Social media platforms resurrect pluralist politics
Summer was mired in events that can only be described as plainly horrific. In all different corners of the world, young people logged onto their social media accounts to find themselves drowning in posts describing events one might hardly believe were real. Facebook helpfully marked friends traveling in Europe as “safe,” like the world had become some Orwellian hell. Millennials of all creeds absentmindedly worried for friends living near cities burdened by tragedy. Another horrific shooting (this time in downtown Orlando) reignited a seemingly nationwide loss of faith in humanity.
Despite the distance in both geography, reasoning and ideology between these events, one result was the same: Young people turned to social media platforms to express their shock, sadness and outrage — and it wasn’t the first time. Social media has become the stage where the collective struggles of the many have manifested into movements and organizations. These groups are able to utilize these platforms to freely and frequently present their social and political needs, desires and demands. From this frenzy of hashtags and movements has emerged something both socially convenient and politically necessary — a true pluralism that, in a time as hyper-partisan as our own, may otherwise have been rendered obsolete.
The movement against police violence was one of the first, and to this day most popular, examples of this phenomenon. Video and photo evidence of manslaughter, mistake and murder alike were released into the endless sea of the internet to be reposted by millions — from traffic camera footage that caught the shooting of Michael Brown to Eric Garner’s choking to Alton Sterling’s death this year. From a wave of horrific images was garnered an outrage that, thanks to the fast and public communication allowed by social media, developed into the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter and evolved subsequently into a physical and ideological movement. Protests in St. Louis, Seattle, Los Angeles and others came to fruition from plans originally conceived and organized online.
In the classic nature of political pluralism, the success of #BlackLivesMatter prompted the development of an opposing movement, billed with the hashtag #AllLivesMatter. Keeping with the theory’s core value of balance between non-governmental groups, the new movement sought to support the interests and reputations of city police, rebuking the notion that racially motivated crime was or is a major national issue. Other viewpoints developed afterward in that same fashion, swirling around the mass message that had originally been disseminated: Unarmed citizens are dying in the streets. People of all races, religions, creeds and political affiliations flocked to the online world to offer an answer as to why.
Though what eventually might manifest as a nasty Twitter fight might not possess significant political importance on the surface, the phenomenon itself belies something quite seminal, and perhaps uplifting, to the American political sea. Without social media platforms, these movements may never have been created at all, much less organized by a steady stream of instant, trackable and reliable communication.
The hyper-partisan era of politics in which our country is currently embroiled would not naturally be given to sympathy for grassroots movements. Perhaps petitioning congressmen and small marches in individual cities and towns may have come to fruition, but whether they would have galvanized the same level of support for the cause — or the same breadth of results (from police body cameras to internal investigations of police departments) is highly doubtful. Whether any of these avenues of traditional appeal to the government would have been organized at all is even more dubious. Social media may not be responsible for the presence or necessity of these movements, but it is certainly responsible for their success.