What’s New Transcript Season 3, Episode 16: Activism April 21, 2020

Host: Dan Cohen, Dean of Libraries and Vice Provost for Information at Northeastern University.

Guests: Moya Bailey, Assistant Professor of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies Northeastern University.

Brooke Foucalt Welles, Associate Professor, Department of Studies, Northeastern University.

Host: Dan Cohen (00:13): began as a simple way to categorize posts, but soon became a way for people across the world to connect around shared issues and identities. And from there, slowly grew into a potent new form of activism. Today on What's New, we'll look at some of the most important online social movements, how they coalesced, gained strength and successfully advocated for social change.

Host: Dan Cohen (00:54): Welcome back to the what's new podcast. I'm Dan Cohen once again recording from home in the Northeastern University Library's second month of remote work in the shadow of COVID- 19. So it's good to have the virtual company today. I have two colleagues who are coauthors of an insightful new book called #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice.

Host: Dan Cohen (01:16): Joining me today from their homes are Moya Bailey, Assistant Professor of Cultures, Societies and Global Studies and Women's Gender and Sexuality Studies. And Brooke Foucalt Welles, an associate professor in the Department of Communication Studies. And I should also note that Sarah Jackson, Presidential Associate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania is also a coauthor with Moya and Brooke of #HashtagActivism. Hello Moya and Brooke, how are you doing?

Moya Bailey (01:46): Doing well. Thanks for having us.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (01:47): Hi Dan.

Host: Dan Cohen (01:48):

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Thanks so much for recording on this. I guess it's actually the last day of classes at Northeastern. I should ask how the transition to online teaching and research has gone for the two of you. Moya, how are you holding up?

Moya Bailey (02:01): I'm doing pretty well. I mean it was a of a transition, but my students have definitely rallied and I think we've actually had some wonderful asynchronous interactions as a result.

Host: Dan Cohen (02:16): Oh, that's great to hear. Brooke, how are you doing and how are your students doing?

Brooke Foucalt Welles (02:21): Well, I am struggling to become an online teacher, a 3rd grade teacher, and a 5th grade teacher with less than a month's training, but we're all hanging in. I've been really impressed, particularly at the students' ability to adapt to a variety of tools. In some ways, I would say we're connecting more often now and more closely now than we were just in the classroom, so there's certainly some silver linings there.

Host: Dan Cohen (02:48): Great. Good to hear. Okay, well with the prayers that are children and pets do not bother us during the recording, I just want to thank you again for joining me under these unusual circumstances. And I'm delighted to talk about your great new book. Moya, can you just tell me about the origins of #HashtagActivism?

Moya Bailey (03:04): Sure. And #HashtagActivism as a concept, we really trace back to the way that people were using hashtags in the Arab Spring as being one of the ways that we started to think about them as really important. And then our own United States Occupy Movement as being an essential moment where #HashtagActivism was really brought to the fore and its power really got to be something that people understood.

Moya Bailey (03:38): And so Occupy Wall Street and these moments really gave rise to the idea that hashtags could help the organizing the people were already doing on the ground and create a new context for that organizing. And even before that we'd seen some organizing that people were doing in relationship to specific incidents of police violence. So the January 1st, 2009 shooting of Oscar Grant and then also in January 25th the Egyptian revolution and all of the work that people were doing at Tahrir Square.

Moya Bailey (04:21): So these things were kind of in the background, but in terms of how we started to think about the book, we were individually and actually Brooke can talk more about her work with Sarah in

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terms of their thinking about #HashtagActivism, but we were all working on different hashtags that we saw as being really important to a momentum that people were trying to build around particular political issues. And that really brought us together to think collaboratively about what this book could offer.

Host: Dan Cohen (05:00): One of the things I noticed Moya in an early chapter was that this may even kind of predate Twitter. I think when people think about hashtags, they immediately think of Twitter, which we'll get to in great, great depth momentarily.

Host: Dan Cohen (05:13): But I think both of you and Sarah note that there were some earlier forums, for instance around MeToo in feminist and other areas that were sort of engaging in a kind of proto hashtag form of activism. Can you talk about that? And then the way that Twitter really kind of exploded all of this activity?

Moya Bailey (05:36): Sure. So one thing that is important is to think about the origin of hashtags themselves. And it's something that people had taken from kind of their own experiences of being involved in listservs online and using hashtags just as a way to connect different of information.

Moya Bailey (05:59): So thinking of it as a keyword, some form of that linked different conversations together. So in those early days of people using hashtags, it wasn't connected to Twitter because Twitter didn't exist. But once people started using Twitter, people saw the utility of using hashtags. So it was actually users on Twitter who started to think about how hashtags could help make the kind of infinite data stream of Twitter more manageable.

Moya Bailey (06:37): And then it was Twitter users and other activists who started to think about how this could be utilized for more political network ends. And so that's when you start to see people linking and connecting conversations around police brutality, racial injustice, all of the things that we end up covering in the text.

Host: Dan Cohen (07:07): Right. Brooke, how did you get involved and interested in hashtags? And then as Moya mentioned, around the methodology, how did you begin to sort through what is sort of almost incalculably large number of tweets? I mean there are millions of these a day. How did you sort of begin to deconstruct that, find the hashtags, find the people who are tweeting using these hashtags and then making your way from there to some larger interpretation.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (07:39):

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Sure. Yeah. For me, I've been studying online communication since really the widespread use of the . So my first job as an undergraduate student in 1997 was looking at online message boards. So groups and things like that. So to see what people are talking about. So I really come at this from the online communication and persuasion angle. And specifically throughout the years, I've cultivated some skills around large scale network analysis.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (08:11): So trying to understand who connects with who, what influence do folks have over each other online. And then as we started to see just pre-Black Lives Matter Movement, pre the time the Black Lives Matter Movement really solidified on Twitter. We started to see again and again these cases of folks from marginalized communities using Twitter in particular to offer counter narratives.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (08:45): So things that I as a white woman living on the East coast was not really that familiar with. So different ways of thinking about police citizen relationships for example. So I just noticed this as a user of Twitter. And then fortunately, serendipitously, I happened to work alongside Sarah Jackson and we saw a particular hashtag break that we cover in the book. So it was the MyNYPD hashtag where folks use that hashtag, which was originally proposed by the New York City police department as a way to praise the New York police department.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (09:21): Folks hijacked it and used it to show their encounters with the police that were violent, where they had been racially profiled and so on and used that to highlight a different narrative about police-citizen interaction. So when we saw that happening, Sarah was initially quite interested in this particular use, but did not have the large scale data analysis skills. And that's where I came in.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (09:48): So as an expert in coordinating network information and scraping it out of and so on, at the time Twitter was relatively open in terms of your ability to access data in there. And so I grabbed all the tweets that had #MyNYPD in them and made a network out of them. So a network of people connected by retweets and mentions.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (10:13): Happily, Twitter was then and still is very easy to manipulate. It's very easy to store and to create these networks. People have these communication conventions that lend themselves really well to connections, retweets and mentions. And from that, we were able to extract folks who were getting an outsized amount of attention in that particular network.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (10:37):

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And the really surprising thing for us, once I did that, was that those folks weren't traditional political elites. They weren't big mainstream news sources. So they weren't the types of folks who usually get a lot of attention for political messages. They were activists, they were regular citizens, folks who had experienced these encounters with the police and so on.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (10:59): So that was really what sparked for me. And I think for all of us, this idea that something a little different is going on onTwitter.

Host: Dan Cohen (11:05): Moya, could you walk us through, before we actually get to these big activist successes, just the origins of these kinds of online communities, how hashtag arises, how a specific community, which might consist of very distributed, decentralized people, maybe who don't have a lot of followers as Brooke just mentioned, but can gain some influence on their own and then together and sort of find each other. What are the early stages of one of these hashtags that you could walk us through?

Moya Bailey (11:42): Sure. So I'll talk a bit about the hashtag that brought me in and brought me to the work that Sarah and Brooke were already doing. So I was looking at the hashtag GirlsLikeUs, which was created by Janet Mock, a trans advocate and media maker, who had come out as trans recently and was doing a lot of advocacy for trans women particularly trans women of color.

Moya Bailey (12:14): And it was at this moment early in the 2010s that she saw another trans woman who was trying to be a part of a pageant and was being denied access because of her gender. And so that really sparked for her this question of, so what are we doing about inclusion? Who gets to be in certain spaces? And so she started the hashtag GirlsLikeUs as a way to bring attention to this movement for this one person.

Moya Bailey (12:52): But from that, a lot of people really resonated with this idea of girls like us. And it's slowly built and became a network and a way to create conversations between trans women, primarily trans women of color. And what's beautiful and amazing about that is it wasn't something that I don't think at the time that she thought would have a longevity that it's had. GirlsLikeUs is still in use.

Moya Bailey (13:22): It's also been used in a number of different places beyond Twitter, used in TV shows and used in other campaigns that exist beyond Twitter. And what is so important is that some of the connections that were made by people who are a part of that network really inspired and

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moved some of these later media projects that came forward. So what I think is essential for some of these hashtags is the connections that people are able to form because of them.

Moya Bailey (14:03): It gives people an opportunity to connect in ways they otherwise might not be able to. So when you're in a situation where you might be one of a few trans women in your local community, it can be very isolating. But with the advent of the internet and with the advent of the hashtag, you're connected to a broader network of people that you otherwise would not have been able to connect with. And I think that's really one of the ways that hashtags are powerful.

Moya Bailey (14:34): And also it has something to do with the kinds of language that people use when they're creating these hashtags. So GirlsLikeUs really centers the experiences of trans women. It's not really a comparative sort of hashtag and so I think for that reason it's been very effective and one that the community itself finds very affirming, which we see in a lot of the other hashtags that we look at.

Moya Bailey (15:05): The people are really trying to express a sentiment that otherwise might not be easily expressed in very pithy, short ways and I think that is what makes some of these hashtags stick around for a while.

Host: Dan Cohen (15:25): How does the hashtag use then move into a kind of new phase of advocacy beyond the shared identity and finding each other? Brooke, I noticed probably the most famous case I think in the book, while there are several, certainly Black Lives Matter, it would be one of them, but also MeToo I think has really had an impact on society.

Host: Dan Cohen (15:48): How do some of these shared feelings and language that Moya just mentioned move into a more political and socially activist phase?

Brooke Foucalt Welles (16:01): Yeah, so I think there are at least two different prototypes or prototypical ways that that happens. So one is when there's a particular event. So here I'm thinking about, for example, Mike Brown's murder in Ferguson. So folks, local folks gathered around, documented the event and started speaking about it on Twitter. And you have to remember at the time, there was not a national conversation about violence against citizens of color. Right? So now that's a national conversation.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (16:37):

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I think folks, often they have the vocabulary for speaking about it. At the time, that wasn't really the case. There were local conversations, but it certainly wasn't nationwide and it wasn't getting covered in the New York Times. So the really surprising thing about Michael Brown's murder is that it did end up getting covered in the New York Times. And the way that happened is a pattern that we've seen in other similar kind of event driven activism moments.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (17:04): So it starts with local citizens. And then, next, just local folks who are maybe slightly more recognizable. So here I'm thinking like local celebrities might get involved, right? So folks, for example, Tef Poe is a hip hop artist in that region of the world that folks locally knew of. Folks nationally, probably not. And then once local celebrities get involved, we get a little bit of a bump and we start to see local activists, maybe some local politicians.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (17:38): So like aldermen or city counselors, they start tweeting about it, right? And so once that happens, then it becomes a news story at least to the local news. Then the local news starts to pick up on it. And then we might see an upleveling, sort of a broader coalition of activists might pick up on it or a broader swath of the news media might pick up on it.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (18:01): And then we see this bubbling up effect where folks from outside of the area. So folks with no connection at all to Ferguson start tweeting about Ferguson, right? And then the Twitter event itself. So the hashtag itself becomes newsworthy. And when we start to see this pattern of national news or regional news at least, but maybe even national news covering the Twitter event, and then by proxy they're showing the images of what's happening in Ferguson. They're showing on the ground interviews with folks and so on. And then we start to see nationwide coverage.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (18:35): So we saw this a few times and we've seen it now kind of catalyzed, right? So it happens faster each subsequent time, this pattern. And part of that is that activists have come to know this pattern, right? And they leverage it on purpose. And part of that is because once we have a vocabulary for talking about these things, it becomes easier to cover on the news. It's a more legible story as a news event. So that's one of the patterns that we see when we're looking at these.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (19:06): The other pattern is something more like a common experience that has been bottled up, that's stigmatized in some way. So I'd put MeToo in this category. That virtually every woman in America has experienced some form of sexual harassment or assault. And unfortunately that is a stigmatized status, right? So having experienced that, it's not a thing that people freely disclose. They feel uncomfortable doing so.

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Brooke Foucalt Welles (19:35): And yet when someone does, right? So in this case we had a few of course MeToo started with Tarana Burke and it was a conversation that was happening on Twitter and then many years later, Alyssa Milano came in and tweeted a very high profile celebrity and tweeted MeToo. And suddenly that kind of catalyzed a new phase in the disclosures, right?

Brooke Foucalt Welles (20:02): So people started to disclose. Some people just said #MeToo and nothing else. Many people shared some story and then hashtagged it MeToo. And for each person who does that, the stigma and each subsequent person goes down, right? So suddenly, it's normal to start talking about these experiences that everyone has had and it becoming normal then begets more conversation about it. Right? And more and more and more.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (20:25): So that's another pattern. We might see that something happens and these flood gates release where everyone suddenly talks about an experience that needed to be talked about this whole time, but for some reason it was suppressed and people didn't feel comfortable talking about it until they did

Host: Dan Cohen (20:41): That snowballing is interesting and just the visibility aspect as well. Moya, what did you take away in working on this book in terms of the sort of construction and aggregation of what is really decentralized social activism and its success?

Moya Bailey (21:00): One of the things I took away was just the power of Twitter and hashtags as a tool in the toolbox that activists and organizers use to get their message out. So I think what is so affirming about Twitter and hashtags use on Twitter is that, again, you have everyday ordinary people who are able to leverage this as a tool to get people out around important political issues and also to advocate more successfully for things to change.

Moya Bailey (21:41): Genie Lauren who wrote the foreword to the book was somebody who didn't actually consider herself an activist or an organizer. But following the acquittal of George Zimmerman, was really disturbed to learn that one of the jurors from Zimmerman's trial had a book deal with a press and used Twitter and a hashtag campaign to get that book deal revoked. And that happened over the course of a couple of days.

Moya Bailey (22:17): And so for me, I think that's one really powerful example of how hashtags, Twitter organizing can be utilized to create effective change and create effective change amongst people who ordinarily might not see themselves as change agents. So it really lowers the bar of

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participation in a way that makes activism and organizing much more accessible. And we can also see this and a disability rights context where a lot of disabled folks have been able to organize using Twitter and hashtags in ways that they couldn't before.

Moya Bailey (23:02): And I kind of see that as kind of the next place that this work is going. Looking at other communities who are dealing with and addressing these questions around how are we being viewed, what sort of media do we have access to, and social media platforms are one space where there can be more accessibility than not.

Host: Dan Cohen (23:30): Yeah. One of the things I wondered about in reading your book and you mentioned it in the afterword is that, I mean obviously this is still going on and new communities are being empowered by the low bar it takes to sort of hop on a platform like Twitter and to find each other.

Host: Dan Cohen (23:47): But on the other hand, there are also some dark forces at work, particularly in the last few years in a place like Twitter where hashtags themselves have sort of been used against social activists and the loudest voice on the platform is probably the President of the United States, which in some ways pushes against a more decentralized up from the bottom kind of snowballing of social work.

Host: Dan Cohen (24:13): What is your feeling now having written the book and done research on movements from the last decade about where all of this will head in the next decade given what we've seen in the last few years?

Brooke Foucalt Welles (24:25): I do think, I agree there are some disturbing trends. So we specifically for example, see the weaponization of the Black Lives Matter hashtag by foreign actors in order to suppress the black vote. I think that we'll continue to see operations like that carrying on. And the tricky thing is I think they're really hard to detect. So there are lots of smart folks working on things like bot detection and these things even to us, trained observers who do close reads of these tweets. There were some that we would pass around and say like, "I'm just not sure about this one." Right?

Brooke Foucalt Welles (25:03): So it just seems so out of character with this person or this person's just seems so idiosyncratic in what they say. Like are they real? Are they not real? At the same time, I think people are becoming more literate readers of these texts, if you will. So as awareness about these kinds of information operations proliferates, folks also become more critical of what they're seeing.

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Brooke Foucalt Welles (25:31): So I do think that any widespread open access information platform is going to be a host of good things and bad things and folks are getting savvier about sussing out, creating curated lists of folks they follow and trust.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (25:47): For example, we see a lot of that going on right now and I do think that it's on the platform. So we've reached a point where either the platforms need to self-regulate or they need to be regulated by say an external body that informs rules or forms rules and then enforces them.

Host: Dan Cohen (26:06): Yeah, I did want to ask you about that maybe as a final question. Did the two of you and Sarah sit down over coffee and decide what the rules of Twitter really should be? Or if you were to run Twitter right now, what changes would you make to make it still very open at the widest possible level to the most people to find each other, to advocate for their issues but to tamp down some of these darker aspects to the platform?

Moya Bailey (26:40): Well, one way I think that we can start to put pressure on platforms is to ask them more about how they're determining what gets viewed. So there've been a lot of questions about Twitter and Facebook around the algorithms that they use. Also, some question about whether they understand how the algorithms they use work in terms of what content is exposed to what people and at what level.

Moya Bailey (27:14): I think there needs to be more transparency about that, so that people have access to multiple kinds of conversations and that we aren't creating opportunities where people are only getting a bit of tunnel vision or going down the rabbit hole into these places that perhaps affirm some of their already prejudiced beliefs.

Moya Bailey (27:41): And I also think that there's more work that needs to be done at the level of education, both for people who are creating platforms and for people who are using them. Media literacy as an idea, I think perhaps peaked in the mid to early 2000s unfortunately. And I think there's still so much that needs to be done in terms of K through 12 education to allow people to learn how to be more critical with the media that they consume so that people can start to be savvy in the way that Brooke mentioned.

Moya Bailey (28:23): And also the way that we train graduate students in computer science and in design who go on to invent and be the ones who are part of these programs. Part of these platforms such that they are better equipped to address and respond to some of the social pressures that they have

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not really foreseen or had the opportunity to think about critically during their graduate and undergraduate education.

Host: Dan Cohen (29:00): Boy, those are all great points and I think especially this final point about the producers of these platforms needing to really be able to take the perspectives of someone who might be marginalized or new to the platform and may not understand it and its powers and its problems seems like really critical for the next generation of these internet apps.

Host: Dan Cohen (29:24): Moya Bailey and Brooke Foucalt Welles along with Sarah Jackson are authors of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice. It's just out from MIT Press and we will link to it from the show notes. You should pick up a copy and read it. Thanks for joining me on What's New, Moya and Brooke.

Moya Bailey (29:42): Thanks for having us.

Brooke Foucalt Welles (29:43): Thanks Dan. It's a pleasure.

Host: Dan Cohen (29:44): Thanks. Especially given the added difficulty of recording in multiple locations. I really appreciate it. And this is the last show of our third season of What's New. Thanks for listening. As always, you can listen to all of our shows now close to 50 episodes at whatsnewpodcasts.org. You can subscribe from there to What's New on your favorite podcast app. You can also find us at lyceum.fm, a new education-oriented podcast site and app.

Host: Dan Cohen (30:16): And if you like this podcast, our colleagues at the Boston Area Research Institute have a new podcast on economic, political, and social issues, which you can find at bitly.com/bari2020. We'll link to that from the show notes as well. What's New is a production of the Northeastern University Library produced this week by John Reed and me Dan Cohen.

Host: Dan Cohen (30:38): I'm also giving my dog partial credit for not barking during the recording and well done to the other pets, and children who were present during this recording. We will have some updates and rebroadcasts over the summer and we'll be back in September for season four of What's New. Until then, take care all and be well.

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