Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. Memorial Scholarship

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Civil rights can only be advanced in public spaces; in the dark, they wither and die, and cruelty thrives. This is why racists and other hate groups have historically put so much effort into controlling those public spaces, such as by restricting the rights of blacks and women to vote, or busting unions, or using rioters and even armed forces to break up peaceful protests on campuses and at the capital (see the Hardhat Riots of 1970 for the former, or the Haymarket Riots of 1896).

The publicity of these cruelties and the exposure of this violence was instrumental to ending it. Everything from sharecropping to lynching had been persisting for decades, but because of the lack of public attention and outcry, little momentum was generated to defeat it. In fact it gradually became normalized. It took a high-profile supreme court case (Dred Scott) and a bestselling book (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) to start the Civil War, which was ultimately about the civil rights of African-Americans.

Social media has created the loudest megaphone with the largest audience in history. The biggest camera and the fastest-printing newspaper to record everything. On the surface, one might look at a communication revolution like that and think it would greatly aid the cause of civil rights, since civil rights fare better when they are given public attention than when they are kept under wraps.

In many cases, this has proven to be true. Social media’s ability to quickly expose millions of people to recorded evidence of civil rights abuses has been instrumental to improving public awareness of systemic racism and bigotry. The murder of George Floyd in 2020 in Minneapolis at the hands of police officers was immediately captured and broadcast to tens of millions of people. The video disseminated through social media so quickly that it started nationwide protests. There is reason to suspect many such murders at the hands of policemen go unreported, and the perpetrators face no consequences, but Derek Chauvin was arrested four days after the incident.

This kind of rapid, national-scale response would simply not be possible without social media. Martin Luther King Jr. was a far more high-profile individual than George Floyd was before their deaths, yet when King was assassinated fifty years prior, long before social media was widespread, the manhunt didn’t start until the next day. It took over two weeks for the killer (James Earl Ray) to even be identified, and a months-long manhunt to find and apprehend him.

Many other murders of civil rights activists (such as those of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner) weren’t even discovered for over a month. They simply “disappeared” until the bodies were found. It’s impossible to say whether the proliferation of social media would have prevented these disappearances or hastened their discovery, but George Floyd and many other instances of otherwise low-profile people being given national attention make a strong case for the good that social media can do for civil rights.

However, it is impossible to appreciate the positive impact of social media on civil rights in America without also discussing the severe harm it has caused.

Social media is not a neutral force of nature; it is a collection of corporations whose power and influence continues to steadily increase. It must always be remembered that any corporation’s primary objective is to make money, first and foremost. A corporation can do a lot of good, and a lot of evil, as it seeks to accomplish this goal.

A corporation that owns a social media platform controls an enormous public space. Imagine if a corporation controlled a town hall, or a common room, which anyone could access by a few seconds’ effort. That corporation’s objective of making money will manifest itself in positive and negative ways, but let us focus on how it affects civil rights.

In order for a social media corporation to be profitable, it must capture and retain audience attention. Over the years, these corporations have discovered that controversy is more captivating than cooperation, that fear is more captivating than hope, and that hatred is more captivating than tolerance. As such, they do everything in their power to share two kinds of content with their users:

1. Content they already agree with, which doesn’t challenge their worldview.

2. Content they disagree with vehemently, poorly presented and inviting a bad faith argument.

This creates an information ecosystem that insulates racists and other opponents of civil rights from being challenged, and gives them a steady stream of self-affirming, radicalizing content that leads to a steady stream of normalized acts of violence and hate crimes.

There is a hopeful flip-side to this approach from these corporations: if they must expend so much effort to keep us in echo chambers that prevent us from truly hearing opposing points of view from people who are different from us, it implies humans are too prone to cooperation and understanding when they aren’t so insulated. When we are exposed to different points of view and people, we are too likely to get along and therefore spend less time and attention fighting each other on social media to be profitable to these companies.

If civil rights causes want to make the best use of social media, they must do everything they can to break these echo chambers and hold social media companies accountable for their stewardship over public discourse. There is legal precedent for this (such as the now-defunct Fairness Doctrine), and if they want to succeed, activists must bring something like it back to the modern day communication technologies through which civil rights issues are most effectively disseminated.