We cannot tweet our way out of fascism
Tags: Influencers, Activism, Politics, Social Media

Lately a lot of people have taken to calling themselves social media influencers (different from the popular idea of beauty, fashion, lifestyle, travel vloggers who are the original “influencers”). These influencers post informative twitter threads, infographics, live videos and keep sharing books and other resources on several issues. These are public accounts of people whose profiles are open to the public and their views can be shared out in the open. There is a popular acceptance among their followers that they are social media influencers whose opinions carry a lot of weight. But can they really be called activists?

For this we need to revisit the very idea of what activism means to us? It has always meant working for an organisation or a collective on specific or all issues among those affected by the same issues to build a resistance against the status quo. Activists are called activists only after there is a general consensus and acceptance among the people that they are part of a continuous struggle for justice for particular or all sections of the society which are oppressed today.

Do people who post their opinions on social media fit that category? Are they part of mass organisations? Are they working on ground building or being a part of grassroot movements which are involved in spreading awareness not only online but also offline? It is generally found that most of them are not involved in mass movements but prefer to be lone wolves who spend their time tweeting, posting, making reels, explainer videos or conduct live sessions on various issues. Is that a problem? Of course not. We should all spend our time talking about whatever is on our mind. But this cannot be the sole focus of our energy simply because it does not challenge the status quo enough. Maybe it helps us get noticed or we get to reach out to five new people with our opinions but generally speaking even sustained digital campaigns or twitter storms are merely a one day affair which the ruling classes can forget and move on from. Any form of resistance has to disrupt the normal functioning of the general public for them to take notice and has to take form in rallies, human chains, solidarity meetings, reading circles, protest demonstrations and the famous blockade/chakka jam model used in Shaheen Bagh or the farmer protests now.

I do not want to undermine the power of social media because it would be unfair to say that the ruling classes do not notice at all. There is a reason people like Prashant Kanojia are arrested in the country for merely tweeting, there are contempt proceedings initiated for web based cartoons against Sanitary Panels and tweets by Kunal Kamra. There has been a sustained effort by the state to curb internet freedoms in the form of censorship, shadow bans, hiding specific hashtags, posts, tweets, internet shutdowns, website blocks as is seen in Kashmir and other proposals targeting social media platforms. The government even registered UAPA charges against websites for merely organising petition drives for the draft EIA rules, which the government itself was seeking objections to. But the websites were targeted because it appealed to the public in innovative ways to democratically register their objections on…surprise…the government website itself!

Importance of social media notwithstanding, it is important that we make the distinction between using social media platforms as a tool for mobilization and using it as a primary source of “activism”, if one can call it that. Using it as a tool to amplify protests, fundraisers, and share crucial information about organisations is great as news spreads like a wildfire on these platforms with several accounts sharing the information within minutes of it being released in public domain. It is also a great place to vent your opinions. As someone with a public profile on Instagram, I am quite active there and I routinely use it to share my opinions there. But I do it with full awareness that it will circulate among people who are already well aware of what I am talking about or are more or less progressive.

This is why any feedback or activity on social media must not be taken at face value. Having a huge amount of followers, having a lot of people respond to your stories or comment on your posts might or might not mean that you have reached out to a lot of people because social media works in a way that our content is consumed by like minded people who also consume the same stuff we consume. So the feedback mechanism reinforces our own beliefs and the algorithms are built in such a way that spending more time there means more feedback and more engagement. All of this gives us the impression that a lot of people are receiving our information and we are able to make a significant dent in the space occupied by the rightf. The masses are not all urban English speaking elite, who form the majority of the followers of influencers on these platforms. We need to keep in mind that both the ruling party and these social media apps are powerful because of the money involved. The ruling party has dedicated armies of accounts with big follower size who continuously churn out content to constantly peddle their bigotry. All these people are paid. All of them get paid to spend their time on the internet, unlike us who use it in our free time when we are not busy working our butt off for our employers. They are paid to abuse, troll, threaten others who also try to use this medium and suck out the energy from people who wish to share their progressive ideas on the internet, which we all must. But the amount of time we spend must be something that we need to figure out as individuals and as members of organisations.

Another factor is that these apps are owned by corporates which will not tolerate any threat to their own power. This is why accounts get suspended and blocked, why abuses from bigots go unchecked. Anything that challenges their position and relationship with the government in power will not go unchecked. Not to the mention the algorithms which limit reach of people occasionally to make sure their opinions are not visible on news feeds of their followers.

Should we stop using social media completely? Absolutely not. Social media has managed to break the hegemony of news publications and those who get to write and get published there. Now everyone has a voice and everyone can share their opinion. It does affect popular discourse because conversations had on social media are also discussed offline. It has democratised and found newer modes of expression which are friendly towards people with disabilities, people from marginalised castes, communities and has broken the barriers of class, especially with apps like TikTok which completely revolutionised the idea of what popular content can be.

There is however, no denying that social media can be an extremely toxic space. Not just because of bots and right wing hate factories, but also because as Mark Fisher puts it in Capitalist Realism, there is a constant fear that we are being watched. Even among the progressive circles, there is continued surveillance over what other people write. Critical engagement is always necessary and horrible opinions which call for genocide, issuing sexual assault threats, condoning the oppression of an entire community must not go unchecked. But any and every tiny mistake made by people, who are all work in progress is scrutinized, torn apart and a bullying campaign is launched. The screenshot generation wastes no time launching a personal attack on any person who shares something that needs to be critically engaged with. Instead of giving the person a chance to grow, the person is not even given a chance to apologise, but is excommunicated from the progressive circles online. This is taxing for a lot of people because there is always someone who “What abouts” in the comments section of a post. We are constantly scared that we will say something that we might be never forgiven for. Perhaps the intention is never to grow because otherwise the person who has erred would be given a chance to correct themselves. The moralism on social media especially because of the obvious privilege that most people who become popular on social media come from is tiring. It drains people out because most time is spent clarifying, responding, engaging and correcting.

Most people here operate out of guilt or suspicion. Guilt that they have privilege and they must constantly acknowledge it constantly. But no one wants to chart out a roadmap to annihilate these privileges. What after one shares a poster saying “Smash Brahminical Patriarchy”? Are they prepared to part with the privileges so as to change the material reality of the people? Are people ready to put in the work required to create an equal society or are they comfortable knowing that before sleeping they shared a poster talking about why Dalit Lives Matter? Suspicion because everyone is capable of being “problematic”, which is true, we are all flawed and we are all capable of being horrible human beings. But if to err is human, then we must give each other the space to grow. What we do by suspecting the trust of people who wish to stand in solidarity with us is that we think they are incapable of changing. Then what even is the point of trying to change the world if we have already decided that people won’t?

Mark Fisher calls this the ‘Vampire Castle’ and the following lines aptly summarise what I feel about progressive users on the internet today:

“It is driven by a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn, an academic-pedant’s desire to be the first to be seen to spot a mistake, and a hipster’s desire to be one of the in-crowd. The danger in attacking the Vampires’ Castle is that it can look as if – and it will do everything it can to reinforce this thought – that one is also attacking the struggles against racism, sexism, heterosexism. But, far from being the only legitimate expression of such struggles, the Vampires’ Castle is best understood as a bourgeois-liberal perversion and appropriation of the energy of these movements.”

Our obsession with social media is important to analyse because constantly being active online is overwhelming, not only because of the sheer volume of information that is thrown our way, but also because it leaves us with little time to organise and agitate. Twitter storms and live sessions are parts of the campaign for social justice, they can never be the primary modes of changing this world. That still requires assembling physically and reaching out to people who are not from the same circles of people online. We cannot get lost in individual reform online, it is possible to change people with sustained conversations on personal forums like messaging apps not social media platforms. Jodi Dean in the book Comrade and in this Jacobin article says that “the discipline of collective work on behalf of a shared goal has been replaced by an individualist rhetoric of comfort and self-care.” We are all comfortable knowing we did something, but what does that something amount to? How do we break this action-reaction loop that has been built as a response to concerted attacks on the freedoms and rights of the people? We must analyse whether abusing each other on social media and not giving people the space to correct themselves is hampering our movement and hurting chances of building solidarities.

It is high time we stop giving social media the attention it doesn’t deserve and doing Capital’s work for it by not becoming parts of mass organisations, collectives where resistance is built. This will reduce our mistrust, give us a positive roadmap for using our privilege for the right things, make us feel less lonely and also give us the necessary “discipline, joy, enthusiasm and courage”, four guiding principles. of a comrade in Jodi Dean’s words to build a formidable movement to end fascism. Until then, do share the change.org petition or participate in that comment war, but do so with the awareness that it might amount to nothing.