While our previous chapters examined the ways in which social media can empower historically disenfranchised groups, racial minorities, and affective networked publics, we now look at the ways in which social media conversations about race turn politically charged and, in many cases, ugly; we will review as well how social justice groups can counteract some of these narratives. A Pew Research Center study by Monica Anderson showed that social media is an important venue for news and political information, while focusing national attention on racially involved issues.

In fact, two of the most used hashtags around social causes in Twitter history focus on race and criminal justice: #Ferguson and #BlackLivesMatter . . . and key news events . . . often serve as a catalyst for social media conversations about race.1

Perhaps less understood, though, is the effective quality of this discourse, and its connection to popular politics, especially when Twitter trolls and social media mobs go on the attack.

Social media mobbing occurs when groups of people converge on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media platforms around an issue that they are angry about, or a person that offends them. The mob relentlessly trolls that person or dominates discussion of the issue with a barrage of insults, arguments, and memes. Some of the more notable targets of social media mobbing have been Black women, including Saturday Night Live comedian Leslie Jones, Olympian Gabby Douglas, and the mother of a young boy who fell into a gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo.2

This calls into question the quality of public discourse taking place in certain venues on social media. Since there are no universally accepted community standards online, conversations taking place via social media can occasionally escalate into a mob-like atmosphere in which the more even-tempered speakers are heckled off the platform in a rabble of highly offensive posts, including some that are explicitly racist. For instance, Leslie Jones, who used Twitter to speak out against sexism and racism, eventually deleted her account under the crushing emotional strain of the social media mob that was trolling her with crude attacks about her appearance.3

In another case, the Cincinnati Zoo asked social media users to stop posting memes about Harambe, the silverback gorilla that was put down in order to save the life of the child who fell into the exhibit, because it was hurtful to their staff. Nevertheless, the Zoo’s call for self-restraint only ignited the mob further, which in turn overwhelmed their social media feed with even more posts and memes involving images and mentions of Harambe. As a result, the Zoo deactivated its Twitter account to escape the disquiet.4

A concern present in all of these cases is that the voices in favor of more respectful public dialogue on social media may tend to spiral into silence for fear of being mobbed.5 As such, social media outlets should consider more carefully how they want to define and enforce community standards for their own platform. In the Leslie Jones case, Twitter eventually banned the mob leader from using its service. But that is just one high-profile incident. More generally across social media platforms, action against mobbing occurs on a case-by-case basis. At the very least, the application of policies seems inconsistent, and it is usually up to the target of offensive posts to initiate the complaint.

In some cases an organized social justice group can help balance out the discourse, such as when @BlackLivesCincy and @theIRATE8 quickly mobilized on social media under the hashtags #SamDuBose and #JusticeForSamDuBose to challenge the framing of DuBose’s shooting as justified and were able to help balance public understanding about the meaning and implications of the slaying (see The Irate 8’s website, which includes a timeline of events).

Brittany Bibb, one of the founders of the Irate 8 said that initially the group “was never meant to be an organization,” but was instead “responding to how people reacted” in the aftermath of the DuBose shooting.6 Most notably, in its tweets and other social media posts about DuBose, the Irate 8 invoked the #HottestCollegeInAmerica hashtag that was part of the University of Cincinnati’s branding and marketing campaign at the time. “We hijacked the HottestCollegeInAmerica as the first thing we ever did,” Bibb said.7 The #HottestCollegeInAmerica hashtag was popularized by its social media–savvy president at the time, Dr. Santa Ono, and was used by the university’s athletics programs, student program, academic units, and others on campus to promote their individual successes by getting into the trending Twitter stream.

At first, the Irate 8 did not even have a Twitter account and relied on individual members coordinating posts through their personal accounts. Instead, #theIrate8 was primarily a hashtag, and its users used it together with the #HottestCollegeInAmerica hashtag in a single post, as a strategy to get hits for their messages within the more popular Twitter stream that #HottestCollegeInAmerica provided. “The hijacking of HottestCollegeInAmerica was definitely on purpose,” said Bibb, who noted that the group often tagged UC President Ono in some of their tweets too. Bibb added: “using that hashtag [#HottestCollegeInAmerica] . . . wherever you look, if you’re looking for this famous college president and his social media presence, you’re going to find us.”8 Later, the Irate 8 did create its own Twitter account, Bibb explained, to better coordinate group members to like, make comments, and retweet specific posts to get more engagements on Twitter.9

However, when there appears to be no mobilized social justice effort, the results can be far different. For instance, there was an uneven display of empathy on social media toward Black and white parents of children involved in tragic incidents during family outings in 2016. A Black family was visiting the Cincinnati Zoo on May 28, 2016, when their three-year-old son climbed over a barrier and fell into a gorilla exhibit, encountering a 450-pound silverback named Harambe. Despite being dragged around, the child was not seriously injured, as zoo staff shot and killed the gorilla within minutes.10

Afterwards, the child’s mother was widely vilified in a barrage of memes and tweets tagged #JusticeForHarambe for not responsibly looking after her child.11 An online petition quickly collected a half-million signatures asking that the mother “be held accountable for her lack of supervision and negligence” and further requested a criminal investigation as to whether this was “reflective of the child’s home situation.” There was widespread outrage that a gorilla was killed due to an “idiot mom” and speculation that she was “shopping for lawyers and celebrating her good fortune.” One of the more popular memes pictured Harambe with the caption: “Why did they shoot me? I was doing a better job watching that lady’s kid than she was.” Rallying under the #JusticeForHarambe hashtag a stream of social media posts seemed to mock the slogans invoked in recent social justice movements after Black males were slain by white police officers (e.g., #JusticeForSamDebose, #Justice4Dontre, #JusticeForTamirRice, and #JusticeForJohnCrawford).

In contrast, similar incidents involving white families did not provoke the same kind of vitriol on social media. In the latest instance, tagged #DisneyGatorAttack, a two-year-old boy was killed by an alligator at a Disney resort on June 14 while he splashed around by himself in a shallow lagoon a short distance away from his parents.12

There are some important distinctions (besides race) that would account for the more tempered reactions on social media in the latter case. The young child could not be saved, and the parents were suffering unimaginable anguish. Also, the Disney gator attack happened just days after the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history at the time, which dominated the national news cycle, as well as social media activity.13

Another accident happened at the Cleveland Zoo in 2015 when a white mother dropped her child while dangling him over a cheetah exhibit.14 The boy suffered a broken leg and the mother received probation as a result of the incident. However, there was no widespread campaign on social media to further humiliate the mother, which is in stark contrast to what happened to the Black mother at the Cincinnati Zoo.

While it may be difficult to quantify the disparity in social media reactions between these cases, it is not impossible to see the difference. Whether intentional or not, posters often seem to jump to conclusions based on minimal information contained in a meme or tweet and may further perpetuate insidious forms of racism with hasty likes, shares, and retweets.

While trolls and mean tweets certainly add to the quantity of dialogue taking place on social media, we may at the same time question the quality of this form of public discourse. Ideally, in a society that values free expression, online networks should be a platform for opposing thoughts and viewpoints in a digital marketplace of ideas, without devolving to the communicative equivalent of throwing rocks at each other. Rather, as Brett Johnson has suggested, “digital communication intermediaries like Facebook or Twitter should publish community standards that commit to protecting freedom of expression on their platforms in all but a few clear exceptions,” such as threats of violence, pornography, or other criminal content.15 Too often, online hecklers do not face their opponents, person-to-person, but manage to silence them through threats and intimidation. They can be online mobs “who petition Facebook to remove speech with which they disagree” or take to Twitter and other outlets “to intimidate others who speak up for a cause.”16

The value of social media as a potential tool for public discourse is that individuals and groups can send their message to a large number of other individuals and groups that are both intended (and not intended) to receive the message, thus contributing to the marketplace of ideas. Addressing this point, Johnson warns that information intermediaries have to be careful to not “allow norm policing and trolling to be amplified to such an extent that it chills potentially valuable speech.”17

There is already evidence that a small amount of the content online is receiving a large amount of attention. On the internet, audience “attention is clustered around a select few content options, followed by a long tail, in which the remaining multitude of content options each attract very small audiences that in the aggregate can exceed the audience for the ‘hits.’”18 As Johnson explained, “this difference in scale is problematic for public discourse,” as the further one’s speech is down the long tail, the smaller the marketplace for one’s ideas.19

Given the rise of Twitter trolls and the ability of some groups to shout down other more reasoned voices in sensitive questions about race, we might also question who is driving traditional political conversations, especially during election cycles. We examine this particular issue using Twitter activity during the U.S. presidential election cycle in 2016, which was also a high point for Twitter-trolling and cyber-bullying in the Harambe and Leslie Jones cases discussed previously. We also wonder what groups, other than social justice advocates, might employ the hashtag hijacking strategies described by Bibb.