterpublics and hashtag activism have had in progressive movement building and culture creation, we acknowledge the serious limitations of the technological platforms and corporate logics within which racial justice and feminist narratives evolve. In chapter 4, for example, we discussed the horrific viral hashtag #Trayvonning, which was attached to images of overwhelmingly white youth taking pictures of themselves as though they were a deceased Trayvon Martin, with Skittles and AriZona Iced Tea in hand. The hashtag and photos appeared on Twitter and a number of other platforms, most notably Instagram. The insensitive imagery raises questions about the role and responsibility of digital platforms regarding problematic content. Although many countries around the world have imposed content regulations on social media platforms, the United States has few requirements. Under Section 230, Title V, of the U.S. Telecommunications Act, platforms are “safe harbors,” neither required to censor content nor penalized if they choose to do so. All the major social media platforms do impose community standards on content but none has been particularly consistent about enforcing them. As Tarleton Gillespie explains in his book on social media moderation, this is partly because the available options for identifying, preventing or removing objectionable content are not especially good.[8] Professional moderation and editorial review cannot scale up sufficiently to cover the overwhelming quantity of data on social media platforms; relying on users to flag questionable content is reactive and can be used to unfairly target and harass people; and algorithmic detection technology is still limited, especially for the photos and videos that dominate most modern social media platforms.

In the face of imperfect solutions, platforms often take a “publish-then-filter” approach that, while efficient, allows problematic content to persist. Decisions on whether and how to curate content are not neutral. The capitalist decisions of billion-dollar social media corporations are often mired in the same racism and sexism that hashtag activists are addressing in society. Work by scholars such as Safiya Noble, who describes how algorithms absorb and replicate the racial and gender biases of their programmers and users, and Joy Buolamwini, whose work highlights intersectional gaps in standard algorithmic training sets, exemplifies the deeply embedded nature of platform prejudice.[9] Although Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and other social media CEOs vociferously deny actively coding prejudice into their platforms, not specifically coding racism, sexism, and other forms of hate into platforms is insufficient.[10] A systemic failure to imagine various ways platforms may incubate and magnify bias, however unintentional, allows them to proliferate.

Twitter does publicly acknowledge and celebrate its role in activist causes, and in some cases it has made (small) changes to its business practices to signal that support.[11] In 2009, Twitter rescheduled a major upgrade to avoid outages during the 2009 Iranian presidential election protests.[12] At the same time, the platform is routinely critiqued for being unresponsive to claims of bias and harassment against activists and people with marginalized identities. Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis’s work on far-right media manipulation demonstrates how Twitter is used as a waystation for mainstreaming racist and sexist ideas originating in anonymous internet forums.[13] Jessie Daniels has shown how women, people of color, and LGBTQ+ folks are disproportionately targeted and harassed on Twitter, often in response to activism efforts.[14] In her book, Crash Override, for example, Zoe Quinn details the unrelenting harassment she experienced as a result of a targeted campaign against her and other women in the video gaming industry, which became known as Gamergate.[15] Twitter and other platforms demonstrated an extreme unwillingness to help, even as Quinn was chased from her home and forced to stop working because of threats advanced through the platform.

While Twitter has publicly made moves that seem to align with Black Lives Matter activism—such as creating a corresponding emoji image (or hashflag) that automatically appears alongside the hashtag—their algorithms, policies, and business practices have come under scrutiny for what Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández calls “platformed racism.”[16] For example, despite the disproportionate use of and creation on the platform by African American women, in 2015 Twitter boasted zero Black women employees. Two years later, according to the company’s 2017 Equal Employment Opportunity report, only 3 percent of its employees were African American, and none of those held positions in senior management.[17] Users of color have complained for years of racist threats and harassment on the platform. A 2018 Amnesty International report confirmed that women of color experience intense harassment on Twitter; one in every ten tweets sent to Black women contains abusive language or threats of violence.[18]

Additionally, “minstrel accounts,” in which white supremacist users present themselves as people of color with stolen or stock profile images and stereotypical names spread racist content under the cover of speaking for marginalized groups, have been allowed to proliferate despite the platform’s policy of banning fake accounts.[19] In fact, Twitter’s hesitation to ban Nazis has become something of a morbid joke in conjunction with a desperate demand on the platform as users change their display names to ones like “John BanNazis Smith” and “Jane BanAllNazis Doe.” Celebrities, including Seth Rogan and Kim Kardashian, have expressed public frustration with the platform’s inability or unwillingness to ban neo-Nazis.[20]

Though Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey has acknowledged “our inability to address [harassment, abuse, trolls, and misinformation] fast enough,” and though in 2018 the platform moved to ban some of the most egregious content, much of this activity came in response to complaints about the spread of fake news, as exemplified by the banning of conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, rather than racist and sexist abuse.[21] In response to these conditions, collectives such as Data for Black Lives have begun working on analytical tools to intervene, and some hashtag activists have chosen to suspend or make their accounts private in response to racist and sexist abuse.[22] While Facebook came under scrutiny in 2018 for making it easier for foreign agents to target African American users with fake news during the 2016 election cycle, Twitter has received less public scrutiny on how the corporation profits from the ideas and identities of its users.

The selling or giving away of user data and content on social media platforms is part of what makes them lucrative and of interest not only to advertisers and other corporations but also to the state. Academics and journalists alike have documented how police and corporations use social media to track particular activists and social movement trends in the interest of “national security” or “corporate reputation.”[23] In a particularly salient example, Jeffrey Juris has described how he and his colleagues at the Independent Media Center were targeted by Italian police seeking to destroy digital footage of police violence during the anti-G8 protests in Genoa in 2001.[24] More recently, Simone Browne has charted the way technologies of surveillance have a history rooted in enslavement in the United States and continue to be used to enforce state violence that is disproportionally visited on Black bodies.[25]

As we presented earlier versions of our work, several activists we spoke to described their experiences with surveillance and resistance to it, from being electronically followed by law enforcement during protests to deliberately altering or deleting content to avoid inadvertently revealing protest plans. Even without the explicit cooperation of social media platforms, state agencies increasingly make use of social media content to surveil activists. Nashville police, for example, claim that their creation of fake user profiles on Facebook is a way to ensure public safety, even though activists allege these profiles are used to monitor their activities.[26] The Boston Police Department has engaged in digital surveillance of Black Lives Matter and anti-Trump activists, and similar tactics have been used by Canadian law enforcement agencies.[27]

Yet activists have also developed thoughtful ways to bypass unwanted state attention. In 2016, indigenous organizers working to prevent the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from crossing through the Standing Rock Sioux territory encouraged social media users to “check in” or change their location to the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation, effectively masking who was actually present at the protest. Over one million people checked in at Standing Rock on Facebook, and even more used the hashtags #NoDAPL and #StandWithStandingRock across platforms, making it difficult to ascertain who was really protesting at the site.[28] This shows how the interconnectedness of platforms and the solidarity built in digital spaces can also be used to address activist concerns in the wake of heightened surveillance.

Characteristics of Hashtag Activism

Although Twitter and other social media platforms have been repurposed by activists and marginalized groups for the promulgation of political claims, there is little evidence that the companies specifically sought to support this sort of work. Unlike the case with other platforms, such as Facebook, which has been accused of unfairly suppressing posts by Black Lives Matter organizers, independent assessments suggest similar claims of censorship by Twitter are unfounded.[29] However, the particular factors that lead racial and gender justice hashtags to trend on Twitter may be a serendipitous result of the events and people popularizing the hashtags, rather than a specific effort by Twitter to promote activism.

While the particulars of how and why items trend on Twitter are proprietary, Twitter representatives have confirmed that the algorithm preferences hashtags that are novel, used across multiple subgroups, and accelerate in popularity over a short period of time.[30] To the extent that racial and gender justice hashtags tend to center on particular events (with novel keywords and short timeframes) and draw in a coalition of activists and everyday people, they may appeal to algorithmic features not specifically designed for their benefit. That said, the hashtags examined in this book also exemplify a survivorship bias insofar as we selected on success when we chose hashtags to include. That is, these hashtags may have had certain features that benefited from the trending algorithm, but it is almost certainly not the case that all racial and gender justice hashtags benefit from the algorithm, as there is no evidence that Twitter goes out of its way to make that happen.

With few exceptions, there is remarkable consistency in the composition and shape of the counterpublic hashtag networks we examined in this book. Hashtags that trended, and in doing so garnered attention in the larger public sphere, were almost always started by a woman in response to an incident or cultural repertoire not initially covered in depth by the mainstream media. Black women are disproportionately adept users and creators of persuasive hashtags and play influential roles in both racial justice and feminist networks, from insisting on #JusticeForTrayvon to championing #GirlsLikeUs. This speaks not only to the overrepresentation of African Americans on Twitter relative to other social media platforms (as some scholars have oversimplistically suggested is the cause of this influence) but also to the role Black women play as cultural influencers in U.S. society: from popular culture trends to activist politics, what they say and do is repeated and copied.

We have illustrated that through counterpublic networks, compelling narratives often authored by regular African Americans and women are picked up by local leaders and regional celebrities with connections to their counterpublic, and ultimately ushered into widespread visibility by mainstream (often Black) celebrities, journalists, and politicians. Discourse across counterpublic networks reflects a nuance rarely seen in mainstream media coverage of issues of gender-based and anti-Black violence. These networks center, struggle with, and develop identity politics alongside social movement demands.

The hashtags we examined in this book span several years and a period of tumultuous political and social change in the United States. It is notable that over time, we see a more rapid mainstreaming of racial and gender justice hashtags. Mainstream media are quicker to report on hashtags in 2019 than they were in 2012, racial justice networks include more white users in later years, and feminist networks include more male users. In light of this, there is a case to be made that over time, these networks have done their job by promulgating messages to those outside counterpublics. Moreover, white and male allies tend to work as partners in later years, amplifying and assisting marginalized voices rather than speaking for them. As illustrated by Elon James White’s #TheEmptyChair allyship work in chapter 1 compared to the #AllMenCan attempt at allyship in chapter 6, for example, when users with dominant identities become part of the community of a counterpublic network, their allyship works more effectively. This effective allyship can introduce messages developed and nurtured by marginalized groups into other networks of people who may not otherwise hear vital counterpublic messages.

Because of how technological networks break down long-standing separations between groups and access to media production, counterpublics are no longer spaces that allies must actively seek out but spaces to which potential and yet to be converted citizens have a front-row seat. Networked counterpublics, then, present those who have always had more access with the choice of allyship—to read, learn, engage, act (or not)—but not knowing where to look for alternative narratives is no longer an excuse for those in the mainstream.

The time span of our research also saw the birth of expert online activists. Some users, such as Johnetta Elzie (@Netaaaaaaaa) and Genie Lauren (@MoreAndAgain), played central roles in multiple viral hashtags, underscoring the savvy and adept nature of their engagement of the platform. As discussed by Lauren in her foreword to this book, it is not uncommon for those involved in earlier hashtags to play increasingly central roles in subsequent, related hashtags as people come to rely on them for information, both on Twitter and in mainstream news and political circles. Thus Lauren, Elzie, and others become another pathway for mainstreaming counterpublic narratives, lifted up by the networked counterpublics themselves as trusted and authentic authorities on issues and breaking news events.

Finally, just as we see particular people and ideas reappear within counterpublics on Twitter, we also see counterpublics connecting strategies and struggles that originated well before Twitter and online activism became popular. In the case of feminist and Black advocacy, group-based memories of past activists and demands clearly shape the development of new hashtag-centered discourses as such figures as Marsha P. Johnson and Emmett Till become linked to CeCe McDonald and Tamir Rice. Similarly, it was not uncommon to find tweets related to any given event string together, in the form of hashtags, a series of names, connecting multiple contemporary events to those that happened in the past, even several decades earlier. At the same time, the discourses linked to these hashtags do new and unusually public work. As networks proliferate, both intra- and intercommunity claims are made in response to those that minimize, dismiss, or naturalize intersectional forms of oppression. Through these hashtags women argue that, yes, they are all hurt by sexism; African Americans demand we say the names of the lives taken by anti-Black violence; women of color call white women to account for erasing them from feminist projects and men of color to account for misogynistic harassment; transgender women celebrate their accomplishments and call cisgender LGB people to account for agreeing to their continued invisibility; and allies with privilege try to name, or perhaps experiment with naming, their responsibilities to these other groups.

Overall, these hashtags have been successful in creating a shorthand story that is easily recognizable and speaks to much broader concerns. Just a few words, such as #BlackLivesMatter, elicit past, present, and future political claims and tell compelling and difficult stories that members of counterpublics are more than familiar with and allies are encouraged to learn. Thus hashtags can be thought of as what psychologists and scholars of public opinion might call schemas; they recall complex, nuanced experiences and claims, histories and presents, and theories of social belonging in a succinct, easy to digest, and repeatable form.

Hashtagged protest has become a feature of the contemporary political environment, which for the first time includes a president who uses Twitter as much as those who oppose him. Hashtags such as #FamiliesBelongTogether and #WillNotBeErased have directly responded to some of the more egregious actions of the Trump administration on issues ranging from immigration to transgender rights. As we have documented throughout this book, policymakers, presidential candidates, journalists, advocacy organizations, and celebrities have taken note of the messages and experiences of regular people advocating for social change. And they should continue to do so. As technologies change, so do the methods those at the margins use to make claims of belonging and for justice. Claims originating online—on whatever platform may rule the day—are legitimate and essential counternarratives. Taking these claims seriously is vital to social progress and civil society.

Afterword: Ethics, Backlash, and Access in Twitter Research

Over the course of the research for this book, which spanned five years, internet policy, thinking regarding best practices in online research, the tone of national politics, and the viability of Twitter access for researchers changed—a lot. Here we note some of the issues that concern us because of our vested interest in both research and justice.

Net Neutrality

Our work illustrates the power of Twitter hashtags as a user-generated phenomenon. The 2018 dissolution of the Obama White House Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulation that protected people’s ability to access the internet poses a devastating threat to hashtag activism. Federally, net neutrality ended when the FCC voted 3–2 to repeal protections that prevented internet service providers from slowing the speed of broadband usage, from blocking access to certain sites, and from creating fast lanes accessible for a price. Hashtag activism depends on users being able to tweet quickly from mobile devices and access new information rapidly. Advocates fear that if slowing, blocking, and outpricing of people’s access to the internet takes place, it will be nearly impossible for the dynamic and fast-paced democratic culture of hashtag activism to be maintained.

The internet has become such an important medium for activism that it cannot be deregulated into oblivion. Our work shows the power of user-generated hashtags to aid activism and the need for consumers to push back against cable and phone companies that whittle away at access to the internet. Consumers are making inroads, with twenty-two states joining together to challenge the 2018 repeal of net neutrality rules.[1] Local advocacy organizations such as the Equitable Internet Initiative, which has a program that trains young people to install routers, modems, and cables in homes that would otherwise not have access to the internet, circumventing problematic ISPs by effectively creating their own network of providers for their communities.[2]

Efforts to make access to the internet a human right have had mixed success. While there is interest from users in such a campaign, nation-states have undertaken no coordinated actions to make the freedom to connect a reality. When basic human needs like food, access to clean water, and shelter are still contested, a fight for the right to broadband may seem superfluous. But as we have shown, the internet allows users to make claims and create actions that affect these material realities.

Bots, Trolls, and the Weaponization of Networks

In the wake of the 2016 U.S. presidential election, much has been written about the weaponization of social media by foreign governments and domestic extremists. Evidence emerging as we finish writing this book suggests that Russian actors deliberately leveraged social media accounts to spread misinformation.[3] More germane to our work, recent work by Ahmer Arif, Leo Stewart, and Kate Starbird suggests that Russian operatives specifically infiltrated #BlackLivesMatter networks on Twitter to amplify polarized political conversations and (presumably) fuel discontent between right-leaning and left-leaning voters interested in race, policing, and gun violence.[4] Though none of the prominent accounts identified in their published work appears in our networks (which largely predate the run-up to the 2016 presidential election), and though our mixed-methods approach helped us identify and remove suspicious bot and troll accounts from our analysis, it is nevertheless notable that some used hashtags and networks on Twitter as a weapon to fracture an already polarized nation. This finding puts online activism work in a precarious bind. On the one hand, our research points to the real and important advances made by racial and gender justice activists and allies online; on the other, growing concern over Russian interference has put public and political pressure on social media companies to better manage controversial conversations. The risk, of course, is that legitimate activism will be partially or fully silenced—as in the cause of Genie Lauren’s suspension, noted in the foreword—in an effort to diminish foreign interference, throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater.

Such challenges are further complicated by evidence that far-right extremist groups, partly in response to advances made in racial and gender justice, are actively and deliberately using the same networks to manipulate mainstream media.[5] Members of the alt-right Gamergaters (video-gamers who engage in ongoing harassment of women developers and players), men’s rights activists, and others work together to craft and test messages on 4chan and Reddit that are pushed through Twitter and laundered by partisan media such as Breitbart. Not surprisingly, these efforts often target activists and other members of networked counterpublics, with whom far-right extremists vocally and sometimes violently disagree. Messages curated in extreme right corners of the internet have successfully infiltrated mainstream media and are sometimes held up as equally valid alternate interpretations to messages arising from networked counterpublics. In a misguided effort to give equal airtime to “both sides” of important social justice issues, mainstream media outlets may (however unwittingly) be playing into deliberate attempts to propagate and (re)normalize regressive, sexist, white supremacist narratives.

While some of these concerns are outside the scope of this book, we encourage future researchers not only to tackle the difficult question of the backlash against counterpublic politics online but to continue to elevate and center the good work that is simultaneously occurring. One way to do this is to work with activists and those committed to expanding the public sphere to develop critical interventions and guidelines for responding to the weaponization of networks. If the studies in this book have illustrated anything, it is that those on the margins will find a way to be heard and that we must hear them even as we take realistic stock of the media and political ecosystems in which they face steep uphill battles.

Research Ethics

There were few guidelines about how to handle Twitter data when we began research for this book. Although we worked with our institutional review board to establish an ethical framework for handling Twitter data, we found ourselves leaning more heavily on our own internally negotiated (and higher) standards for ethical data use as we drafted each chapter. Some chapters demanded more privacy protections than others, as some topics and individual tweets revealed sensitive information. Although we always operated on the assumption that ordinary (non-public figure) users do not fully appreciate that their data can be used by researchers, after recent confirmation in scholarly research we added an additional ethical practice to our workflow.[6] In addition to the guidelines outlined in the introduction, which included considering context, lifting up marginalized voices, and respecting signals of privacy added after a tweet was issued, we also made our best effort to reach out and inform non-public figures whose tweets we quote.

API Restrictions

As Deen Freelon argued in a 2018 address to the Computational Methods Interest Group at the annual International Communication Association meeting, those interested in using online data are increasingly faced with an impossible choice: violate the terms of service of the platforms that own the data or find a new line of work. The data collection and analyses that motivate the insights in this book would not have been possible without privileged access to Twitter data—access we no longer have, and which would be prohibitively expensive if we were to try to replicate our work today. Although some social media companies are experimenting with ways to share data with social science researchers while respecting the privacy of their users, such efforts are still quite limited in scope and topic.[7] The threats to privacy and security that are introduced through unwanted use of social media data are real, but so too are the threats to social scientific insight if we are unable to create pathways for researchers to access data within and across social media platforms. The trend toward restricting data to a small few who are fortunate enough to win grants, or, worse, to those who can afford to pay exorbitant fees for access, risks cutting off the entire enterprise of online social justice research in its infancy. It is imperative that content creators, social media companies, and scholars work together to find solutions that ethically and equitably enable access to the data that underwrite research on social justice and other vital social and behavioral questions.

Notes

Introduction

1. Sarah Silkey, Black Woman Reformer: Ida B. Wells, Lynching, and Transatlantic Activism (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2014).

2. Kathleen Endres, “In Their Own Voices: Women Redefine and Frame Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,” American Journalism 26, no. 1 (2009): 55–80; Adrienne E. Christiansen and Jeremy J. Hanson, “Comedy As Cure for Tragedy: ACT UP and the Rhetoric of AIDS,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 82, no. 2 (1996): 157–170.

3. Micha Sifry, “From TXTMob to Twitter: How an Activist Tool Took Over the Conventions,” TechPresident, August 25, 2012, http://techpresident.com/news/22775/txtmob-twitter-how-activist-tool-took-over-conventions.

4. Axel Bruns and Jean E. Burgess, “The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics,” in Proceedings of the 6th European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR General Conference 2011), Reykjavik, August 25–27, 2011.

5. danah boyd, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan, “Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter,” in Conference Proceedings: 2010 43rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), January 5–8, 2010 (Washington, DC: IEEE) 1–10, https://doi.org/10.1109/HICSS.2010.412; Zizi Papacharissi and Maria de Fatima Oliveira, “Affective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt,” Journal of Communication 62, no. 2 (April 1, 2012): 266–282, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460–2466.2012.01630.x.

6. Zeynep Tufekci, “The Medium and the Movement: Digital Tools, Social Movement Politics, and the End of the Free Rider Problem,” Policy & Internet 6, no. 2 (June 1, 2014): 202–208, https://doi.org/10.1002/1944–2866.POI362.

7. Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson, “Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations from Tahrir Square,” Journal of Communication 62, no. 2 (April 1, 2012): 363–379, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460–2466.2012.01629.x; Alfred Hermida, Seth C. Lewis, and Rodrigo Zamith, “Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources on Twitter during the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 19, no. 3 (April 1, 2014): 479–499, https://doi.org/10.1111/jcc4.12074.

8. Merlyna Lim, “Clicks, Cabs, and Coffee Houses: Social Media and Oppositional Movements in Egypt, 2004–2011,” Journal of Communication 62, no. 2 (April 1, 2012): 231–248, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460–2466.2012.01628.x; Christopher Wilson and Alexandra Dunn, “Digital Media in the Egyptian Revolution: Descriptive Analysis from the Tahrir Data Set,” in “The Arab Spring,” special issue, International Journal of Communication 5 (September 2, 2011): 25, https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1180.

9. Anthony C. Alessandrini, “Their Fight Is Our Fight: Occupy Wall Street, the Arab Spring, and New Modes of Solidarity Today,” in Periscope: Is This What Democracy Looks Like?, ed. Social Text Collective, 2013; Eve Ng and Sophie Toupin, “Feminist and Queer Practices in the Online and Offline Activism of Occupy Wall Street,” Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network 6, no. 3 (November 29, 2013), http://ojs.meccsa.org.uk/index.php/netknow/article/view/307.

10. Mike Orcutt, “How Occupy Wall Street Occupied Twitter, Too,” Global Panel (blog), MIT Technology Review, November 9, 2011, https://www.technologyreview.com/s/426079/how-occupy-wall-street-occupied-twitter-too.

11. Sasha Costanza-Chock, “Mic Check! Media Cultures and the Occupy Movement,” Social Movement Studies 11, nos. 3–4 (August 1, 2012): 375–385, https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2012.710746.

12. Matt Petronzio, “How Young Native Americans Built and Sustained the #NoDAPL Movement,” Mashable, December 4, 2016, https://mashable.com/2016/12/07/standing-rock-nodapl-youth; Je Seung Lee, “Cyntoia Brown to Be Freed after Being Jailed for Murder As a Teen,” Telegraph, January 8, 2019, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/01/08/cyntoia-brown-freed-jailed-murder-teen; Eric Augenbraun, “Occupy Wall Street and the Limits of Spontaneous Street Protest,” Guardian, September 29, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/29/occupy-wall-street-protest.

13. Laura Seay, “Does Slacktivism Work?,” Washington Post, March 12, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/03/12/does-slacktivism-work; Bridget Christie, “We’re a Nation of Armchair Activists—What’s Wrong with That?,” Guardian, April 11, 2015, Life and Style, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/apr/11/bridget-christie-armchair-activist.

14. Robert Asen and Daniel C. Brouwer, eds., Counterpublics and the State (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001).

15. Clemencia Rodriguez, Dorothy Kidd, and Laura Stein, eds., Making Our Media: Global Initiatives toward a Democratic Public Sphere; Creating New Communication Spaces (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009).

16. Zizi Papacharissi and Maria de Fatima Oliveira, “Affective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt,” Journal of Communication 62, no. 2 (April 1, 2012): 266–282, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460–2466.2012.01630.x.

17. Stephen Ramsay, Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011).

18. Moya Bailey, “#transform(ing) DH Writing and Research: An Autoethnography of Digital Humanities and Feminist Ethics,” Digital Humanities 9, no. 2 (2015), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/9/2/000209/000209.html.

Chapter 1: Women Tweet on Violence

1. Lisa M. Cuklanz, Rape on Prime Time: Television, Masculinity, and Sexual Violence (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000), http://site.ebrary.com/id/10491963; Jenny Kitzinger, Framing Abuse: Media Influence and Public Understanding of Sexual Violence Against Children (London: Pluto Press, 2004); Gary Lafree, Rape and Criminal Justice: The Social Construction of Sexual Assault (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1989); Marian Meyers, News Coverage of Violence against Women: Engendering Blame (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1996); Sujata Moorti, Color of Rape: Gender and Race in Television»s Public Spheres (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001).

2. Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo, “Medical Violence against People of Color and the Medicalization of Domestic Violence,” in Color of Violence, ed. INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 179–188, https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373445–022.

3. Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color, reprint ed., with a foreword by Angela Davis (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).

4. Bailey Poland, Haters: Harassment, Abuse, and Violence Online (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016); Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017).

5. Deen Freelon, Lori Lopez, Meredith D. Clark, and Sarah J. Jackson, “How Black Twitter and Other Social Media Communities Interact with Mainstream News,” Open Science Framework, August 5, 2018, https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/nhsd9.

6. Hollaback!, “History and Values,” Hollaback! Together We Have the Power to End Harassment, accessed June 6, 2018, https://www.ihollaback.org/about/history-and-values.

7. Emily Gould, “Race, ‘Catcalling’ and #notallmen: Making Sense of the Viral Street Harassment Video,” Salon, October 29, 2014, https://www.salon.com/2014/10/29/race_catcalling_and_notallmen_making_sense_of_the_viral_street_harassment_video.

8. “Weekend Read: For Incels, It’s Not about Sex. It’s about Women,” Southern Poverty Law Center, May 4, 2018, https://www.splcenter.org/news/2018/05/04/weekend-read-incels-its-not-about-sex-its-about-women.

9. Joan Walsh, “Elliot Rodger’s Half-White Male Privilege,” Salon, May 29, 2014, https://www.salon.com/2014/05/29/elliot_rodgers_half_white_male_privilege; Amanda Hess, “‘If I Can’t Have Them, No One Will’: How Misogyny Kills Men,” Slate, May 29, 2014, https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/05/elliot-rodger-hated-men-because-he-hated-women.html.

10. Emanuella Grinberg CNN, “Why #YesAllWomen Took Off on Twitter,” CNN, May 27, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/27/living/california-killer-hashtag-yesallwomen/index.html.

11. There was a surge in tweets linking #YesAllWomen on April 6, 2015, when two automated accounts with large followings (@WeNeedFeminlsm and @SincerelyTumblr) retweeted old #YesAllWomen tweets, which were in turn retweeted by several of their followers. The decision to retweet on April 6 appears to have been idiosyncratic, unattached to activity elsewhere on Twitter or to any external events or anniversaries that may have prompted the resurgence.

12. Michelle Rodino-Colocino, “#YesAllWomen: Intersectional Mobilization against Sexual Assault Is Radical (Again),” Feminist Media Studies 14, no. 6 (November 2, 2014): 1113–1115, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2014.975475; Samantha C. Thrift, “#YesAllWomen as Feminist Meme Event,” Feminist Media Studies 14, no. 6 (November 2, 2014): 1090–1092, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2014.975421.

13. Agatha Beins, “Sisterly Solidarity: Politics and Rhetoric of the Direct Address in US Feminism in the 1970s,” Women: A Cultural Review 21, no. 3 (December 1, 2010): 292–308, https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2010.513492.

14. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, with an introduction by Fredric Jameson (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972); Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011).

15. Sarah J. Jackson and Sonia Banaszczyk, “Digital Standpoints: Debating Gendered Violence and Racial Exclusions in the Feminist Counterpublic,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 40, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 391–407, https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859916667731.

16. George F. Will, “Colleges Become the Victims of Progressivism,” editorial, Washington Post, June 6, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-college-become-the-victims-of-progressivism/2014/06/06/e90e73b4-eb50-11e3-9f5c-9075d5508f0a_story.html?utm_term=.b8035a5dd0b3.

17. “Sexual Assault on College Campuses Is Common,” WomensHealth.gov, October 10, 2017, https://www.womenshealth.gov/relationships-and-safety/sexual-assault-and-rape/college-sexual-assault.

18. Ryan Parker, “Fox News Show Hammered by Critics for Ray Rice Lesson: ‘Take the Stairs,’” Los Angeles Times, September 8, 2014, Entertainment, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/tv/showtracker/la-et-st-fox-news-ray-rice-stairs-20140908-htmlstory.html.

19. Beverly Gooden, “Why I Created the Why I Stayed (#WhyIStayed) Movement.,” BeverlyGooden.com, accessed October 30, 2018, http://www.beverlygooden.com/hear/whyistayed.

20. #WhyIStayed was the first among those we examined to include a large number of pornographic images propagated by bots or automated accounts. Although we cannot be sure why pornographic bots appeared here, the fact that they first appeared in a hashtag associated with violence perpetrated against a Black woman is evocative of Safiya Noble’s intersectional critique of algorithmic bias against women of color. See Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018). For purposes of our analysis, we removed confirmed bots from this network and all of the networks we examine.

21. Throughout this book we use screenshots of tweets to illustrate important findings. Although the twitter data used in our analysis were collected from the Twitter API, these screenshots were collected at various times throughout 2015–2018 as we completed our analysis. The text content of tweets retrieved through the API and appearing in the screenshots is identical, but occasionally the visual features of the tweets, including the avatar image used by each user and the layout of the tweet, may be different from how they originally appeared.

22. Ella Ceron and Lainna Fader, “35 Women and #TheEmptyChair,” The Cut, July 28, 2015, https://www.thecut.com/2015/07/35-women-and-theemptychair.html.

23. Anna Silman, “Hannibal Buress Called Bill Cosby a Rapist,” Vulture, October 20, 2014, http://www.vulture.com/2014/10/hannibal-buress-called-bill-cosby-a-rapist.html.

24. Cara Buckley, “Stars Will Take Activists to the Golden Globes Red Carpet,” New York Times, January 20, 2018, Movies, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/07/movies/golden-globes-2018-activists-metoo-red-carpet.html.

25. Brent Lang, “Harvey Weinstein Forced Out of His Own Company,” Variety, October 8, 2017, https://variety.com/2017/biz/news/harvey-weinstein-out-weinstein-company-1202583568.

26. Leta Hong Fincher, Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China (London: Verso, 2018).

27. Colleen Flaherty, “Michael Kimmel’s Former Student Is Putting a Name and Details to Those Harassment ‘Rumors,’” InsideHigherEd.com, August 10, 2018, https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2018/08/10/michael-kimmels-former-student-putting-name-and-details-those-harassment-rumors.

28. Sarah Cascone, “Meet the Artist Whose ‘KAVANOPE’ Poster Has Gone Totally Viral,” Artnet News, September 28, 2018, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/heres-story-behind-viral-kavanope-graphic-1359625.

Chapter 2: Visions of Black Feminism

1. Susana Loza, “Hashtag Feminism, #SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, and the Other #FemFuture,” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 5 (July 7, 2014), http://adanewmedia.org/2014/07/issue5-loza.

2. Sarah J. Jackson and Sonia Banaszczyk, “Digital Standpoints: Debating Gendered Violence and Racial Exclusions in the Feminist Counterpublic,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 40, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 391–407, https://doi.org/10.1177/0196859916667731.

3. Pew Research Center, “Demographics of Social Media Users and Adoption in the United States,” PewInternet.org, February 5, 2018, http://www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/social-media.

4. Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South, with an introduction by Janet Neary (New York: Dover Publications, 2016), 62.

5. Frances Beale, “Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995), 146–155.

6. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, ed., How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).

7. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299.

8. Moya Bailey, “They Aren’t Talking about Me …,” Crunk Feminist Collective, March 14, 2010, http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2010/03/14/they-arent-talking-about-me.

9. Mikki Kendall and Jamie Nesbitt Golden, “Hoodfeminism,” hoodfeminism, 2013, https://hoodfeminism.com.

10. Elsewhere, Moya Bailey has written about the way that this misogynoirstic thinking led to Kelly’s acquittal on child pornography charges in 2008. See “Misogynoir in Medical Media: On Caster Semenya and R. Kelly,” Catalyst, September 2016.

11. Trendinalia USA, “@Karnythia the 1st Mention of the #FastTailedGirls Hashtag Appears on Your TL. Now Is Trending Topic in United States! #trndnl,” Tweet, @trendinaliaUS, November 30, 2013, https://twitter.com/trendinaliaUS/status/406895177677041665.

12. Of note, the most commonly co-occurring hashtags suggest that the rapid proliferation of #FastTailedGirls was exploited by bots seeking to boost follower accounts through the use of trending hashtags. In our original data set, #FastTailedGirls appeared alongside references to college football bowl games (e.g. #BAMAvsAUB and #OSUvsMICH) that were played on the same day Kendall’s tweets appeared. Subsequent analyses used a reduced data set, referred to as the “core network,” that eliminated tweets that did not get at least one retweet.

13. Mikki Kendall, “*Mikki Kendall* on Twitter: ‘One of the Reasons #fasttailedgirls Was so Specific in Focus Is Because While We All Experience #rapeculture We Don’t All Do It the Same,’” March 3, 2014, accessed October 30, 2018, https://twitter.com/karnythia/status/440611017404325890.

14. Mikki Kendall, “#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen: Women of Color’s Issue with Digital Feminism,” Guardian, August 14, 2013, Opinion, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/14/solidarityisforwhitewomen-hashtag-feminism.

15. @FeministaJones, “3. ‘Turn off’ the Accusations of Being #FastTailedGirls and the Street Harassment Many Begin Experiencing at Age 11,” Tweet, @FeministaJones, December 12, 2013, https://twitter.com/FeministaJones/status/411210162121498624.

16. Jamilah Lemieux, “Black Women Warned Us about R Kelly’s Behavior for Years. Was Nobody Listening?,” Mic.com, July 19, 2017, https://mic.com/articles/182471/the-latest-r-kelly-allegations-are-more-evidence-that-Black-womens-words-are-never-enough.

17. Demetria Irwin, “#YouOkSis: Online Movement Launches to Combat Street Harassment,” TheGrio, August 2, 2014, https://thegrio.com/2014/08/02/youoksis-online-movement-launches-to-combat-street-harassment.

18. André Brock, “From the Blackhand Side: Twitter as a Cultural Conversation,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 56, no. 4 (October 1, 2012): 529–549, https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.732147; Tara L. Conley, “Decoding Black Feminist Hashtags as Becoming,” The Black Scholar 47, no. 3 (August 1, 2017): 22–32, http://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2017.1330107.

19. Threading, or the practice of replying to your own tweets (usually repeatedly, in rapid succession), is now a formal feature on Twitter. However, it was originally invented by Black Twitter users as a hack to string together a longer narrative than would otherwise be allowed in 140 or 280 characters.

20. Terrell Jermaine Starr, “Tarana Burke: Black Community Needs to Have Uncomfortable Conversations about Sexual Violence,” The Root, accessed July 2, 2018, https://www.theroot.com/tarana-burke-Black-community-needs-to-have-uncomfortab-1825887443; Stereo Williams, “The Life and Death of XXXTentacion: Abuse, Homophobia and Hip-Hop,” Daily Beast, June 19, 2018, Entertainment, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-life-and-death-of-xxxtentacion-abuse-homophobia-and-hip-hop.

21. Sarah J. Jackson, “(Re)Imagining Intersectional Democracy from Black Feminism to Hashtag Activism,” Women’s Studies in Communication 39, no. 4 (October 1, 2016): 375–379, https://doi.org/10.1080/07491409.2016.1226654; Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, reprint ed. (New York: Vintage, 2011); Beth E. Richie, Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2012); Andrea Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color, reprint ed., with a foreword by Angela Davis (Boston: Beacon Press, 2017).

22. Erin C. J. Robertson, “Study: Eviction Rates for Black Women on Par with Incarcerations for Black Men,” The Root, accessed July 18, 2018, https://www.theroot.com/study-eviction-rates-for-Black-women-on-par-with-incar-1790876083.Notes to Chapter 2

23. African American Policy Forum, “#SayHerName,” AAPF.org, March 30, 2015, http://www.aapf.org/sayhernamewebinar.

24. Kimberlé Crenshaw, Andrea J. Ritchie, Rachel Anspach, Rachel Gilmer, and Luke Harris, Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality against Black Women (New York: African American Policy Forum, Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies, 2016).

25. Brenna Cammeron, “Questions after Woman Dies in US Jail,” Trending (blog), BBC News, July 16, 2015, https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-33560980.

26. Lauren Barbato, “The 13 Most Powerful #IfIDieInPoliceCustody Tweets,” Bustle, July 20, 2015, https://www.bustle.com/articles/98466-the-powerful-if-i-die-in-police-custody-hashtag-was-inspired-by-the-deaths-of-sandra.

27. Catherine R. Squires, “Making Visible Victimhood, Bringing Intersectionality to a Mass Shooting: #SAYHERNAME, Black Women, and Charleston,” chap. 6 in Dangerous Discourses Feminism, Gun Violence, and Civic Life, ed. Catherine R. Squires, chap. 6 (New York: Peter Lang, 2016), https://www.peterlang.com/view/9781433135897/chapter06.xhtml.

28. Eugene Daniels, “#BlackLivesMatter Interrupts A Bernie Sanders Speech. Again,” RTV6, August 9, 2015, https://www.theindychannel.com/newsy/Blacklivesmatter-interrupts-a-bernie-sanders-speech-again.

29. Michael Walsh, “Bernie Sanders Keeps Promise Made in Private to Sandra Bland’s Mother,” Yahoo.com, October 16, 2015, http://news.yahoo.com/sanders-keeps-promise-made-in-private-to-145437157.html.

30. Janelle Monáe, Janelle Monáe and Wondaland Records (Ft. Jidenna, Roman GianArthur & St. Beauty)—Hell You Talmbout, [song lyrics] 2015, https://genius.com/Janelle-monae-and-wondaland-records-hell-you-talmbout-lyrics.

31. Ruha Benjamin, “Black AfterLives Matter,” Text, Boston Review, July 11, 2018, https://bostonreview.net/race/ruha-benjamin-Black-afterlives-matter.

32. Kevin Munger, “This Researcher Programmed Bots to Fight Racism on Twitter. It Worked,” Washington Post, November 17, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/11/17/this-researcher-programmed-bots-to-fight-racism-on-twitter-it-worked.

33. Deen Freelon, Lori Lopez, Meredith D. Clark, and Sarah J. Jackson, “How Black Twitter and Other Social Media Communities Interact with Mainstream News,” Open Science Framework, August 5, 2018, https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/nhsd9.

Chapter 3: #GirlsLikeUs

1. Catherine R. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12, no. 4 (November 1, 2002): 446–468, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468–2885.2002.tb00278.x.

2. Leland G. Spencer, “Introduction: Centering Transgender Studies and Gender Identity in Communication Scholarship,” in Transgender Communication Studies: Histories, Trends, and Trajectories, ed. Jamie C. Capuzza and Leland G. Spencer (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), ix–xxii.

3. Dawn Ennis, “Booing Jennicet Was Wrong, but Was What She Did Worse?,” Advocate, July 1, 2015, http://www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/07/01/booing-jennicet-was-wrong-was-what-she-did-worse.

4. In fact, Sylvia Rivera, founding member of some of the first gay and trans liberation organizations in America, was once similarly booed and chastised for speaking to the concerns of trans women of color at a pride rally in 1973, only a few short years after her pivotal role in starting the LGBTQ movement.

5. Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook, “Doing Gender, Doing Heteronormativity: ‘Gender Normals,’ Transgender People, and the Social Maintenance of Heterosexuality,” Gender & Society 23, no. 4 (2009): 440–464; Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity (Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2016).

6. Joshua Gamson, Freaks Talk Back: Tabloid Talk Shows and Sexual Nonconformity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

7. Cynthia Lee and Peter Kar Yu Kwan, “The Trans Panic Defense: Heteronormativity, and the Murder of Transgender Women,” Hastings Law Journal 77 (2014): 66.

8. Elias Vituli, “A Defining Moment in Civil Rights History? The Employment Non-discrimination Act, Trans-inclusion, and Homonormativity,” Sexuality Research and Social Policy 7, no. 3 (2010): 155–167.

9. Zavé Martohardjono and Rye Young, “Toward Transfeminism: Moving beyond Inclusion,” Nonprofit Quarterly, March 2, 2016.

10. Caitlyn Jenner’s tweet introducing herself to the world was the tenth most-retweeted post on Twitter in 2015 (“Most Retweeted Posts 2015 | Statistic”).

11. Jamie C. Capuzza, “What’s in a Name? Transgender Identity, Metareporting, and the Misgendering of Chelsea Manning,” in Capuzza and Spencer, Transgender Communication Studies, 93–110.

12. National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and HIV-Affected Intimate Partner Violence in 2014 (New York: National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs, 2015).

13. “Under Siege: Trans People, Muslim Americans and Hate,” Southern Poverty Law Center, June 10, 2015, https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2015/under-siege-trans-people-muslim-americans-and-hate.

14. Human Rights Campaign, “Violence against the Transgender Community in 2018,” Human Rights Campaign, 2018, http://www.hrc.org/resources/violence-against-the-transgender-community-in-2018.

15. Jen Christensen, “Killings of Transgender People in the U.S. Saw Another High Year,” CNN, January 17, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/16/health/transgender-deaths-2018.

16. Daniel Reynolds, “Is ‘Transface’ a Problem in Hollywood?,” Advocate, February 25, 2015, http://www.advocate.com/arts-entertainment/2015/02/25/transface-problem-hollywood.

17. Scott Mendelson, “Why Roland Emmerich’s ‘Stonewall’ Was a Box Office Disaster,” Forbes, September 29, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2015/09/29/why-roland-emmerichs-stonewall-was-a-box-office-disaster.

18. Eric Shorey, “Backlash against ‘Stonewall’ Prompts Donations to ‘Happy Birthday, Marsha!,’” LOGO News, August 6, 2015, http://www.newnownext.com/backlash-against-stonewall-prompts-donations-to-happy-birthday-marsha/08/2015.

19. Reina Gossett, Eric A. Stanley, and Johanna Burton, eds., Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017).

20. Capuzza, “What’s in a Name?”

21. K. J. Rawson, “Transgender Worldmaking in Cyberspace: Historical Activism on the Internet,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 1, no. 2 (2014): 38–60.

22. Joshua Trey Barnett, “Fleshy Metamorphosis: Temporal Pedagogies of Transsexual Counterpublics,” in Capuzzo and Spencer, Transgender Communication Studies, 155–172.

23. E. Tristan Booth, “Television: The Provisional Acknowledgment of Identity Claims in Televised Documentary,” in Capuzzo and Spencer, Transgender Communication Studies, 111–126. Booth writes that in television documentaries, voiceover narration often misgenders trans people, while scripts create visual spectacles by focusing overwhelmingly on physical and medical aspects of transition. These trends are indicative of how traditional media “consider the comfort level of the dominant public above that of the transgender public, even though transgender lives are being represented” (p. 115).

24. The #GirlsLikeUs hashtag predates Janet Mock’s deployment. It was initially a little-used hashtag promoting the film Girls Like Us, a short-lived, now squelched Joni Mitchell biopic set to star Taylor Swift. The studio attempted to make the hashtag popular by repeatedly tweeting the tag and getting Swift fans to reblog it. However, no one created original tweets with the hashtag, and when the project was shelved, there was little trace of the tag when Mock generated it herself. This demonstrates the ephemeral nature of hashtag use if the particular initiating use of a tag does not resonate widely.

25. Janet Mock, Twitter post, January 13, 2014, 11:39 a.m., http://twitter.com/janetmock.

26. Michael Warner, “Publics and counterpublics,” Public Culture 14, no. 1 (2002): 49–90.

27. Marc A. Smith, Lee Rainie, Ben Shneiderman, and Itai Himelboim, Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, February 20, 2014).

28. As in other groups, class status and race have an impact on the lives of different trans women and shape their political perspectives differently. @xoAMILLAxo’s conservative ideology is likely in part informed by her class and race privilege. Similarly, Caitlyn Jenner’s conservatism has prompted confusion, including during a 2015 interview with Ellen Degeneres after Jenner mentioned her own reticience around the issue of gay marriage, prompting Degeneres to say she expected Jenner to have a more left-leaning political stance on transitioning. Degeneres conflated Jenner’s transition not only with a liberal political perspective but also with her views on sexuality.

29. Angelica Ross, Twitter post, August 31, 2013, 11:39 a.m., http://twitter.com/angelicaross.

30. Janet Mock, Twitter post, September 22, 2013, 10:40 p.m., http://twitter.com/janetmock.

31. “Mission,” San Francisco Trans March, accessed July 26, 2016, http://transmarch.org/mission.

32. Laverne Cox, Twitter post, August 4, 2013, 8:01 p.m., http://twitter.com/lavernecox.

33. Sarah Florini, “Recontextualizing the Racial Present: Intertextuality and the Politics of Online Remembering,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 31, no. 4 (2014): 314–326.

34. Marc Lamont Hill, “Why Aren’t We Fighting for CeCe McDonald?,” Ebony, June 11, 2012.

35. Russell Goldman, “Transgender Activist CeCe McDonald Released from Prison,” ABC News, January 14, 2014, http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2014/01/transgender-activist-cece-mcdonald-released-early-from-prison.

36. Janet Mock, Twitter post, January 13, 2014, 11:33am, http://www.twitter.com/janetmock.

37. Mia Fischer, “#Free_CeCe: The Material Convergence of Social Media Activism,” Feminist Media Studies 16, no. 5 (September 2, 2016): 755–771, https://doi.org/10.1080/14680777.2016.1140668.

38. Janet Mock, “I AM #REDEFININGREALNESS,” I AM #RedefiningRealness, accessed October 30, 2018, http://redefiningrealness.tumblr.com/post/67300819301/i-am-redefining-realness-janet-mock.

39. Leah Chernikoff, “Laverne Cox’s Explanation of Why #TransIsBeautiful Will Make You Cheer and Cry,” Elle.com, September 11, 2015, http://www.elle.com/culture/celebrities/news/a30388/laverne-cox-trans-is-beautiful.

40. matthew heinz, “Interpersonal Communication: Trans Interpersonal Support Needs,” in Capuzza and Spencer, Transgender Communication Studies), 33–50, http://site.ebrary.com/lib/northeastern/docDetail.action?docID=11025328.

41. Heather L. Hundley and J. Scott Rodriguez, “Transactivism and Postmodernity: An Agonistic Analysis of Transliterature,” Communication Quarterly 57, no. 1 (2009): 35–50, https://doi.org/10.1080/01463370802662473.

42. Alice E. Marwick, “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience,” New Media & Society 13, no. 1 (2011): 114–133.

43. Matt Pearce, “What It’s Like to Live under North Carolina’s Bathroom Law If You’re Transgender,” Los Angeles Times, June 12, 2016.

44. David Crary, “Massachusetts Backs Transgender Rights; Michigan OKs Pot Use,” Channel 6 News, November 7, 2018, https://www.wowt.com/content/news/Massachusetts-backs-transgender-rights-Michigan-OKs-pot-use-499937621.html?ref=621.

45. Erica L. Green, Katie Benner, and Robert Pear, “‘Transgender’ Could Be Defined Out of Existence under Trump Administration,” New York Times, December 10, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/21/us/politics/transgender-trump-administration-sex-definition.html.

46. Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement,” Feminist Wire, October 7, 2014, https://thefeministwire.com/2014/10/Blacklivesmatter-2.

47. African American Policy Forum, “#SayHerName” (New York: AAPF, March 30, 2015), http://www.aapf.org/sayhernamewebinar.

Chapter 4: Racial Violence and Racial Profiling

1. Mary Grace Antony and Ryan J. Thomas, “‘This Is Citizen Journalism at Its Finest’: YouTube and the Public Sphere in the Oscar Grant Shooting Incident,” New Media & Society 12, no. 8 (2010): 1280–1296.

2. Erik Ortiz, “George Holliday, Who Taped Rodney King Beating, Urges Others to Share Videos,” NBC News, June 9, 2015, http://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/george-holliday-who-taped-rodney-king-beating-urges-others-share-n372551.

3. Ronald N. Jacobs, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

4. Terry Collins and Terence Chea, “Fatal Police Shooting Sparks Violent Protests,” San Diego Union Tribune, January 8, 2009, http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/sdut-train-station-shooting-010809–2009jan08-story.html.

5. Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2012).

6. Erhardt Graeff, Matt Stempeck, and Ethan Zuckerman, “The Battle for ‘Trayvon Martin’: Mapping a Media Controversy Online and Off-Line,” First Monday 19, no. 2 (January 28, 2014), http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4947.

7. Susan Jacobson, “Sanford Killing: One Dead, One in Custody in Sanford Killing, Police Say,” Orlando Sentinel, February 29, 2012, http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2012-02-29/news/os-fatal-shooting-sanford-townhomes-20120226_1_gated-community-death-sunday-night-shot.

8. “Prosecute the Killer of Our Son, 17-Year-Old Trayvon Martin,” Change.org, accessed June 13, 2017, https://www.change.org/p/prosecute-the-killer-of-our-son-17-year-old-trayvon-martin.

9. In addition to the celebrities sharing the Change.org petition, others took it upon themselves to engage in their own Twitter activism, with not always useful effects. Notably, filmmaker Spike Lee tweeted what he mistakenly believed to be the home address of George Zimmerman. Lee later apologized to the elderly couple whose home he had targeted and settled out of court for undisclosed damages after they received death threats and were forced to flee.

10. Rivera claimed that “the hoodie is as much responsible for Trayvon Martin’s death as George Zimmerman.”

11. Graeff, Stempeck, and Zuckerman, “The Battle for ‘Trayvon Martin.’”

12. Natalie Jackson is a Martin family attorney and John Guy was one of the state prosecutors on the case.

13. Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous (New York: Verso Books, 2014).

14. Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White, eds., Race after the Internet (New York: Routledge, 2011).

Chapter 5: From #Ferguson to #FalconHeights

1. CNN, Eyewitness: Michael Brown Had His Hands in the Air, YouTube video, accessed July 23, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2nWxMUX05k. Later, Mitchell’s account was disputed by other eyewitnesses during grand jury testimony, who corroborated Wilson’s story that Brown charged at him, creating an unclear picture that aided Wilson’s version of events. See Erik Eckholm, “Witnesses Told Grand Jury That Michael Brown Charged at Darren Wilson, Prosecutor Says,” New York Times, January 19, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/us/witnesses-told-grand-jury-that-michael-brown-charged-at-darren-wilson-prosecutor-says.html.

2. Chris Taylor, “Twitter Now Fills Your Feed With Photos,” Mashable, October 29, 2013, https://mashable.com/2013/10/29/twitter-photos-videos.

3. Deen Freelon, Charlton D. McIlwain, and Meredith Clark, “Beyond the Hashtags: #Ferguson, #Blacklivesmatter, and the Online Struggle for Offline Justice” (Washington, DC: American University School of Communication, Center for Media and Social Impact, February 29, 2016), http://cmsimpact.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/beyond_the_hashtags_2016.pdf.

4. U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, “Investigation of the Ferguson Police Department,” March 4, 2015, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releases/attachments/2015/03/04/ferguson_police_department_report.pdf.

5. José Andrés Araiza, Heloisa Aruth Sturm, Pinar Istek, and Mary Angela Bock, “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot, Whose Side Are You On? Journalists Tweeting the Ferguson Protests,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 16, no. 3 (June 1, 2016): 305–312, https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616634834.

6. Barbara Starr, “Pentagon Drawn into Police Militarization Debate,” CNN, August 19, 2014, https://www.cnn.com/2014/08/19/us/pentagon-police-militarization/index.html.

7. Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark, “Beyond the Hashtags,” 9.

8. Jelani Ince, Fabio Rojas, and Clayton A. Davis, “The Social Media Response to Black Lives Matter: How Twitter Users Interact with Black Lives Matter through Hashtag Use,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 11 (September 2, 2017): 1814–1830, https://doi.org/10.1080/01419870.2017.1334931.

9. Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa, “#Ferguson: Digital Protest, Hashtag Ethnography, and the Racial Politics of Social Media in the United States,” American Ethnologist 42, no. 1 (February 1, 2015): 4–17, https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12112.

10. Sarah J. Jackson and Brooke Foucault Welles, “#Ferguson Is Everywhere: Initiators in Emerging Counterpublic Networks,” Information, Communication & Society 19, no. 3 (2016): 397–418.

11. Mark Molloy and Molloy, “Palestinians Tweet Tear Gas Advice to Protesters in Ferguson,” Telegraph, August 15, 2014, World, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11036190/Palestinians-tweet-tear-gas-advice-to-protesters-in-Ferguson.html.

12. Freelon, McIlwain, and Clark, “Beyond the Hashtags,” 31.

13. “Zendaya on Instagram: ‘#EricGarner #SandraBland #OscarGrant #AltonSterling #WalterScott #PhilandoCastile to Think … That’s Not Even the Beginning of It, These Are …,’” Instagram, accessed October 30, 2018, https://www.instagram.com/p/BHjIDxqAkTa.

14. Laura Westbrook, “Tamir Rice Shot ‘within Two Seconds,’” BBC News, November 27, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-us-canada-30220700/tamir-rice-shot-within-two-seconds-of-police-arrival.

15. The City of Cleveland infamously billed Rice’s family for his ambulance ride to the hospital where he died following the shooting and only withdrew the claim after public outrage. See Yanan Wang and Sarah Larimer, “Cleveland Mayor Apologizes after Ambulance-Bill Claim against Tamir Rice’s Estate,” Washington Post, February 11, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2016/02/11/cleveland-files-claim-against-tamir-rices-estate-for-500-ambulance-fees.

16. Christina Sterbenz, “A ‘Big Question’ Surrounds the Arrest of Freddie Gray, Which Sparked Riots across Baltimore,” Business Insider, April 30, 2015, https://www.businessinsider.com/did-police-have-a-right-to-stop-freddie-gray-2015–4.

17. This is not to say that those opposing the claims and demands of the Black Lives Matter networks on Twitter did not share and spread their ideas, simply that they were largely unsuccessful in doing so vis-à-vis the hashtags created by and and within the networks by activists and everyday people we’ve examined up to this point. Instead, those working to justify police use of force generally created and interacted on their own hashtags, such as #AllLivesMatter, #BlueLivesMatter, and the nonsubtly racist #PantsUpDontShoot.

18. Ronald N. Jacobs, Race, Media, and the Crisis of Civil Society: From Watts to Rodney King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Daniel Trottier and Christian Fuchs, eds., Social Media, Politics and the State: Protests, Revolutions, Riots, Crime and Policing in the Age of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (New York: Routledge, 2014).

19. B. Foucault Welles and S. Jackson, “The Battle for #Baltimore: Networked Counterpublics and the Contested Framing of Urban Unrest,” International Journal of Communication 13, no. 21 (2019).

20. For more on the racist history of the NRA, see Maxine Burkett, “Much Ado about … Something Else: D.C. v. Heller, the Racialized Mythology of the Second Amendment, and Gun Policy Reform No School Left Behind: Providing Equal Educational Opportunities,” Journal of Gender, Race & Justice 12, no. 1 (Fall 2008): 57–106.

21. A Facebook Live recording of Newsome’s speech garnered 50 million views, and, though his comments were seen by many white Americans as clear and agreeable, some Black Lives Matter organizers felt his words were too conciliatory and that he legitimized white supremacists by engaging with them at all. See Wilbert L. Cooper and Chauncey Alcorn, “Speaking at a Trump Rally Made This BLM Activist an Outcast,” Vice,, October 19, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/wjx9m4/speaking-at-a-trump-rally-made-this-blm-activist-an-outcast.

22. Barbara Ransby, “Ella Taught Me: Shattering the Myth of the Leaderless Movement,” Colorlines.com, June 12, 2015, https://www.colorlines.com/articles/ella-taught-me-shattering-myth-leaderless-movement.

23. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Associated Press, “Report: Boston Police Social Media Monitoring Targeted Muslims, Black Lives Matter Posts,” February 7, 2018, https://www.wcvb.com/article/boston-police-Black-lives-matter-racial-inequality-muslim-lives-matter-social-media/16751692.

24. Olivier Laurent, “See TIME’s Baltimore Cover Shot by an Aspiring Photographer,” Time, April 30, 2015, http://time.com/3841077/baltimore-protests-riot-freddie-gray-devin-allen.

25. Bob Bryan, “‘Find Something Else to Do!’: Trump Continues His War of Words against NFL Players in Tweetstorm,” Business Insider, September 23, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-tweets-on-nfl-players-national-anthem-protest-2017–9.

26. Nick Eilerson, “WNBA Withdraws Penalties for Players’ ‘Black Lives Matter’ Protests,” Washington Post, July 23, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2016/07/23/wnba-withdraws-penalties-for-players-Black-lives-matter-protests.

27. Carma Hassan, Gregory Krieg, and Melonyce McAfee, “Police Union Calls for a Boycott of Beyoncé World Tour,” CNN, February 20, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/19/us/beyonce-police-boycott/index.html.

28. Kashif Jerome Powell, “Making #BlackLivesMatter: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the Specters of Black Life—Toward a Hauntology of Blackness,” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 16, no. 3 (June 1, 2016): 253–260, https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708616634770.

Chapter 6: The Utility of Digital Allyship

1. Susan Schweik, “Lomax’s Matrix: Disability, Solidarity, and the Black Power of 504,” Disability Studies Quarterly 31, no. 1 (January 24, 2011), http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1371.

2. Combahee River Collective, The Combahee River Collective Statement: Black Feminist Organizing in the Seventies and Eighties (Latham, NY: Kitchen Table, 1986).

3. Mia McKenzie, “How to Tell the Difference between Real Solidarity and ‘Ally Theater,’” BGD Blog, November 4, 2015, https://www.bgdblog.org/2015/11/the-difference-between-real-solidarity-and-ally-theatre.

4. Patrick Stewart, “#Safetypinpic.twitter.com/MGFcjx68BP,” tweet, @SirPatStew, November 11, 2016, https://twitter.com/SirPatStew/status/797143600341585920.

5. Stephanie Buck, “During Nazi Occupation, Office Supplies Became Symbols of Resistance,” Timeline, November 11, 2016, https://timeline.com/safety-pin-brexit-trump-dutch-12ce84093550; Sarfraz Manzoor, “1978, the Year Rock Found the Power to Unite,” Observer, April 20, 2008, Music, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2008/apr/20/popandrock.race.

6. Valeriya Safronova, “Safety Pins Show Support for the Vulnerable,” New York Times, January 20, 2018, Fashion & Style, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/fashion/safety-pin-ally-activism.html.

7. Tora’s Spooky Shae, “‘Come Peasant, Look upon My Diamond Encrusted Safety Pin and Know That You Are Safe’ pic.Twitter.Com/Ntnn3ggIJk,” tweet, @BlackMajiik, November 16, 2016, https://twitter.com/BlackMajiik/status/799133203676139521?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bustle.com%2Farticles%2F195850-how-to-wear-a-safety-pin-responsibly-as-an-ally.

8. In an attempt at intervening in this solely performative trend of allyship, Marissa Janae Johnson and Leslie Mac, two Black women, created the subscription-based Safety Pin Box as a more meaningful intervention that sends hopeful-allies readings and suggestions for targeted action they can take to dismantle white supremacy.

9. Qamar, “You Cannot Designate Yourself an Ally by Wearing a Safety Pin,” Brown Girl Magazine (blog), Huffington Post, November 21, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/brown-girl-magazine/you-cannot-designate-your_b_13098646.html.

10. Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, Volume 1 (New Brunswick, NJ: Routledge, 1995); Cynthia Stokes Brown, William Ayers, and Therese Quinn, Refusing Racism: White Allies and the Struggle for Civil Rights (New York: Teachers College Press, 2002); Daniel Tatum Beverly, “Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?” and Other Conversations about Race (New York: Basic Books, 1997).

11. David Lazer, “The Rise of the Social Algorithm,” Science 348, no. 6239 (2015): 1090–1091; Pablo Barberá, John T. Jost, Jonathan Nagler, Joshua A. Tucker, and Richard Bonneau, “Tweeting from Left to Right: Is Online Political Communication More Than an Echo Chamber?,” Psychological Science 26, no. 10 (October 1, 2015): 1531–1542, https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797615594620.

12. Ana Valens, “Men Tweet #HowIWillChange after #MeToo—but It Isn’t Helping,” Daily Dot, October 17, 2017, https://www.dailydot.com/irl/metoo-men-sexual-assault.

13. We recognize that #CrimingWhileWhite and #AllMenCan are not the only hashtags created in recent years with the intention of calling allies to action. However, these hashtags were the most used ally hashtags during the period of our data collection. While we hoped to focus on organic allyship, for this chapter, only #CrimingWhileWhite ultimately met this expectation. Unlike #CrimingWhileWhite and the other hashtags examined in this book and chapter, which were created spontaneously by members of the networks we analyze, the most circulated examples of digital allyship by men on behalf of women, including #AllMenCan, were started by organizations or women hoping to encourage men to play a more active role in digital feminism.

14. Elizabeth Plank, “35 Men Show Us What Real Men’s Activists Look Like,” PolicyMic, May 29, 2014, https://mic.com/articles/90079/35-men-show-us-what-real-men-s-activists-look-like.

15. Phillip Atiba Goff, Tracey Lloyd, Amanda Geller, Steven Raphael, and Jack Glaser, “The Science of Justice: Race, Arrests, and Police Use of Force,” Center for Policing Equity, PolicingEquity.org, July 8, 2016, http://policingequity.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/CPE_SoJ_Race-Arrests-UoF_2016-07-08-1130.pdf; Beverly Daniel Tatum, “Teaching White Students about Racism: The Search for White Allies and the Restoration of Hope,” Teachers College Record 95, no. 4 (1994): 462–476.

16. Marc A. Smith et al., “Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters,” Pew Research Center: Internet, Science & Tech (blog), February 20, 2014, http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/02/20/mapping-twitter-topic-networks-from-polarized-crowds-to-community-clusters.

17. Sharad Goel, Duncan J. Watts, and Daniel G. Goldstein, “The Structure of Online Diffusion Networks,” in Proceedings of the 13th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce, Valencia, June 4–8, 2012 (New York: ACM, 2012), 623–638, https://doi.org/10.1145/2229012.2229058.

18. Sharad Goel, Ashton Anderson, Jake Hofman, and Duncan J. Watts, “The Structural Virality of Online Diffusion,” Management Science 62, no. 1 (July 22, 2015): 180–196, https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2158.

19. Clayton A. Davis, Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, Luca Maria Aiello, Keychul Chung, Michael D. Conover, Emilio Ferrara, Alessandro Flammini, et al., “OSoMe: The IUNI Observatory on Social Media,” PeerJ Computer Science 2 (October 3, 2016): e87, https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj-cs.87.

20. Gail C. Christopher, “Meta-Analysis of Recent Polling Data on the Impact of Racism on American Society Today,” W. K. Kellogg Foundation, 2016, https://www.wkkf.org:443/resource-directory/resource/2016/01/meta-analysis-of-recent-polling-data-on-the-impact-of-racism-on-american-society-today.

21. Brown, Ayers, and Quinn, Refusing Racism; Drick Boyd, White Allies in the Struggle for Racial Justice, with a foreword by C. T. Vivian (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2015).

22. Jessica Dickerson, “#CrimingWhileWhite Explodes on Twitter Following Eric Garner Decision,” Huffington Post, December 4, 2014, Black Voices, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/03/criming-while-white-hashtag_n_6265480.html; Wilfred Chan, “#CrimingWhileWhite, #ICantBreathe Dominate Twitter Talk in Eric Garner Case,” CNN, December 4, 2014, http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/04/us/criming-while-white-hashtag/index.html; Zachary Goldfarb, “#Crimingwhilewhite: White People Are Confessing on Twitter to Crimes They Got Away With,” Washington Post, December 4, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2014/12/04/crimingwhilewhite-white-people-are-confessing-on-twitter-to-crimes-they-got-away-with; Durando, “#Crimingwhilewhite Puts Focus on Police and Race,” USA Today, December 3, 2014, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2014/12/03/criming-while-white-twitter-/19866725.

Conclusion

1. Sasha Costanza-Chock, Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets! Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014).

2. Stephen Harrington, Tim Highfield, and Axel Bruns, “More Than a Backchannel: Twitter and Television,” Audience Interactivity and Participation 10, no. 1 (2012): 13–17.

3. Audrey Carlsen, Maya Salam, Claire Cain Miller, Denise Lu, Ash Ngu, Jugal K. Patel, and Zach Wichter, “#MeToo Brought Down 201 Powerful Men. Nearly Half of Their Replacements Are Women.,” New York Times, October 23, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/10/23/us/metoo-replacements.html.

4. Aisha Harris, “She Founded Me Too. Now She Wants to Move Past the Trauma,” New York Times, October 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/arts/tarana-burke-metoo-anniversary.html.

5. Jem Aswad Halperin Shirley, Jem Aswad, and Shirley Halperin, “R. Kelly Dropped by Sony Music,” Variety, January 18, 2019, https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/r-kelly-dropped-sony-music-1203106180.

6. Steve Greene, “WGA Awards 2019: Nominees Are Haunting of Hill House, Atlanta, Barry,” IndieWire, December 6, 2018, https://www.indiewire.com/2018/12/wga-awards-2019-tv-nominees-haunting-of-hill-house-atlanta-barry-1202026046.

7. Kendall Fisher, “How Jessica Chastain Fought to Get Octavia Spencer Equal Pay,” E! Online, January 25, 2018, https://www.eonline.com/news/909035/how-jessica-chastain-fought-to-get-octavia-spencer-equal-pay; Maiysha Kai, “This Is How You Use Your Privilege: How Jessica Chastain Helped Octavia Spencer Earn Her Worth,” Glow Up, January 25, 2018, https://theglowup.theroot.com/this-is-how-you-use-your-privilege-how-jessica-chastai-1822407114.

8. Tarleton Gillespie, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).

9. Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” in “Proceedings of the First Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency,” special issue, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 21 (2018): 77–91, http://proceedings.mlr.press/v81/buolamwini18a.html.

10. Ashley Feinberg, “Jack Dorsey Has No Clue What He Wants,” Huffington Post, January 17, 2019, Tech, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jack-dorsey-twitter-interview_us_5c3e2601e4b01c93e00e2a00.

11. Tarleton Gillespie, “Can an Algorithm Be Wrong? Twitter Trends, the Specter of Censorship, and Our Faith in the Algorithms around Us,” Social Media Collective, October 9, 2011, https://socialmediacollective.org/2011/10/19/can-an-algorithm-be-wrong.

12. Biz Stone, “Down Time Rescheduled,” Twitter (blog), June 15, 2009, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2009/down-time-rescheduled.html.

13. Alice E. Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online,” Data and Society Institute, accessed November 15, 2018, https://datasociety.net/output/media-manipulation-and-disinfo-online.

14. Jessie Daniels, “Twitter and White Supremacy, A Love Story,” Dame Magazine, October 19, 2017, https://www.damemagazine.com/2017/10/19/twitter-and-white-supremacy-love-story.

15. Zoe Quinn, Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate (New York: PublicAffairs, 2017).

16. Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, “Platformed Racism: The Mediation and Circulation of an Australian Race-Based Controversy on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube,” Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 6 (June 3, 2017): 930–946, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2017.1293130.

17. Jessica Guynn, “Twitter Users Are Diverse but Not Its Staff,” USA Today, January 19, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2017/01/19/twitter-diversity-2016/96749454.

18. Emily Dreyfuss, “Twitter Is Indeed Toxic for Women, Amnesty Report Says,” Wired, December 18, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/amnesty-report-twitter-abuse-women.

19. Amanda Hess, “On Twitter, a Battle among Political Bots,” New York Times, December 14, 2016, Arts, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/arts/on-twitter-a-battle-among-political-bots.html.

20. Anthony Cutherbertson, “Seth Rogen Spoke with the Boss of Twitter about Nazis—and It Didn’t Go Well,” Independent, July 4, 2018, https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/seth-rogen-twitter-jack-dorsey-white-supremacists-nazis-online-abuse-a8430586.html.

21. Todd Haselton, “Twitter’s CEO Admitted the Platform Is Broken and Is Asking for Help,” CNBC, March 1, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/03/01/twitters-ceo-admitted-the-platform-is-broken-and-is-asking-for-help.html.

22. “Data For Black Lives,” accessed January 18, 2019, https://d4bl.typeform.com/to/wg6agF.

23. Julie Uldam, “Corporate Management of Visibility and the Fantasy of the Post-Political: Social Media and Surveillance,” New Media & Society 18, no. 2 (February 1, 2016): 201–219, https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444814541526.

24. Jeffrey S. Juris, “The New Digital Media and Activist Networking within Anti–Corporate Globalization Movements,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597, no. 1 (January 1, 2005): 189–208, https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716204270338.

25. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).

26. Clint Confehr, “Metro Police Monitoring Social Media,” Tennessee Tribune, January 3, 2019, https://tntribune.com/community/local/nashville/metro-police-monitoring-social-media.

27. Stephen Davis, “Police Monitored Black Lives Matter Toronto Protesters in 2016, Documents Show,” CBC News, May 3, 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/police-monitored-Black-lives-matter-toronto-protesters-in-2016-documents-show-1.4645628; Sarah Betancourt, “Massachusetts Police Tweet Lets Slip Scale of Leftwing Surveillance,” The Guardian, September 15, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/sep/15/massachusetts-police-tweet-leftwing-surveillance-boston.

28. Merrit Kennedy, “More Than 1 Million ‘Check In’ On Facebook to Support the Standing Rock Sioux,” NPR.Org, November 1, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/11/01/500268879/more-than-a-million-check-in-on-facebook-to-support-the-standing-rock-sioux.

29. Julia Angwin, “Facebook’s Secret Censorship Rules Protect White Men from Hate Speech but Not Black Children,” ProPublica, June 28, 2017, https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-hate-speech-censorship-internal-documents-algorithms.

30. Twitter, “To Trend or Not to Trend …,” Twitter (blog), December 8, 2010, https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/a/2010/to-trend-or-not-to-trend.html.

Afterword

1. “FCC Chairman Ramps Up Defense of Net Neutrality Repeal,” Reuters, September 21, 2018, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-internet/fcc-chairman-ramps-up-defense-of-net-neutrality-repeal-idUSKCN1M12OO.

2. “Digital Stewards Training,” Allied Media Projects, March 13, 2015, https://www.alliedmedia.org/dctp/digitalstewards.

3. David M. J. Lazer, Matthew A. Baum, Yochai Benkler, Adam J. Berinsky, Kelly M. Greenhill, Filippo Menczer, Miriam J. Metzger, et al., “The Science of Fake News,” Science 359, no. 6380 (March 9, 2018): 1094–1096, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aao2998.

4. Ahmer Arif, Leo Graiden Stewart, and Kate Starbird, “Acting the Part: Examining Information Operations within #BlackLivesMatter Discourse,” in Proceedings of ACM on Human-Computer Interactions, vol. 2—CSCW, article 20 (November 2018): 1–20, 27, https://doi.org/10.1145/3274289; Leo Graiden Stewart, Ahmer Arif, and Kate Starbird, “Examining Trolls and Polarization with a Retweet Network,” Conference Paper at MIS2: Misinformation and Misbehavior Mining on the Web, 2018.

5. Alice E. Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online,” Data and Society Institute, accessed November 15, 2018, https://datasociety.net/output/media-manipulation-and-disinfo-online.

6. Casey Fiesler and Nicholas Proferes, “‘Participant’ Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics,” Social Media + Society 4, no. 1 (2018), https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305118763366.

7. Gary King and Nathaniel Persily, “A New Model for Industry-Academic Partnerships,” working paper, Harvard University, 2018 (last update February 4, 2019), https://gking.harvard.edu/partnerships.

Index

@0hBehave, 45

Abuse, physical. See Violence

@afemal3pr, 45

African American Policy Forum (AAPF), 52, 59

AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), xxvi, 86

Alexander, Marissa, 120

Allen, Devin, 149

Allen, Raymond, 99

#AllMenCan, 8, 11, 154, 158–166, 181–183

central nodes, 160–161

data, 159–160

directive/instructive tweets, 161–166, 181

images of male allies, 162

and LGBTQ community, 166

limitations of, 166, 181

and media outlets, 160–161, 183

types of discourse, 161–162

and #YesAllWomen, 161–162

Allyship, 153–183

and activism, 179–180

#AllMenCan, 8, 11, 154, 158–166, 181–183

and chivalry, 163–164

and counterpublic networks, 181, 197–198

#CrimingWhileWhite, 130, 154, 166–183

defined, 154

efficacy of, 157–158, 183

faux, 156

feminist, 182–183

and instructive tweets, 164

limitations of, 181

male allies, 22, 45, 64, 156–157

performative, 154–155

and racial justice, 156, 174, 179

and solidarity, 154–155, 157–158, 190

#TheEmptyChair, 1, 19–25, 189–190

white allies, 169, 181–182, 190

and white privilege, 169, 175–179

Ally theater, 155

Anderson, Tanisha, 51

@angelicaross, 78

Anonymous, 115, 130

Anti-Black violence, 80, 112, 114, 118–120, 123–124

children, 135

and co-occurring hashtags, 131, 135

and criminal justice system, 180

media coverage, 133

police brutality, 133–134

surveillance, 149

survivors, 144

Anti-immigrant discourse, 155–156

API restrictions, 205–206

Arab Spring, xxx–xxxi

Arif, Ahmer, 202

@Arizona_Abby, 86

Arnold, Tichina, 104, 106

@AttorneyCrump, 109

@AutistLiam, 164

Bailey, Moya, 34, 72–73

#BaltimoreRiots, 139–141

#BaltimoreUprising, 139–142

Banaszczyk, Sonia, 6

Barnett, Joshua Trey, 70

Beal, Frances, 33

#BecauseOfCeCe, 84

Beins, Agatha, 6

Bell, Wesley, 187

Bellamy, Shanique, 47

Benjamin, Ruha, 62–63, 151

@BET, 109, 112–113

@BETNews, 109, 112–113

Between-centrality, xxxvi

Beyoncé, 151

#BillCosby, 19

Bipartisan Report, 130

Black Girl Dangerous, 42, 155

#BlackLivesMatter, 53, 119, 123–124, 131, 174

data, 125

diversity, 149

and Facebook, 186

groups using, 126

network roles, 136

offline activism, 186–187

Russian operatives on, 203

shared images, 124

Black Lives Matter movement, 123, 134, 151–152

celebrity activists, 147, 151

#FreddieGray, 136–142

leadership, 147–148

and mainstream media, 148–149

#PhilandoCastile, 142–145

#TamirRice, 134–136

Black men

as allies, 64

as leaders, 147

and white vigilantes, 115

Black Panther Party, 154

#BlackTransLivesMatter, 55

Black women

Black feminism, 32–35, 39

Black trans women, 91–92, 95

as cultural influencers, 196

and police violence, 51–52

racism and sexism, 33–35

and sexual violence, 25, 39–40, 47

and state-sanctioned violence, 48–52

statistical data, 59

and street harassment, 42–45

and Twitter, 32–33, 63–64, 193

Twitter harassment, 193

victimization of, 38

#BlackWomenMatter, 52

Black Youth Project, 52, 58–59

Bland, Sandra, 52–56, 60, 131, 134

Blasey Ford, Christine, 28

Bolger, Dana, 15

Bonilla, Yarimar, 126

Bouie, Jamelle, 136

Boxer, Barbara, 5

Boyd, Rekia, 49, 60, 99

Boyd, Zhaleh, 62–63

Brand clusters, 170

@BritiniDWrites, 107

Broadcast diffusion, 172

Broadcast networks, 74

Brock, Roslyn, 115

Brokers, 141–142

Brown, Michael, 114, 119, 124–125, 130–131, 177, 187

Browne, Simone, 149, 194

Bumpers, Eleanor, 56

Buolamwini, Joy, 191

Buress, Hannibal, 25

Burke, Tarana, 24, 26, 32, 188

Burress, Plaxico, 177

Bystander intervention, 43

Campbell, Aaron, 99

Campbell, Cassidy Lynn, 78

Campus sexual assault, 8

Capuzza, Jamie, 68

Carrington, Kiwane, 99

Cascades, 172

Castile, Philando, 131, 134, 142–145

@Cecilyk, 170

Celebrity activists, 147, 151

Cell-phone videos, 97–98, 186

Ceron, Ella, 19

@chaddgway, 45

Change.org, 100

Chastain, Jessica, 190

Chatelain, Marcia, 187

@cheeahs, 155

Chemaly, Soraya, 6, 15

Cheney, Dick, 177

Cheng, Tracie, 28

Chivalry, 163–164

Cho, Margaret, 53

Cisgender gay white men, 66

Clark, Meredith, 125

Clay, Paige, 86–87

@cmclymer, 160

Cole, Keyshia, 53

Color of Change, 59

Combahee River Collective, 33

Combs, Diddy, 104, 106–107

Community watch initiatives, 115

Cooper, Anderson, 104, 107–109

Cooper, Anna Julia, 33

Cosby, Bill, xxx, 19, 22, 25

#CosbyMeme, xxix–xxx

Costanza-Chock, Sasha, 185

Couch, Ethan, 177

Counterpublics, xxv–xxvi

and allyship, 197–198

Black women, 32

complexity of, 63

and democracy, xxxiii

and exclusion, 65

and hashtags, xxxviii, 185

and identity politics, 76

LGBTQ, 65–66, 86, 91–92

and mainstream media, 197

and politics, xxvi–xxvii, xxxiv

trans women, 65, 69–70, 91

and white allies, 169

world-making power of, 71

Cox, Laverne, 67–68, 74–75, 80, 84, 87, 89, 91, 93

Crash Override, 192

Crawford, John, 131, 133, 177

Crenshaw, Kimberlé Williams, 34, 49

Criminal justice system, 180

#CrimingWhileWhite, 130, 154, 166–183

cascades/retweet chains, 172

juxtaposition tweets, 177–179

mainstream media, 183

memoir tweets, 175–177

network characteristics, 169–173

personal accountability, 179–180

and racial justice hashtags, 174–175, 179

Crowdsourced elites, xxxvii

Crump, Benjamin, 100, 104, 109–111

Crying Game, The, 67

Cullors, Patrisse, 147–148, 150

Cunningham, Kevin, 100

Cusseaux, Michelle, 51

Dallas Buyers Club, 68

Daniels, Jessie, 192

Daniels, Lee, 188

Danish Girl, The, 69

Data collection, 205–206

Davis, Clayton A., 126

Davis, Jordan, 113, 119

Degree centrality, xxxvi

Delgado, DiDi, xlii, 126–128

@deluxvivens, 40

@Deray, 141

Digital allyship. See Allyship

Discourse analysis, xxxvii–xxxviii

Distributive framing, 126

Domestic violence, 14–15, 17

Dominguez, Matthew, 160

Dorsey, Jack, 191, 193

DuVernay, Ava, 136

#DyingWhileBlack, 166

Edwards, Jordan, 134

Elzie, Johnetta, 128, 141, 198

Emanuel African Methodist Church shooting, 55

#EmmettTill, 119

Employee Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), 67

Employment discrimination, 67

@Enew82, 117

Equitable Internet Initiative, 202

#EricGarner, 130–133

Facebook, 143, 186, 193–195

Fader, Lainna, 19

Farley, Clair, 83

Far-right extremists, 203–204

#FastTailedGirls, 32–33, 35–42, 188

mainstream coverage, 39

origin of, 38

popularity, 35–36

Feminism

Black feminism, 32–35, 39

Hood Feminism, 35

mainstream/white, 31–32

online discourse, 6

trans feminism, 90–91

#Feminism, 5

@feministabulous, 17, 160

@FeministaJones, 39, 41–43, 45, 47

Feminist allyship, 182–183

@feministculture, 161

Feminist movement of 1960s, xxvi

Feminist Twitter, 2–3, 15

Ferguson, 187

#Ferguson, 125–126, 128–129

#FergusonIsEverywhere, 124

Fincher, Leta Hong, 28

#FireGeorgeWill, 11

Fischer, Mia, 86

Fleming, J. L., xxvi

Florini, Sarah, 81

Ford, Ezell, 177

“Fox & Friends,” 13

@FoxNews, 140

#FreddieGray, 136–142

Free Cece!, 87

#FreeCeCe, 79, 84–87

Freelon, Deen, 125, 205

French, Antonio, 128

Frey, Shelly, 58

Fulton, Sybrina, 104

Gaines, Korryn, 134

Gamergate, 192, 203

Garner, Eric, 114, 119, 130–131, 166, 177

Garza, Alicia, 94, 123, 147, 150

Gay and trans panic defense, 67

Gendered violence, 1–2

Gender inequality, 7, 182

Gender justice, 187

Gender pay gap, 190

Gender Proud, 81

@georgewill, 10–11

Gervasi, Alex, 143

@gildedspine, 5

Gillespie, Tarelton, 191

Gillette commercial, 188

#GirlsLikeUs, 22, 70–95, 189

celebrating trans accomplishments, 81–83

community-building, 78, 90, 93

co-occurring hashtags, 83–86, 89–90

data and popularity, 74

#FreeCeCe, 79, 84–87

intersectional activism, 81

and mainstream media, 91–92

network characteristics, 74–76

#RedefiningRealness, 84, 87–88

trans advocacy, 78–81, 86

#TransIsBeautiful, 84, 89

uses of, 77–78

Glenn, Pia, 22

Goel, Sharad, 172

Golden, Jamie Nesbitt, xli, 32, 35–37, 188

Gomez-Preston, Reagan, 14, 40

Gooden, Beverly, 14

#GoogleWalkout, 187

@GradientLair, 39

Graham, Ramarley, 99

Grant, Oscar, 97–98, 119, 131

Gray, Freddie, 131, 133, 136–142

Grio, The, 47

Gutiérrez, Jennicet, 66

Hall, Mya, 52, 58

Happy Birthday Marsha!, 69

Hashtag activism, xxviii, xxxii–xxxiii

central users, 198

characteristics of, 195–200

and net neutrality, 201–202

as networked activity, xxxv

Hashtags, xxv, xxviii–xxxii. See also Networks; Twitter

and allyship, 64, 183

co-occurring, 83–86, 89–90, 119–121, 131, 135

and counterpublics, xxxviii, 185

cultural repercussions, 27–29

and democratic participation, xxx–xxxi

hashtagged syllabi, 187

and historical events/persons, 198–199

and mainstream media, 186

and offline solidarity, 190

racial and gender justice, 7, 174–175, 179

as schemas, 199

Hauser, Emily, 22

#HeForShe, 182

heinz, matthew, 90

Hello Beautiful, 47

“Hell You Talmbout,” 56

Henson, Taraji P., 104, 106

“Her Dream Deferred,” 49

#HerDreamDeferred, 49

Her Story, 93, 189

Hill, Anita, 28

Historical memory, 56, 198–199

Hollaback!, 3

Holtzclam, Daniel, 51

Hood Feminism, 35

@HoodFeminism, 39

Huffman, Felicity, 68

Humanities critical theory, xxxvii

Hundley, Heather, 90

#ICantBreathe, 130–131, 166

Identity politics, 33–34, 70, 76

#IfIDieInPoliceCustody, 55

#IfTheyGunnedMeDown, 129

Incarceration, 80, 85, 87

Ince, Jelani, 126

Incel groups, 4

Intersectionality, 49

politics of, 32, 34–35, 40

responses to, 199

and trans advocacy, 80–81

Intimate partner violence, 17

Invisible No More, 2

#IStandWithPP, xxix

@itsgabrielleu, 109

#IveDoneThat, 157

#IWillChange, 157

Jackson, Sarah, 6

James, Lebron, 102

@jbouie, 136

@JeffWeinerOS, 109

Jenner, Caitlyn, 67, 74

@JennMJackson, 40

@JennyVSmile, 61

Johnson, Dorian, 124

Johnson, Lavena, 60

Johnson, Marsha P., 69

Jones, Aiyana, 99

Jones, Alex, 193

Jones, Rashida, 39

@juddlegum, 17

Juris, Jeffrey, 194

#JusticeForTrayvon, 79, 119

Kaepernick, Colin, 151

Kardashian, Kim, 193

@Karnythia, 136

Kavanaugh, Brett, 28–29

#KavaNope, 29

Kendall, Mikki, 32, 35–36, 38, 136, 188

Kimmel, Michael, 28

King, Rodney, 98

King, Shaun, 136, 143, 147

Klabusich, Katie, 11, 13

@KnowYourIX, 15

Komen Foundation, xxix

Lady Gaga, 35

Lauren, Genie, 102–103, 198, 203

Lawrence, Jennifer, 161

Legum, Judd, 14

Lemieux, Jamilah, 41

Leto, Jared, 68

Lewis, Rebecca, 192

LGBTQ counterpublics, 65–66

and Black trans women, 91–92

and trans advocacy, 86

Lion, Marley, 117

Lorenz, Taylor, 157

Lyles, Charlena, 134

Lynching, xxv–xxvi, 123

Maher, Bill, 106

Mainstream media

and anti-Black violence, 133

and Black Lives Matter movement, 148–149

and far-right extremists, 203–204

and racial and gender justice hashtags, 186, 197

Male allyship, 22, 64, 156–157

Male entitlement, 45

@MamaBKrayy, 144

Mann, Kate, 2

Manning, Chelsea, 67

“Mapping the Margins,” 34

Maree, Daniel, 101

#MarissaAlexander, 120

Martin, Abby, 119

Martin, Roland, 120

Martin, Trayvon, 79, 99–120, 131

Marwick, Alice, 192

Matamoros-Fernández, Ariadna, 192

@Matt_Dominguez, 160–161

Maxwell, Zerlina, 11

McCulloch, Bob, 187

McDonald, Audra, 53

McDonald, CeCe, 71, 79, 84–87, 91

McGorry, Matt, 151

McIlwain, Charlton D., 125

McKenna, Natasha, 58

McKenzie, Mia, 42, 155

McKesson, DeRay, 128, 141

McSpadden, Lezley, 187

Mediated discourse, xxxii–xxxiii

@Meeeech_L, 75–76

Mehserle, Johannes, 97–99

Melissa Harris Perry Show, 80

Memorialization, 47

Men as allies, 22, 45, 64, 156–157

Mentions (Twitter), xxxvi

Messina, Chris, xxviii

#MeToo, 1, 24–28, 32, 48, 187

as activist campaign, 24

cross-identity solidarity, 26

and Gillette commercial, 188

and male allies, 157

media and academic attention, 26

and #SayHerName, 55

#MeToo moment, 27

@MichaelSkolnik, 160

Micheaux, Michonne, 35

@MikeMooseBC, 120

Milano, Alyssa, 24–26, 32

Million Hoodie March, 101

Minstrel accounts, 193

Misogynoir, 34–35, 189

Misogyny, 7

Mitchell, Tiffany, 124

Mock, Janet, xlii, 22, 70–75, 78–81, 84–85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 189

Monáe, Janelle, 56, 101

Monet, Aja, 58

#MoreAndAgain, 198

#MuteRKelly, 41, 189

NAACP, 115–116

NARAL Pro-Choice America, 59

National Rifle Association (NRA), 143–144

NatStar, 116

#Nerdland, 80

Net neutrality, 201–202

@Nettaaaaaaaa, 141, 198

Networks. See also Hashtags

and allyship, 181, 197–198

average distance between members, 75

brand clusters, 170

broadcast, 74

distributive framing, 126

and mainstream media, 197

and offline activism, 185–186

and social media infrastructure, 143

stokers and brokers, 141–142

tweets as, xxxv–xxxvii

weaponization of, 202–204

Network science, xxxv

Never Before, 189

#NeverForget, 55

New Jersey 7, 52

Newsome, Bree, 19

Newsome, Hawk, 147

NewsOne Now, 47

New York Magazine, 19

Noble, Safiya, 191

#NoDAPL, 195

#NoMore, 17

@NOMOREorg, 15

North Carolina bathroom bill, 94

#NotAllMen, 5–6, 158, 162

#NotMyStonewall, 69

#NRA2DOJ, 145

#NYPD, xxix

Obama, Barack, 66, 113

Occupy movement, xxxi

Offline activism, 185–187, 190

@OITNB, 80

Older, Daniel José, 14

Oliveira, Maria de Fatima, xxxvii

106 & Park, 116

Online violence, 2

Orange Is the New Black, 67, 80

#OscarGrant, 99, 119

Palmer, Janay, 13

@_____PantheR, 45

Papacharissi, Zizi, xxxvii

Parody accounts, 105, 110

Pelosi, Nancy, 5

Performative allyship, 154–155

#PhilandoCastile, 142–145

Physical abuse. See Violence

@PiaGlenn, 43

Pinder, Demont, 145

Plank, Elizabeth, 158, 160, 182

Planned Parenthood, xxix, 160

Platformed racism, 192

@PoderonThat, 107

Poe, Tef, 128

Poland, Bailey, 2

Police brutality, 49–52, 131, 133–134, 144

PolicyMic, 160

Politics

and counterpublics, xxvi–xxvii, xxxiv

and exclusion, xxxiii–xxxiv

identity, 33–34, 70, 76

of intersectionality, 32, 34–35, 40

Pose, 189

Pound sign (#), xxviii. See also Hashtags

Powell, Kashif Jerome, 151

@PPact, 160

Presidential election of 2016, 202–203

Prison reform, 80

Quinn, Zoe, 192

Racial justice, 99–103, 156

absence of, 118–119

and allyship, 156, 174, 179

hashtags, 7, 174–175, 179, 186, 197

and Twitter, 99, 103

Racism. See also #BlackLivesMatter

and Black women, 33–35

platformed, 192

racial violence, 108, 129–130

and Twitter, 192–193

Ramsay, Stephen, xxxvii

Ramsey, Ora, 130

Ransby, Barbara, 148

#Rape, 11

#RapeCulture, 5, 11

Rape victims, 20–21

Rapper 9th Wonder, 174

Rawson, K. J., 69

@RealFerrellWill, 105

@realWillSmith, 110

Redefining Realness, 87, 89

#RedefiningRealness, 84, 87–88, 91, 189

Redmayne, Eddie, 69

Red Record, The, 123

Research ethics, 204–208

Retweeting, xxxvi, 170–172

Reynolds, Diamond, 144

Rhianna, 116

Rice, Ray, 13, 17

Rice, Tamir, 114, 119, 131, 133–136

#RiceBunny, 28

Richie, Beth, 17

Ritchie, Andrea, 2, 49

R. Kelly, 35, 41, 188–189

Roach, Maria, 102

Rocero, Geena, 81

Rodger, Elliot, 4, 158

Rodriguez, J. Scott, 90

Rogan, Seth, 193

Rojas, Ana Clarissa, 2

Rojas, Fabio, 126

Rosa, Jonathan, 126

Ross, Angelica, 83, 93

Ross, Jason, xliii, 166–168, 182

#RuinABlackGirlsMonday, 35

@rzimmermanjr, 109

Safe Horizon, 15

Safety pins, 155–156

Sanchez, Deshawnda, 68

Sanders, Bernie, 55

#SandraBland, 53

@sassycrass, 5

#SayHerName, 33, 48–63

contributing organizations, 59

data and popularity, 53

and historical memory, 56

informational tweets, 59

media participation, 61–62

memorialization, 61

and #MeToo, 55

and state violence, 51–52, 61

and trans victims, 67–68

women of color, 56–58

Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Woman, 52

Schwyzer, Hugo, 32

Scott, Walter, 131, 133

#SeanBell, 119

Sexism, 33–35

Sexual violence, 2

and Black women, 25, 39–40, 47

on college campuses, 8

women’s accounts of, 20–21

@SirPatStew, 161

Skolnik, Michael, 160

Slogans, activist, 6

Smith, Jamil, 22

Social justice, 153–154

Social media, xxvii

and Black Americans, 33

content regulations, 190–191

racist and sexist ideas on, 192

and research data, 205–206

surveillance, 194

victim blaming on, 2

weaponization of, 202–204

Solidarity, 154–155, 157–158, 190. See also Allyship

#SolidarityIsForWhiteWomen, 32, 39

SO Popular!, 189

@Soulfulbrotha, 45

Spencer, Leland G., 65

Spencer, Octavia, 190

Sports celebrities, 151

Squires, Catherine, 65

Standing Rock protest, 195

#StandWithStandingRock, 195

Starbird, Kate, 202

State legislation, 94

State-sanctioned violence, 48–52, 61

Sterling, Alton, 134, 143

Stewart, Leo, 202

Stewart, Patrick, 155, 161

Stokers, 141

Stonewall, 69

#StopKavanaugh, 29, 187

Street harassment, 42–45

#StreetHarassment, 43

Surveillance, 149, 194–195

Surviving R. Kelly, 188

#SurvivingRKelly, 189

#SurvivorPrivilege, 1, 8–13

and mainstream media critiques, 11–13

popularity of, 10

Sutton, Martinez, 49

Swan, Bishop Talbert, 130

Talackova, Jenna, 71

Tambor, Jeffrey, 69

#TamirRice, 134–136

Taylor, Goldie, 128

#TheEmptyChair, 1, 19–25, 189–190

cross-identity solidarity, 26

data and popularity, 20

rape victims, 20–21

Think Progress, 15

Thomas, Clarence, 28

Till, Emmett, 56

Time cover, 149–150

#TimesUp, 26, 190

Tometi, Opal, 147, 150

Tomlinson, Patrick S., 144

Tourmaline, 69

Transamerica, 68

#TransBookDrive, 89

Transgender Communication Studies, 65

#TransIsBeautiful, 84, 89, 91

Trans March, 79

Transparent, 69

#TransRevolution, 81

Trans Tech Social, 83

Trans women. See also #GirlsLikeUs

Black, 91–92, 95

of color, 65, 189

entertainment advocacy, 189

identities, 70

incarceration, 85, 87

Trans women (cont.)

marginalization of, 66

online advocacy, 65, 69–70

representation of, 66–69

and state law, 94

trans feminism, 90–91

and violence, 68

#Trayvoning, 102, 190

#TrayvonMartin, 103–121

co-occurring hashtags, 119–121

data, 103, 113–114

dissenting narratives, 117

parody accounts, 105, 110

posttrial network, 113–117

precharges network, 104–109

racial injustice, 118–119

role of celebrities, 107, 116

trial network, 109–113

@Trudy, 39

Trump administration, 199–200

@TRUPATSFAN75, 173

Tufekci, Zeynep, xxx

Twitter, xxv, xxvii–xxviii. See also Hashtags

access to, xxx

African American employees, 192–193

algorithm preferences, 195–196

allies on, 153–154

bias and harassment on, 192–193

and Black women, 32–33, 63–64, 193

content curation, 191

diffusion patterns, 172

directive/instructive tweets, 161–166

and Facebook, 143

Feminist Twitter, 2–3, 15

and Ferguson, 128

in-degree/out-degree metric, 173

and marginalized groups, xxxviii

minstrel accounts, 193

parody accounts, 105, 110

public nature of, 93

and racial justice, 99, 103

research ethics, 204–208

retweets/mentions, xxxvi, 170–172

shared images, 124

and social change, 185

speed of communication, xxix

storytelling, 27, 123

and street demonstrations, 98–99

and trans women, 70

and TV/film content, 186

tweets as networks, xxxv–xxxvii

and women of color, 56–58, 70

TxtMob, xxvii

Union, Gabrielle, 104, 106, 109–110

Victim blaming, 13, 15, 17

Victimization, 1–2

Black women, 38

rape, 20–21

trans women, 68

Videos, cell-phone, 97–98

Violence. See also Anti-Black violence; Sexual violence

domestic, 14–15, 17

gendered, 1–2

online, 2

police, 49–52, 131, 133–134, 144

racial, 108, 129–130

state-sanctioned, 48–50, 61

and trans women, 68

Viral diffusion, 172

Voice from the South, A, 33

Wahlberg, Mark, 177

Wanjuki, Wagatwe, xli, 4, 8–11

Warner, Michael, 71

“War on women,” 5

@washingtonpost, 10–11

Watson, Emma, 182

#WeGotYouSis, 43

Weiner, Jeff, 109–110, 112

Weinstein, Harvey, 24–25, 27–28

Wells, Ida B., xxv–xxvi, 123

@WeLoveTrayvon, 105

@WendyRMonkey, 145

#WeNeedFeminism, 161

West, Kim Kardashian, 53

White, Elon James, 19–26, 189–190

White actresses, 190

White allies, 169, 181–182, 190

White privilege, 169, 175–179

#WhyIStayed, 1, 13–18

domestic violence, 14–15, 17

intimate partner violence, 17

popularity and data, 14

Will, George, 8–11

Williams, Jessie, 53

Wilson, Darren, 124–125, 130, 187

Women. See also Black women; Trans women

and men’s entitlement, 4

and public office, 187

sexual assault accounts, 20–21

and violence, 1–2

Women of color, 31–32

and #SayHerName, 52

and street harassment, 42–45

trans, 65, 189

Twitter harassment, 193

@WomensMarch, 145

@xoCAMILLAxo, 75–76

XXXTentacion, 48

#YesAllWhiteWomen, 7–8, 31–32, 40

#YesAllWomen, 1–3, 5–8, 31, 43, 158

and #AllMenCan, 161–162

and cultural misogyny, 7

duration of tweets, 5

ideological effects of, 6–7

and #NotAllMen, 5–6

#YesOn3, 94

#YouOKSis, 33, 40, 42–48

male allies on, 45

media attention, 47–48

memorialization, 47

popularity, 42–43

street harassment, 42–45

@YourAnonNews, 115

YouTube

Grant videos, 186

Rodger videos, 4

Zendaya, 131

Zimmerman, George, 79, 99–100, 102–104, 106, 108–115, 118–120, 123

Zimmerman, Robert, 109–112

Table of Contents

Cover

Contents

Foreword by Genie Lauren

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Making Race and Gender Politics on Twitter

1 Women Tweet on Violence: From #YesAllWomen to #MeToo

2 Visions of Black Feminism: #FastTailedGirls, #YouOKSis, #SayHerName

3 #GirlsLikeUs: Trans Feminist Advocacy and Community Building

4 Racial Violence and Racial Profiling: From #OscarGrant to #TrayvonMartin

5 From #Ferguson to #FalconHeights: The Networked Case for Black Lives

6 The Utility of Digital Allyship: #AllMenCan and #CrimingWhileWhite

Conclusion: #HashtagActivism: Here to Stay

Afterword: Ethics, Backlash, and Access in Twitter Research

Notes

Index