Social Media: Creating Productive or Ineffective Conversation?
When I was an A-level student (an indeterminate number of years ago), one of the first things I remember being introduced to in my British Politics course was the idea of activism. At the time, as a white middle-class teenager back before Brexit was even a notion, my understanding of protest and activism was limited to the blurry memories I had of the Iraq war protests, and debating whether to skip school to go to the tuition fees protests. I would like it on the record, your honour, that my own activism and socio-political awareness has increased a lot in the last decade.
Protests, we learned, are a form of indirect action – people using what resources they have to try and influence MPs and the government. Direct action is more along the lines of strikes, sit-ins, disrupting the supply lines; the more radical and/or violent the acts, the more they shake up the system. More genteel forms of activism come in the form of signing petitions, donating to charities, writing to your MP, and (the worst form of all, according to the 2011 textbooks) clicktivism. Clicktivism was the easy way out, the way for middle-class people to make themselves feel good about their social awareness with zero effort. Simply click “share” and add a comment along the lines of “can’t believe this still happens in this day and age”, and be absolved of any guilt for the systemic inequality you partake in.
And boy, oh boy, was clicktivism a thing in the early 2010s. Kony 2012 was the fastest watched video ever on YouTube, sharing the plight of Ugandan children under the rule of Joseph Kony, a warlord and leader of a guerrilla army. It was a viral success, dominating social media and racking up the news article almost as quickly as video views. But then people started to (correctly) question some of the claims. Kony was a violent warlord, estimated to have abducted upwards of 60,000 children. But he hadn’t been in Uganda for at least six years by the time the big-budget video hit the internet, and membership of the LRA (Lords Resistance Army) guerrilla group he led was declining. For virality and cultural impact, Kony 2012 was unmatched, but for actual change and on-the-ground impact, it was almost a precursor to what was to come.
Skip forward ten years, and the face of the internet, social media, and politics is all very different. Helped along significantly by the 45th President of the United States choosing Twitter as his main policy outlet, plus the fact that we’re still essentially in our homes and connecting with the outside world through our screens two years into a pandemic, social media is no longer an optional extra when it comes to politics.
The general understanding of what “politics” means has shifted too. After ten years of Tory rule in the UK, it should be clearer than ever to the vast majority that politics isn’t something abstract that happens in the halls of Parliament. Our education, our healthcare, our jobs and savings, our right to live in a safe place, even our ability to see our friends and family is all politics. And as social media increasingly becomes the forum for public conversations about everything, conversations about politics have become a daily event.
And so, we come to 2022 and the Molly-Mae incident.
Molly-Mae, ex-Love Island contestant and influencer, became creative director of the online clothing store, Pretty Little Thing in 2021. On a podcast last year, Molly-Mae said:
“You’re given one life and it’s down to you what you do with it. … People (are) saying, ‘it’s easy for you to say that because you’ve not grown up in poverty, so for you to sit there and say we all have the same 24 hours in a day is not correct.’ But technically, what I’m saying is correct. … If you want something enough you can achieve it; it just depends on what lengths you want to go to. … And I’ll go to any lengths.”
To interpret Molly-Mae’s words kindly, she has worked hard to make the most of the opportunities given to her, and is proud of the work she put in. To be a little less indulgent and a little more “living in the real world”, Molly-Mae’s statement was about as short-sighted as they come. “Thatcher with a fake tan” is both a truly devastating insult and not entirely wrong. Molly Mae’s apparent belief that success is down to an individual’s attitude and things like generational poverty and systemic barriers can just be out-motivated is not exactly well founded.
Moreover, her wealth and success comes directly off exploitation. The Boohoo Group, PLT’s parent company, has been accused of running sweatshops where garment producers are paid less than £4 an hour (minimum wage in the UK is more than double that), and where conditions were so appalling that they directly contributed to Leicester’s Covid-19 spike in 2020. This is pretty unambiguously bad even before you start to consider the staggering environmental cost of fast fashion.
While Kony 2012 didn’t provide an exact blueprint for how to make a topic the theme of the day, the cycle of outrage, virality, and ultimately little impact is familiar, and we can see it happening again with the fallout from Molly-Mae’s statement.
An event happens (a clip from a podcast in this case) or a news story breaks.
People start to share and interact with posts, and the rapid growth algorithms push the new drama onto everyone’s feeds.
More news outlets pick up the story, people are asked to comment, random Tweets from accounts with a few followers get quoted in eye-catching headlines, and you have a new villain.
The original context of anything said is minimised or removed entirely, and any conversation that does happen is parsed down to black/white good/bad, with no nuance or room for debate.
The all-or-nothing mentality is particularly notable in politically left and liberal spheres. There is a fixation on people seen as leaders or spokespeople meeting an impossible moral and ideological purity and when the chosen one inevitably makes a mistake, they are ostracised, demonised, and often threatened. The idea of cancel culture ruining the lives of rich, male comedians is laughable, but the speed with which opinion can turn against people with any sizeable online platform and the damage that can come with it is appalling.
We can see strokes of the same all-or-nothing response right now. Molly-Mae is, most likely, a perfectly nice 22-year-old. She has probably never kicked a puppy. But she espouses Thatcherite-lite views of a #GirlBoss feminism that is totally un-intersectional and inconsiderate of the reality of life for the majority. She took a contract of more than £500k to join PLT after it became public knowledge that garment manufacturers for the same company were paid poverty wages. She appears to fully embrace the right-wing influencer role of #GirlBoss and #RiseAndGrind copy-and-paste character, showing off their success to their young followers to persuade the next generation that they too can make it big if they just want it enough. The benefit of the doubt required to write off her comments as naïve or simply tone-deaf is huge.
Did she say anything that rich white men haven’t said before, with less vicious attacks in response? Can we justify singling a 22-year-old woman out when hustle culture and late-stage capitalism is pushing the exact same narrative? Well, no.
Influencer culture and the resultant outrage is one part of social media, albeit one that the companies and profit-makers push. Despite being one of the main routes for person-to-person interaction in the last two years, social media is a terrible place to be an actual person. On one side, influencers, capitalist propaganda, MLM schemes (#NotAPyramidScheme). On the other, anonymous accounts threatening, doxing, and touting dangerous misinformation.
There are some good sides to social media. Think of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, or the Hong Kong protests the year before. Think of advice shared on how to deal with the police, on missing people, on how to get Covid tests. But the reality is that social media is not designed for organic interaction and constructive conversations. Our personal lives and all the emotional drama that comes with them are the product that is bought, sold, traded, and exploited. More often than not, the genuine communities and connections that occur via social media platforms are in spite of the platforms’ algorithms, and not because of them. In small doses, social media is a fantastic tool, but it is not the easily accessible open forum we would like to think it is.
Written by Beth Price
Beth is a writer and researcher based in Edinburgh. She is interested in all things cultural, especially when it comes to gender, LGBTQ+ identity, and media. She is half of Breakdown Education, an education platform and community that champions intersectional, diverse, and accessible knowledge networks.
You can find Beth on Twitter and see all of her work here, and you can see Breakdown Education’s first online course here.
Recipes
