A response to “Turn On, Retweet, Tune Out”

Ten years ago, the term social media didn’t exist. Facebook was founded in 2004. Twitter was a twinkle in someone’s eye. Billions of users weren’t organized into a handful of hubs and advertisers were barely dipping their toes in the water. One could attribute the rapid escalation in social media use to ease of entry but other factors including desire for entertainment or social value, anxiety at being excluded, and the discovery of online “self” all play a role in an individual’s decision to join the masses in any given forum. I’d be surprised if “Solving humanitarian crises” came out on top in the “Reasons why I joined Twitter” survey, but that’s exactly the point: anything is possible. We should expect to be surprised by internet-based outcomes.

Our proclivity for reverse engineering has driven the conversation about social media and invited near-constant conclusions about human nature based on “the evidence.” Free data of any kind is extremely attractive. We’re hungry for knowledge. Sure, seasoned analysts caution that examples and observations aren’t proof and point out that the internet is one massive, on-going, uncontrolled experiment that makes it nearly impossible to a) ascertain what constitutes reliable data, and b) draw substantive conclusions about causality. The primary use for social media statistics is sales and the stakes are low enough for corporations to ignore the warnings and proceed with trial-and-error marketing ploys. Outcomes have thus become “evidence” of something we want to see.

Through social media, we’ve embarked on a new method of activism that involves marketing a humanitarian cause and citing viral chatter as evidence of public interest and support.

Last week’s Foreign Policy column entitled “Turn on, Retweet, Tune Out” is a good example of this approach. In her piece, Lauren Wolfe reiterates a common refrain about the public’s appetite for humanitarian causes. Specifically, the piece marries social media content to “caring,” an assumption that is so prevalent in contemporary dialogue that the inverse is now a foregone conclusion: if an atrocity, law, event, or person isn’t being discussed on social media then people don’t care. The conversation seamlessly flows to second-tier concern. Why don’t people care? (A frazzled data scientist would follow this question with: Who are “people” and what is “caring”?)

It’s easy to trace this culture-wide assumption to a logical starting point. There have been profound social media “successes” that altered the global political landscape. Hashtags and social media posts during the Arab Spring were widely cited as being instrumental in keeping anti-government protestors connected and informed. On the humanitarian front, Wolfe mentions the ongoing kidnappings in Chibok, Nigeria, and the Kony2012 hashtag in her piece. #Kony2012 was a video campaign to bring Ugandan war criminal Joseph Kony to justice. It attracted the attention of millions of Twitter and Facebook users, many who I expect couldn’t pick out Uganda on a world map even today. #BringBackOurGirls refers to the 300 teenaged girls that Boko Haram took from a school four months ago and continue to hold prisoner today. The hashtag circulates on various sites intermittently while the world waits for news out of the region — the pertinent words for the apathy discussion being “world” and “waits.” Social media’s role in generating global concern by disseminating information is undeniable in these instances, but asking why public support dwindles to apathy over time is merely an activist-end lament. Better to ask: After the retweet, what more can geographically distant non-activists do?

The public isn’t paid for their time on these issues. People willingly participate in humanitarian causes they care about by doing the one thing that they’re directed to do, namely share the story to get the word out. And then what? Share again? This terrible thing happened. It happened. It’s happening. It happened. It’s happening. It happened. It’s happening. The chatter itself doesn’t physically walk Kony into a jail cell, discover the hideout of Boko Haram, or stop bombs from falling in Syria, or Gaza, or Iraq, and since those are the immediate goals then remote participants need guidance on what they can do beyond retweeting. Further, there’s a likelihood that the next step will have nothing to do with clicking a link and more to do with writing a check or contacting a representative, neither of which show up in a Twitter feed. Social media content during the Arab Spring frequently revolved around specific actions – announcing protest locations, giving eye-witness accounts of atrocities to share, uncovering the movements of opposing sides, tracking the whereabouts of arrested protestors – but that chatter is silent now. Should we assume those people are apathetic about continued strife in the region because they aren’t discussing it with the same frequency on social media? Absolutely not.

It’s not a given that every humanitarian crisis will capture global attention but many do, because many people care. The wave of public participation can be ridden much farther than it often is simply by giving people continued guidance on steps they can take beyond posting and tweeting. To this end, it’s crucial for journalists and activists to stay in front of a crisis and lead the groundswell of social media users who eventually turn to face the issue. I expect we’ll see more of this pattern as we learn from our successes and failures in real time, but in the meantime it’s incongruous to assume apathy, or exhaustion, in the absence of online chatter. The short answer to sustaining public participation is to find the best leaders for the cause.