 Good afternoon. Good morning. Welcome to usually I say welcome to New America, but welcome to virtual New America to our first event that is rescheduled from an in person event to not not the organization's first but first that I've been involved in. And we're really pleased to have you all here I'm Mark Schmidt I'm the director of the political reform program at New America. And we are here today in our various locations to talk about a really cool and interesting new book called hashtag activism. That is, that is edited by a new America fellow Sarah Jackson, who is one of our, one of the people who will be joining us today. Sarah is a new America fellow as I said in 2019 on a book about memory about the civil rights movement. This is, this is a book that this is a project that she started before she became a new America fellow, along with Maya Bailey and Brooke Foucault on various forms in which activism has been effective semi effective experimental in the in the online world, particularly around. Well, we'll, we'll talk about we'll talk about some of the specific examples, but this is a it's a really fascinating book and we'll learn, we'll learn more about it. And we're joined also by, I should say, in addition to being a new America fellow Sarah is an associate professor at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. And we're joined by also by at Sarah waving. We're joined also by Dave Karp who is an associate professor in the School of Media and Public Affairs at GW here in DC, and also as a background as a, as an organizer with the Sierra Club. So I, so Dave occupies a really interesting role kind of at the intersection of activism and scholarship about activism, and as seen this in in from some different perspectives. And we're, and our third panelist is Aaron Longbottom, who's the senior manager of campaigns and digital strategies at the National Women's Law Center, which is like the Sierra Club, kind of a organization that's been around for a while. I used to do a lot of work with them in the 90s and have a lot of very high regard for, for a National Women's Law Center and it's been interesting to see how an organization like that changes as forms of activism change so I'm really interested in, in their perspective. Before joining the center she worked at a rape crisis agency, they created community outreach programs for for kids, and has served as an on call advocate for victims at the hospital she's been involved in a lot of the that that National Women's Law Center has as organized so we're going to do this as much like a, an in person event as, as we usually do if any of you have have been to our, have been to our events and we're and I'm going to ask Sarah to, you know, talk for a bit about the research findings of the narrative that informs the chapters and the you know there's a theoretical framework here and then there's very powerful stories of people finding their voice and echoing their voice that you know I was struck by the phrase there's a phrase in there that something like hashtag activism is, is repeated resistance, it's a kind of ongoing amplification of a message that's good that through a lot of different people so really interesting I think one thing I want to the last thing I want to say before we before I turn it over to Sarah is, of course, there should be a hashtag for this discussion so if you would like to tweet about this conversation or things you've heard here, please use the hashtag, hashtag activism is hash, hashtag activism all one, all one phrase so I think I think it was Sarah suggested that it's, you know, kind of a basic idea but let's, let's go with that and let's, you know, expand the audience use the same techniques to expand the audience for this discussion, as broadly as possible. So with that let me turn it over to Sarah, then we'll, you know, have some discussion with the other panelists and their responses, and then we'll open it up to questions from those of you. Thanks. Thanks so much Mark yeah thanks for everyone I'm really thankful that everyone was able to make it I know we're all sort of experiencing the new normal of doing everything virtually what that feels sort of on brand for this book right now, especially because we've sort of seen in the last week or two that the internet is a really important way of connecting people and keeping you know we keep talking about social distancing I've been saying physical distancing because what we're doing right now is social and hashtags are so social and social media is social. So yeah if you want to live tweet as Mark mentioned, here's the hashtag hashtag activism at same as the title of the book. Trust me we had a lot of discussions should the title be a hashtag and the word activism should it be the hashtag and hashtag activism is that redundant and you know that's a whole other story the level of conversations we had to have about that. Yeah, thank you all for being here so I'm going to just start out by offering a few minutes of information about sort of what inspired this book, my co authors, my Bailey and Brooke Foucault Wells and I started writing this book. And actually we started collecting data for it about five years ago. We finished it, you know, just this past year. We have a whole lot of cases and one of the things that's nice about the number of cases we have is we're able to trace ways in which hashtag activism on issues of racial justice and feminist issues and gender justice and trans issues shift over time as the technological infrastructures of Twitter itself shifts and sort of as the way that media and political leaks and sort of mainstream organizations that are advocacy organizations like for example one Aaron works at has sort of changed their relationships to thinking about hashtags and using hashtags in campaign so just a little background on why we started working on this project. Five years ago five six years ago actually 2014. I watched something happen that those of you who are New Yorkers are probably very familiar with which was that the New York City Police Department started a hashtag. It was hashtag my NYPD, and they sent out a very lovely tweet that said, Hey, if you have stories that you'd like to share, use the hashtag NYPD and we'll share them on our Facebook you know send us a picture and they even gave you a sample of the type of picture they were wanting it was a picture of you know a tourist and I love NY, you know baseball hat with two NYPD officers in Times Square smiling for the camera right and they were really doing this as a sort of a PR exercise and you know in retrospect in 2020 we can look back on that and kind of snicker because we can imagine and I think a lot of people know what happened, which was that immediately the hashtag my NYPD was overtaken and dominated by ordinary people responding with images and stories of police brutality. And not just New Yorkers, but people all over the United States and eventually people over the world then used the hashtag my NYPD to talk about issues of state violence and police oppression, both in terms of racialized in terms of reactions to protest and violence against protesters and all kinds of things. And I thought this was really interesting to watch because what started as a elite narrative and for those of you who are in sort of the study of media communication know there's a lot of background and research where we talk about how institutions tend to have more power to tell the story the elite media, or the elite institutions like the police and politicians tend to have more power to tell the story. But in this case where the hashtag couldn't be controlled by the elite institution that started it the story that trended and became popular was really the story about police brutality. And eventually mainstream news channels like MSNBC and CNN and Fox picked up the story of the my NYPD hashtag being hijacked by ordinary people on Twitter. So that was one of the things that really inspired us to start collecting data for this book. And we collected data from basically that period onward if you have a copy of the book you know we go even as far back and look at the hashtag Oscar grant which was in 2009 in the very early days of Twitter before it's technological infrastructure was what it is today, and we sort of move forward looking through various Black Lives Matter hashtags hashtags related and preceding the me to movement hashtags related to trans rights etc. And so just to share, I think, for me what are some of the most interesting findings and, and it's fun to co author book because you know my co authors moya Bailey she's a digital humanist my co author book for co well she's a network scientist, and we each kind of have our favorite findings kind of dependent on our own backgrounds but for me I think there's three big takeaways from the book. One is that we really see through hashtag activism the power of ordinary people to change public narrative. And so again in this sort of story where many people have argued throughout history that it has been elites and people with various sets of privileged access who have the power to change narrative. We see through you know we call short tag, we call hashtags digital shorthand right and they become these compelling short easy to pick up easy to share narratives in and of themselves that really then can have an influence and we see do have an influence on mainstream conversations and mainstream debates. Another thing is the organic way in which the networks are built. That was one of the things that I thought was more interesting that we found is that oftentimes hashtag started with people who didn't necessarily have huge followings weren't necessarily in positions of power were again sort of ordinary folks who started a hashtag and that particular hashtag that particular narrative that they offered became compelling enough that they were able to connect, you know across different networks and groups of people on Twitter, attract allies sort of tell new stories, garner attention from mainstream media. And so again that was really an interesting thing that we saw where ordinary people had a new set of power. Now, of course, we can talk about there are obviously limitations to this and the book itself has a selection bias and that we write about hashtags that were essentially successful. Right. So we're really examining what about successful hashtags made them successful certainly people start hashtags all the time that don't trend and don't influence mainstream political debates and so that something maybe we can come back to later if people are curious about that. But for now I will sort of just wrap up. Hopefully that's enough of a summary for folks who are sort of new to the topic. And I'm excited to hear from my fellow panelists and sort of dig in here. Thank you so much Sarah that was really, that was really fascinating why don't I don't think we really discussed in order here but why don't why don't I turn it over to Dave to start if that's alright with with you and and I think it is really interesting as you read a lot of these stories a lot of these people, a lot of the people who started these campaigns really warped your grassroots activists I mean they're in that in the forward section for example there's repeated. I really mentioned I couldn't really follow all this because I had a job and I had to be at my job and I wasn't my job and person's job obviously had nothing to do with with this. But I think, as we turn it over, we're going to talk about people whose jobs do involve this right and who's and how this relates to organizations where where they're trying to do it so in a way we're kind of looking at one particular aspect of the whole universe that you're that you're talking about although obviously both of you can, all three of you can talk about all aspects of that so with that, let me just hand it over to Dave. Great. Personally note I've read the book I love the book everyone should buy the book. Great book. I want to pick up on the last thing that Sarah just said to identify what I think is kind of a boundary condition here. And I've never noted at the end there that the this hashtag activism can be tremendously powerful for ordinary people in changing public narrative. I think that's exactly right. Public narrative is powerful, but it's only one manifestation of power. And I think particularly when I look across organized political advocacy and activism. What it calls to mind is, like when I'm teaching strategic political campaigning the first thing I always tell students is, or people that are training. It depends on what what your goal is who your target is what you're trying to get your target to do. And sometimes what you're trying to do in a political campaign or an advocacy campaign is change the public narrative. And that's where I think hashtag activism and similar forms of digital activism are at their strongest. And that's what you're trying to do is, like, get Mitch McConnell to do a thing that Mitch McConnell doesn't otherwise want to do. And that's where changing narratives end up end up sort of showing their limitations. One of the examples that I often using class. We take the the some of the origins of the black lives matter movement. I think there's absolutely no question that without hashtag Ferguson, we don't have the mobilization that happens there. Getting reporters getting their editors to allow them to go to Ferguson Missouri to cover a white cop shooting an unarmed black guy. And when their editors have never heard of Ferguson Missouri and sadly that that doesn't sound like news that's an all too common occurrence. That doesn't happen without the hashtag trending. So if, to the extent that the goal is changing the public narrative and that is important. Hashtag actors and tremendously important, but we don't just want to change public narratives. We want pretty racist white juries to actually convict a racist white cop. And that's where the changes in narrative sort of run the limitations of power. And that's where other elements of this activism I think, end up needing to be expanded when when organizations when advocacy organizations are trying to figure out, what should we be doing on Twitter. And we can pause and say, well, what are who our targets and what are our goals right now, because of what they're doing is like running a legislative campaign to try to get some senators to work on a piece of legislation. Sometimes what they like what is needed is actually get this legislation on the news so work through hashtags to influence the mainstream media agenda, and that can work. So what you're going to need is like a set of lobbyists making some cunning arguments or like a really strong primary challenger. And then you're going to need to build organization and hashtag that activism as Sarah and her co authors document in the book, also can be useful for building for creating the building blocks of new organizations of new movements. And that's where the online activity needs to translate into organizational infrastructure, which then reintroduces a bunch of old organizational problems, right like in order for black lives matter to become a successful network movement. Not only do they need their hashtags or trend. They also then need like people's email addresses that they can like organize them into slack channels and then Facebook groups. They need funding they need to navigate all the stuff that comes with funding and all the leadership problems have been crop up. And they need to like separate the wheat from the chat figure out like what are the most strategic uses of our resources as we go. So, as we move from public narrative into other layers of political power. I think that's when we reintroduce a bunch of the old organizational problems that have always been with us. Thank you very much. I'm tempted to ask some questions right now but I'm going to resist that temptation and and turn it over to Aaron to talk about their experience, you know, from various things that that they've done and from within an organization. Yeah, I mean I think what Dave brought up is something that I grapple with all the time in my job. How do you a create a hashtag that's going to move people a you're also coming from a place of, you know, I think Sarah in your book you looked at a lot of storytelling and people who just sort of organically came up with these hashtags. What got with hashtag of survivor privilege that was responding to that George will column, it was so powerful, but as an organization. That's not where we're coming from where sort of trying to reverse engineer that moment a lot of times and sometimes you get really lucky and you have a moment. You know, I think like National Center for transgender equality in the last few years had a couple of those moments with protect trans kids, where they got to respond to something really quickly but those moments don't happen a lot. And as an organization, you really have to be super nimble to take advantage of them and that's I mean like a huge gift falling in your lap if something like that happens. So I think a challenge is to come at it from, well I have to, how can I engineer a hashtag in which folks will actually engage will get our messaging out people will want to use it as a storytelling platform. They'll want to organize under it and it'll move them to offline action, which is a huge task and I think we fail at it more times than we succeed when we come at it from that angle. But it's an interesting, it's an interesting problem and yeah I mean I think when I'm thinking about doing campaigns and you know when folks say can we put a hashtag around this. I always ask people to pause critically about why they're putting a hashtag on it because if we're just hashtagging for the sake of hashtagging it's going into the void and there's no we're just wasting characters on Twitter at that point. But I think that there are moments in which we can create hashtags that are helpful. You know, our organization in the last few years, we have this particular issue we work on which is sort of religious refusals and healthcare so folks who are doctors or pharmacists who are basically using their religious beliefs to deny people care so for instance pharmacists people work control because they don't agree with birth control or doctors refusing to refer people to abortion providers or something like that. And this is, you know, a problem we're trying to motivate organize people around but how do you distill such a thing into something that's actually understandable because by say the word religious refusals probably no one knows what that means. So, from our perspective reverse engineering, you know, we look at messaging we look at what people respond to and then, you know, like all good hashtags got to fit in a sentence it's got to be declarative. So, you know, that's where we sort of landed on our patient first campaign, which is our way of doing storytelling and it's still going strong and folks are still using and engaging in it even though we started it now I think two years ago and you know one thing that organizations can do is have those hashtags that live on for a long time and we can keep returning to them and built and building narratives on top of them. And, you know, it's great. One tool the hashtag is that you can look at the archive of everything which is really cool and so to see how those things change and blossom over time is is fascinating and a great tool for us. Yeah, I think that thank you very much. That's really fascinating. I'm curious how, when you say, if you, you know, a lot of things are going to fail. Is that all right. I mean is it does seem like a kind of a field with a kind of an approach where maybe you do try 100 things and in one or two of them really kind of catch on when, as you say you're sort of trying to reverse it. I mean, it's kind of like I remember in sort of the old days when people would say, Well, let's try to get a viral video and I was like, Well, you really have no idea what makes something kind of catch on so maybe sure do it but don't do it once you know is a certain what is a certain level of failure with this okay. And how does that shape how you go into things. Given that. I mean, no one wants to fail, obviously, but I think being well one good thing about Twitter is there isn't as much of an algorithm issue is with other platforms so you know in Facebook, if you fail at something that might actually have repercussions for you on your page, you know as an organization for a while but on Twitter, it's not so much and so I think you have the freedom to fail, and you're not going to expect everything to take off but that's how you learn. You know you learn that people don't want to engage with a, you know, 20 character hashtag because it's too long and it doesn't make sense. You learn that someone will engage with something that storytelling like hashtag me to or hashtag you know me which is busy Phillips abortion storytelling hashtag. But yeah I mean you think it's expected and it's funny that you bring up the viral thing because yeah it's a joke amongst all digital people of how do I make this go viral and we're like you can't. I can jump in on that it's interesting because we actually talk about this a bit in the book, even though we're not looking at hashtags that are coming necessarily from formal organizations. We do talk about you know the reason that the hashtags that we study trend and others don't when there are many others has a lot to do with affect, and has a lot to do with authenticity. And so this question you know I sort of always like hedge it like you know advising, because so many times it's actually you know advertisers who want to learn how to turn to hashtag or people with other sort of nefarious, you know intense. But a lot of times the reason that hashtags trend organically is because there's something effective about them that people can see their own experience they can feel some kind of empathy or not just sympathy but empathy identification with. But also that the stories and the hashtags seem authentic, and also sometimes it's as simple as you know what Aaron said that some hashtags are too long, or they're not catchy. And a great example of one organization that we do look at out in the book we look at the hashtag, say her name, which is a hashtag that was popularized by the African American Policy Forum, which is, you know, an organization that focuses on drawing attention to the way that women of color and particularly black women experience state violence and how those experiences are different because of gender. And they actually initially had a different hashtag. We talked about it in the book and of course now I'm blanking on what the first hashtag was, but that hashtag didn't pick up, but the hashtag say her name, which was popularized and had already sort of been used in other contexts related to the Sandra Bland case and sort of other cases of police violence against black women really was popularized and then really became a part of their sort of identity and their campaign and so they learned very quickly to use that hashtag sort of the initial, the initial one because that connected them to networks of activists and ordinary folks who are already like thinking and talking about these issues of gender and police violence on Twitter. And so sometimes it's a matter of, you know, these organic things happening at once is it effectively compelling it is does it seem authentic. There you know networks who are already queued into and paying attention to this, and these things can all, you know, is it short enough is it catchy enough doesn't make it clear enough argument and, you know, a lot of people have said that one of the reasons me to became so popular is it's literally the embodiment in a short hashtag of the concept that the personal is political. The, you know, it makes a claim about a political condition and experience and a need for political change through personal storytelling and we look at a lot of hashtags like that in the books that do something similar so I think, you know, there are some elements that can be sort of intuited about what works and what doesn't. And I just want to layer one more point on that which is, it stands out to me as well that you can fail a hashtag can fail for free. Right and that means that, while organizations need to pursue authenticity and there's that like that's that's a little dicey like let let's all really perform authenticity just perfect. Let's compare social media activism to an activist campaign where what you're doing like I was just thinking about one of the first campaigns that I worked on when I was a high school student, and we had a budget of $300 total, and we decided to do a mailing. And we had to get that mailing right because that was our entire budget, and they were like it was for a training day and we felt training wrong. And I didn't get with that because like you made the one mistake but that was the entire budget that like, like communication used to have a marginal cost to it. And that meant that like you needed to like have a big plan in advance and you couldn't learn after trying. And for organizations while there is that challenge of, you're probably not authentic because you're probably like sitting at a committee meeting coming up with hashtags and like that's a new difficulty. And that is if you try a bunch of things so long as you don't end up making massive fools of yourselves, like you can try things out and learn from them and figure out oh this hashtag doesn't work, we're going to use me to or we're going to use say your name instead. And like that can work because you didn't just spend your entire budget on the first day that kind of reminds me, this is something I think about a lot in relation to a lot of things right so like, you know, classic the classic shift in the thousands from direct male advocacy organizations that had members who would join or not join for your lifetime to move on right where, you know it's continual interactions but there's still campaigns. And I think I do do a lot of work on money and politics to and it's like, the reason we have this, you know, kind of small donor revolution of people sending you know $3 to Elizabeth Warren or whoever is because the cost of asking for the next contribution is so low so in an older era you had to, you know, you sort of had to guess at what people were able to give and try to get there, but when the cost when the, when the transaction cost of each next move is low you can do a lot in a different way if you get your head around the other thing that calls out there is, there's a distinction in the old move on or old now the move on style which is old because it's like a decade or two old, which is focused on email and aggregating email lists, which, once you have a list of people who have donated to you it's close to free to email them again. And there's a distinction there between that and organizing via hashtags because the challenge with organizing via hashtags is, it can be very difficult to capture that list of people and follow up with them. So the virality of hashtags well it's a lot easier, like I think I when I teach classes on this stuff I often teach about Coney 2012. Right, which, like, when I started teaching that all my students had memories and then for a while I didn't and now all my students are like, Oh yeah, I was in elementary school and that happens and like, we're getting old. But the fascinating thing about that is that trends on Twitter that gets 100 million views in a few days on YouTube. And a couple years later with Joseph Coney still out there, the organization shuts down for lack of funding. And to me, the lesson there is, look, 100 million people viewed that content on YouTube. And that means that Google which owns YouTube knows who that 100 million people are. But the organization that produced the video and got the hashtag to trend doesn't have that list of people that they can reach out to and say like, Hey, we could really use two bucks. But they don't you think that more has to do with the failures of the organizational model. I mean, the organization that ran 2012 Coney 2012 had so many like shady practices they had misinformation about what was actually happening in Uganda like Joseph Coney wasn't even there at the time. They were giving money to some of the same entities that were also using child soldiers and like also using, you know, rape as a weapon of war and they were very, and their leadership, I think, had some questionable sort of behaviors and things happen. So, I mean, I think that's an interesting example of something goes viral successfully. And, you know, they, the reason it went viral successfully was because of the affect right because everyone watched the video and felt like compelled, but for me the reason that it doesn't result in as much sort of concrete change or action isn't necessarily because it's hard to track down those people and it's hard to keep them engaged in the campaign but it's because the movement itself was flawed in terms of what the way that it understood political solvency. Even what it thought the solution was that it was trying to solve was, you know, sort of sweeping in with this like savior mentality into another country and fixing something without them themselves having the context of this sort of inner workings of what was happening in Uganda and what was happening with you know, all that stuff. So, I mean, I hear you but like I sort of like pushed back a little bit on that being a problem of the people who were drawn into it and more so a problem of like how it was managed but I think I 30% agree 70% disagree. Because I think, like, yes, there were a lot of flaws with the organization and with what they were doing a lot of flood organization stick around for a long time though. And one of the things that helps them stick around is having a bit like if they had that if they had 100 million person list, then that can allow them to endure an awful lot of flaws. The place where I do agree is that I often view the problem for them is that they didn't have a clear next step. Once they had gained public attention. So that like their tagline was make Joseph Coney famous and like congrats you did that. That wasn't your actual goal. And if the goal after make Joseph Coney famous is, okay, I guess the US military should invade large swaths of Africa's wreck because we're not actually sure what country he's in so just like send a military to do some stuff. How, how are you going to do that like that's where they didn't have a good answer and that's where their other problems I think became more apparent and also their ED had a mental breakdown. But I think all of that would be recoverable. I think they had a list because, and again like organizations all the time like make some mistakes or haven't really thought out what's going to happen once you have your big moment in the sun. And then over time they figured out and I think that figuring out if they had had some kind of infrastructure to fall back on to keep, like, keep momentum there. I think they would have been better off. Yeah, do you think a good example, like I can think of two sort of organizational good examples. Planned Parenthood, which I want to say in 2012 when the Susan G. Coleman Foundation withdrew their funding from Planned Parenthood, they started the hashtag stand with PP or I stand with PP. And that was a hashtag that very successfully trended and again part of that was because almost every person who has needed to go to Planned Parenthood in America was like well yeah I stand with PP because I went there when I was in college for birth control or where I got my first pass here and it was very much about that sort of like affective storytelling. So again it was different than the 2012 example because it wasn't about saving some people over here that we don't know actually about the politics of their country. It was about people's own personal experiences and politics which I think is an important distinction in like the cases that we look at in the book as well. But that is a hashtag that also then Planned Parenthood has been able to successfully levy across platforms and in different ways and over time, because it's not specifically tied. You know they didn't use Coleman in the hashtag they didn't use the year in the hashtag it's not tied to a specific moment or a specific person even though it originated in that moment. So even now in 2020 as Planned Parenthood continues to be attacked by certain people in policy and legislation people are still using the hashtag I stand with PP because it's sort of this more universal sort of discourse and I think that again goes back to Aaron's point about like well how do we know what what is a good hashtag look like and we can't predict it but I think those again that sort of reflects some of the qualities and the other example if I can quickly that I was thinking of is and back to your very original point Dave about this larger universe of activism and advocacy. We totally agree with and we talked about in the book that you know we see hashtag activism, similar to our activism similar to other forms of media activism as part of sort of the changing the hearts and minds, changing the story helping people imagine a different narrative right about the world, but of course that doesn't change the fact that we need people engaging in you know traditional forms of petition and policy change traditional forms of like on the ground, you know sometimes civil disobedience and other forms of action. And that was something that I'm sure everyone here knows. Many sort of hashtags were critiqued for like oh online activism is slactivism it's not legitimate it's not this and this. But what we know is that you know, most people who are going to show up for a protest or going to get on a mailing list are going to do that with or without the hashtag. The hashtag draws a larger audience in. And so I think the Black Lives Matter hashtag is a really, really great example of that where there's an organization an official organization that you know the Black Lives Matter founder founders and other racial justice activists working on issues of police brutality have called the organizational for black struggle. They have a website they have a mailing list that's much more akin with what Dave is talking about with the traditional you know they send you an email they ask for donations to see what their specific campaign demands are they're also connected to an organization color of change which similarly has a mailing list and just specific policy demands and campaigns. But they were able to get much more public attention much more media attention, a much more sort of like diverse network of people paying attention to these issues through the hashtag then through just the sort of actual one on one engagement and so I agree with what Dave said originally about this being sort of one ingredient in a larger more successful strategy for for any organization I don't know if Aaron would agree with that but Yeah, I mean I definitely think like we're not expecting you know when you use a hashtag you hope that it brings people to you as an organization but I think for me my approach with any hashtag that we're making recently we started a narrative change campaign around abortion and that also has a hashtag but I think you know we're hoping people engage with it and it pushes the narrative broader than just folks who are on our email list who are already following us because someone retweets that into their feed or someone chooses to engage with the hashtag and someone outside of our network sees it so it's very much I think you know yes it can move people to action but I think from an organizational perspective. It's all about the narrative change and the messaging for me and thinking about how can we create a hashtag that taps into the storytelling taps into. Yeah, like imagining the world that you want, which is, you know, goes back to our sort of healthcare hashtag which is put patients first you know that's a values based positive framing. And our abortion campaign is abortion act hashtag abortion actually because we want people to talk about what abortion actually is versus all these negative things that are out there about it so you know it's we very much tap into that positive like imagine the better world and hope that it reaches folks outside our network, but yeah I mean you hope that then they join your email list or they take action with you or they show up to your protest. But yeah I mean it's hard to convert people and move people out that ladder, but I think yeah the strongest, the strongest thing about hashtags is definitely the storytelling and the messaging and just reaching folks and hopefully simplifying your message to more people, and it's free like you said. That's great I had a whole bunch of things that I wanted to ask more about and I'm going to, I'm going to resist that temptation and, and kind of get started with some of the questions that are coming in from, you know from people who are watching. Let me just start with a question that that's particularly addressed to Sarah but obviously for for anybody which is, can you say a bit more about black Twitter and the ability of that community to drive conversations. Are there other communities out there that are especially good at repeatedly driving online. Yeah, that's a great question thanks to whoever asked it. So, I know. So, yes, so I'm sure people who have studied Twitter sort of paid attention to the discussion about like why Twitter has become such a sort of not just at influencer in terms of politics and activism but also cultural and pop cultural influence and I know that you know a lot has been written about the fact that compared to our representation in the US population and compared to our representation on other social media platforms. African Americans are over represented on Twitter so Twitter has a larger user base of African Americans and then other platforms. So there's, there's a lot of things about the technological infrastructure that have made, you know what people call black Twitter into a thing that you know a few years. I think the Los Angeles Times hired a reporter, just to cover black Twitter and you know some other journalistic publications have done that as well and you know research reports have come out. That you can follow anybody. So unlike on other social media, which is sort of reflective of how racially segregated our communities in the United States are where for example on Facebook you tend to be friends with people you know in real life and for most Americans. And so as a result of their same race on Twitter, you can follow anyone and you see other people's content when it gets retweeted into your timeline by people you follow and so as a result, it's much easier for users who aren't black to follow black users on Twitter and to sort of see what those stories and narratives are that are happening and in fact we talk about in the book how this was really useful for allyship around some of the black lives matter stuff. So, so black users on Twitter have been extremely influential, not just in terms of politics but in terms of popular culture, in terms of style. We talk about in the book and there's a great example in our forward that Mark mentioned from Jeannie Lauren who is sort of a become an influencer I would say on Twitter, where you know ordinary folks who have a certain what I would call really rooted in black cultural communication styles sometimes sarcastic sometimes like sort of dark humor, sometimes able to able to talk about very serious topics in a way that is accessible. So talk about for example race and racism in a way that you can also laugh which sounds, you know, very odd. A lot of those communication styles you see in the successful hashtags and in the successful and popular tweets and a lot of those come out of black Twitter and so, you know, I think it's interesting and absolutely the case that networks of African American folks on Twitter have really had an important and significant influence in politics and you see that as well in feminist Twitter where very early on in Twitter there was sort of the immediate headbutting and engagement of critiques coming from women of color and women of color feminists about the claims and sort of demands of what they were seeing as white feminism only representing you know certain types of experiences, and I don't think it's an accident then that when we look at successful feminist hashtags on Twitter that have trended and become popular. A large majority of them actually were started by women of color. So yes all women was started by Muslim American women. You know, survivor privilege was started by a black woman, why I stayed was started by a black woman, you'll case this was started by black women. Say her name was started by black women and me to although it was popularized by Alyssa Milano as we know was originally you know used by Toronto Burke in her in her activist campaigns. And so I think that that is partially response to the fact that on Twitter. There's more direct sort of not just engagement but also critique across racial groups. So that there's more and you know some people might call it call out culture and I really don't like to use that term but there's more people saying like hey, this group. And you know there's this whole other group of us over here having this other set of experiences that you haven't been advocating around that you haven't been tweeting about, and that has really become sort of a part of the part per course of Twitter political engagement and I think that's why we see black Twitter being so influential. Before, before going back to, I feel like Aaron wants to say something, but before doing that, I have the most mundane question. I'm somebody who lived pretty active on Twitter, completely off Facebook for decades, or as long as one could be off it. Are we talking about something that's almost entirely Twitter I mean it seems to me their Facebook and analogues to some of the campaigns. Are there, is there, are there any that start there or are we talking almost exclusively about a Twitter. Well it's interesting because the hashtag black lives matter. Alicia Garza, who's one of the founders of black lives matter first use that hashtag on Facebook. But the technological infrastructures of Facebook and the way things trend are different so it you know hashtags don't really trend on Facebook like the, they do but it's not the same it's not like then everybody on Facebook sees it it's still within, you know your network or whatever. So a lot of there was a lot of crossover. Similarly YouTube very early on when Twitter was still in the early days of Twitter you couldn't embed videos, you couldn't embed pictures, we know now you can do that. But so early on you know, for example in the Oscar Grant case, it was the YouTube video of Oscar Grant being shot by BART police that went viral. And people were sharing it on Twitter, but it had to be an outlink so people would have to follow the link out to YouTube in order to see the viral video whereas now if that happened today and I want to say, you know, God forbid but it probably will happen again, you know. If someone shares that video on Twitter, it will actually autoplay which you know there's a whole critique about that and whether that's good for people's mental health but you'll be able to watch it on the platform. I think there's other social media networks like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram also comes into play here. But the way that the sort of architecture of Twitter is makes it I think uniquely easy for things to spread across groups of people that don't know each other in real life. Did you want to, did you have thoughts about the original? I think I was just nodding my head really enthusiastically about Sarah's call out culture comment. But yeah I also agree the platforms are just structured completely differently and folks don't engage in hashtags on other platforms. Thanks for helping me with, thanks for helping me with that kind of mundane question. Question here in the note from the authors in the book it says that Jeannie Lauren who wrote the forward was a victim of brigading that caused her account to be suspended. And I think it's, I don't think the reason was ever clear. So how much is how common is this and how much of the hashtag movements face that kind of opposition or, or being shut down? Dave and I are actually part of a sort of, I don't know what would you call it Dave like a think tank where we're studying online sort of harassment and silencing and sort of some of the not good things which there are many, right as we know now about social media One of the things is that some of the tools, some of the algorithms, some of the methods that platforms like Facebook and Twitter have put into effect in order to supposedly protect people from harassment, hate speech, etc. can also then be appropriated by those wanting to spread hate and used against them and so that's was what happened to Jeannie Lauren who was wrote the forward of our book and had a really was a really pivotal person in a couple of the hashtag networks where she tweets often about race and racism and racial justice issues. And she had her account for gated which means a group of people organized and all reported her for abuse at the same time. And the way that Twitter had set up the algorithm was if you get reported for abuse multiple times they would just automatically suspend your account. And so this became a silencing tool for, you know, white supremacists and men's rights activists and other people who wanted to silence racial justice or feminists, they could all go and report the count and algorithm would suspend before checking right so it was like they would suspend you and then only later. If you sort of wrote to them and you know made a big deal about it could you get unsuspected and that's what happened with Jeannie Jeannie actually had to go through the link on the name but it's a legal advocacy organization actually she that worked with her to reach out to Twitter to get her unsuspected and she came to the release of the book in New York just a couple weeks ago when we were still going out in public. And she talked about how you know eventually they unsuspected her and they even invited her to Twitter headquarters and you know have been very generous with her but not everybody has the benefit of being able to have somebody advocate for them in a moment like that and so it's not uncommon and of course just like the real world. The people who are targeted with sort of brigading and other forms of online harassment tend to be people who are already have marginal identities and in society so obviously in for example the hashtags on feminist issues you often see women getting rape threats on Twitter or other sort of serious forms of identity based you know harassment. You often see black folks being called racial slurs on Twitter and you know I mean we've even seen this with people who are in positions of power we've seen this in the last few years with some of our new Democratic politicians who have been being inundated with rape threats and racial slurs and you know all these things and there's a lot of questions about how they as public figures even are supposed to respond to that whether they're allowed to block people whether they're not because they're politicians so it's a problem it is one of the problems that the platforms Twitter and all other social media platforms need to do better on figuring out how to handle. So either of you want to add. On that experience. I think Sarah basically got it but the only thing I would add is that it has been becoming more common, because things like we're getting are a tactic, and you have networks of people who have figured out this is a way that we can deploy power against those who are voicing opinions that we disagree with. As Sarah said they are mostly deploying that power against people who also come from marginalized identities. Some of the viewers will, well, no I got into a bit of a tiff with Brett Stevens and New York Times columnist back in August, I got zero death threats. Wow. Like, what is a guy got to do to get a threat. But if that if I that had happened to any of my female colleagues in my department, they would have gotten dozens of death threats as they do basically every week on Twitter. So that definitely fits that that definitely it's amplified by marginalized identities. It is a strategy that is being pursued. I think the, the other reason why I didn't get any death threats is that Brett Stevens being a never trumpet meant that the people who would deploy that tactic. If it had been me versus like Tucker Carlson, we're like, Oh, we're going to sit back and laugh because we don't like that guy either. So I got lucky and who my opponent was. And that is evidence that like this is strategic behavior, which only is going to get better if the platforms decide that they're going to step up and actually do something about it, which they've been really slow to do. And that's something that's really important that you know we get asked when we talk about the book a lot my co-authors and I is about, you know, we always get this question that's like well what about the Nazis on Twitter, right, or like what about the Russian box on Twitter right and and our position on that is like, yeah, like we wrote a book about these particular networks and these particular hashtags because we really feel that this is an important and undertold story to sort of highlight how marginalized groups are using hashtags in ways that you know Twitter wasn't made for them, you know it wasn't made for this but it's this really innovative strategy and of course you know there are other scholars and other people who are doing the very important work of studying how these same platforms are also being used to further hateful ideologies to further miss and disinformation, and that in fact you know the platform in this case. I don't want to say it's neutral because nothing is neutral right but the platform is an object it's a tool and the way people use it matters and so people can use it towards sort of progressive or liberatory goals and they can also use it in in the reverse direction for sure. We're really getting close to time so I want to make sure I get. Last few questions in, although I just got a message that we can go past one so if we can go past one let's go past one question. I think that's identified as a question from the Middle East. What does research say about whether an individual on an individual level. Hashtag activism can dilute offline activism by giving the impression sometimes false that one is doing enough to fulfill their civic responsibility. I guess you could call this the slack of his. People think that's a hey they they achieved something. So, I will go first on this and say that the research is mixed there are some who have found that yes maybe it's there there's a bit of a slack of something there are those who found no. I have always maintained and will still loudly maintain that it's starting from the wrong prompt. If you are using this in a good campaign, then the hashtag activism or the digital petition you're signing or whatever first online step you're taking is the first step in a broader campaign to mobilize for social change. And that's that's a useful set of tools to have I'm glad that we have have them. When people sign it like I was invited on my campus. Last week, some people are mad at our university president. This is before COVID-19. And there was petition to the university president asking him to just resign. And I was like, I am not signing that petition because that is not a thing that our target is going to do. That was like there was a bad actress tactic. I think we really need to look at these things in terms of the broader campaign context, because the answer is like yeah people are taking one action and then never invited to do another thing. Yes, the research suggests that maybe that will leave them feeling like, okay I did enough. But that means that you're running a terrible campaign. You're saying we're just going to do one thing and then not ask people to do another thing. You ask them to do the one thing, and then you say to them that wasn't enough here's the next thing we need to do. The nice thing is that you, you've changed the narrative you also potentially built a list, and you can use that to mobilize for power. Aaron. Yeah, I mean I think that. Sure, tweeting doesn't necessarily always change the world but it also does. I think that Black Lives Matter and me too are just incredible examples of that, that did change the world and so I think that I don't know, I, I think that even if your network is five people. So, tell a story with the hashtag and that in those five people continue to share that story and you know the hashtag grows I think that is activism, like it's not selectivism you're doing something and also I think that, you know this is folks have said that the idea that armchair activism or selectivism it's also kind of ableist because there are people who can't go to a protest all the time or maybe their best option is online and so to discount online activism I think is just rude and wrong and is against the research so. Yeah, I just concur with with what, what these folks have already said there's actually a great study that came out a few years ago. That if I had access to the other people I could share, called the critical periphery and the growth of social protests, and basically what these researchers argue is that the people who are going to, you know show up carrying a sign, you know, tie themselves to the university president's house, go to the women's march block traffic, those people are engaged and going to be engaged in that way, regardless of sort of online activism and so what essentially the idea isn't that because online activism exists suddenly people that were going to show up to something in real life, or going to sign a petition in real life, say like oh well I'm no longer going to that thing. Instead, it broadens the number of people who are aware of the issue and so they sort of argue that there's this periphery of people who have maybe never participated in a protest, maybe would never feel safe or comfortable or be able to physically show up to something who maybe would be afraid to sign a petition because of some kind of backlash against them, but can have an anonymous Twitter account for example, and that those people sharing information is actually very good for the promulgation of sort of the demands and ideas that come out of the movement and that that sort of exists in and of itself as something useful. And there are actually sort of a smaller group of people that are both the people who show up to the protest and tweet about it, right, and so that these sets of sort of people overlap and are all important and also thank you to that person for tuning in from so far away I love that. Right, I mean and the question of course has a slightly different context in a world where there won't be much canvassing for a while and there won't be a lot of in person protesting and people probably won't be chaining themselves to things for for the foreseeable future. So, it's interesting how how different that that it's an old question and it feels, it feels a little different. Let me throw out a question from from Elena Soros in the political reform program, which is, can can this kind of hashtag activism, genuinely be democrat be democratizing and opening up organizing people, otherwise wouldn't have a voice weren't involved in existing organization, or is the commercialization of just the commercialization of it kind of drown that out and how much is this, how much is this really new and how much can can it be, you know, whatever can it be democratizing I guess. I mean I think yes, that's why I wrote a book about it. There is a lot of noise and there's a lot of noise there's a lot of commercial stuff and a lot of this leading stuff I mean one question I mean my maybe just further question a little further. Like one thing I've been thinking about that number of points in this conversation is like as a, as a person engaged, I'm continually trying to figure out who to trust and what to trust, you know, it's like, you know, I was thinking last night that I spent the first part of the time trying to figure out which of the people who do elaborate Russia theories are reliable and which ones are crackpots and it's a lot of work to do that. And it's a lot of work and now I'm like okay, who are the bullshit epidemiologists and who are the actual epidemiologists, you know, a lot of work to do that or the Coney 2020 example is a good, you know, yes, like the first thing I heard about it was it's this really dubious organizational mess. And so that's the that I carried that skepticism with me, but but in other cases I don't actually know what's going so it's like, in a way that's the, how do how do we prove how do we ensure that kind of real activism useful activism or whatever kind of cuts through the noise. Well, I mean, I think to use the current moment, rather than, you know, book example which I could also use the trending of the hashtag flat and the curve, which really it wasn't unfortunately a public or government, you know, campaign to turn that hashtag it was doctors and nurses and physicians assistants and epidemiologists on Twitter, explaining to people sharing, you know, infographics, explaining what the concept of flattening the curve or that really led a lot of Americans to now be familiar now you hear people and see people say you know, flatten the curve and we all seem to understand what that means, even though that's like really a shorthand for something that's like pretty complex idea. And so I would say yes of course, you know, it's it doesn't mean that everything, and certainly it's not the case that it can be trusted or as useful or can spread democratically in fact, in many ways that's not true for many things, but certainly for some things. We still see sort of ordinary people having influence having power, and it benefiting us as a whole to sort of listened to those to those stories and narratives and one thing we found in the book is I think that social media users are more trusted than we sometimes give them credit for when we talk about them as a whole of course we know disinformation is a huge problem. We know there are a lot of people that believe things and consume things online that are not trustworthy and have bad information. But what you have to remember is there's also millions of other people who are consuming things online and are doing the work of sort of judging. Let me check this source. Let me do this other thing. So do we have a problem with with with whether information is reliable and whether ordinary people, you know, can be believed in all this stuff. Yes, do we also have people that are able to sort out misinformation and engage and tell honest stories and help us learn a difficult concept like flatten the curve. Also, yes, so I would just say that there's it's nuanced. David, I know you probably have to pop off soon so yeah comment on this and then we can let you go and and we'll wrap up in a couple minutes. Yeah. Yeah, so what I'd add is it is nuanced and there's a role here for the platforms right now for the platforms and eventually for regulators if we ever go back to a time when we have government regulators who actually get to regulate things. Like the pound the table moment that I always have when people ask me about social media and disinformation in the 2020 election is to remind people that we don't have a functioning FEC. And if we don't have a federal election commission, then yeah Facebook and Twitter and Google are just going to make up the rules on their own because there's literally no one else to do it. But there's a role for the social media companies to not just disincentivize bad behavior, but notice where bad behavior is currently being incentivized. Like a lot of the fake news factories out of Macedonia that drew so much headlines so many headlines in 2016. Those were partially being run as an as a political influence operation but they were partially being run because there was a lot of money to be made in setting up those fake news factories and spreading through Facebook and Twitter. And it was after the election that Facebook demonetized those play they set new rules to demonetize them. They could have and should have done it beforehand. The whole question of like, who should we be trial like what epidemiologist should be trusting online. It's nuanced because you're always going to have some asshole who decides that it would be fun to lie online. But those assholes will be relatively rare if a they are aware that they can lose their platform when they get caught and be they'll be rare if there's no money in it. And the way that we end up getting a ton of this stuff is when it's an effective business model to run a bunch of scams. And again, again, ideally we would have an FCC and an FCC that actively worked out these tough problems because I don't think that the platforms I don't think a few companies should be the ones setting the rules of public discourse. And we're not going to have regulators that I'm afraid we need our digital monopolist to be benevolent monopolists. And for the, at least in the short term, figure out where are their platforms creating monetary incentives like financial incentives and reputational incentives that encourage terrible behavior, and then they should change the incentives, and then it'll still be difficult figuring out how to trust who to trust. But I think it will be easier if the algorithms and the rules get adjusted so that you don't have as much of the stuff cropping up because there's money. Great, thanks. Although I mean, I do think as a user, it's the real challenge is not the bliers it's the people who, you know, either don't know what they're acting good faith but don't know what they're talking about. I mean, even as I if I try to understand a movement that's sort of I'm not in like if I want, if I want to get what Black Lives Matter or anything is about it's it's it's work and I think we have to. We have to respect how complex that can be. Yeah, and that'll still be work. I think there will be right now that's work layered on top of all the other stuff. And that work will always be there, but it'll be easier I think to take that on. If we're not also cognitively taxing ourselves by trying to sort through all of the other junk that crops up because basically there's money. Great. Okay. And I'm going to need to rock. So I know good luck. Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks. Take care everyone. Yeah, I know we promised people we would finish it one so I thanks to everyone for staying a few minutes over and for the great questions. Aaron, do you want to I think that will be our last question but but I'd love to hear Aaron's thoughts on. I mean, I actually raised a bunch of things here so. Yeah, wherever you'd like. I think it makes me think about, you know, something as an organization, you know, when we're engaging with Twitter, you know, something I actually be really thoughtful about is, you know, retweeting people or making sure that people are engaging in good faith in our content. So, you know, if you're going through a hashtag campaign and you're like okay I'm going to lift up some folks that I don't know them it's grassroots whatever you really do have to look at someone's profile because I have been in situations where someone engages but they're actually trolling you and it's just not like very clear. Like that that's part of the due diligence of, you know, don't engage with people who have fish catching pictures as their profile and no shade anyone who has that is their profile picture but I think we all know it's a big troll account flags. I think it's yeah it's interesting to engage with that as a platform and you have to be really careful about who you actually lift up and, and I think to your point to yeah it's like we can't trust any one person to right you know we have to check with the consensus and get multiple viewpoints and all this. So that's where the, the links to organizations can actually be really helpful. Sarah when you were talking about the Planned Parenthood campaign, like that's an organization that comes in with it enters the conversation with an enormous reservoir of trust. Right. It kind of greater than any organization that exists. Yeah, well I mean to use that carefully of course. Yeah. Um, just one last thing on that I think because you just triggered something that's really important for me to say about the hashtag networks we study is offline and in person real life trust matters. A lot in these networks because then a lot of people don't realize this you know when Twitter was first launched, it was launched as a micro blogging site. And a lot of people from the blog is fear. So a lot of feminist bloggers, a lot of, you know, various bloggers moved from blogs onto Twitter or kept and maintain both. And so actually a lot of the networks the early sort of roots of the networks we study in the book the racial justice networks the feminist networks started with people who had been interacting for years in blogs, and on their blogs so they never met in real life, but they had already sort of acclimated to a culture of I asked questions you respond there's good faith exchange here. And so that then later facilitates the trust that when somebody starts a hashtag, people maybe if they've never even seen that person in real life can feel like they've known that person for 10 years they know that that person's a real person, because you know they've followed their blog and have seen pictures of their friends they know where they work they you know whatever so there is like a certain level of trust, I think, even on the individual level of how users choose to or not choose to engage with particular user other users and hashtags. That's great. All right. Well I have gotten the time to wrap message which usually takes a different form but unless you want to you want to the last word Aaron otherwise will. No, I think. Yeah. All right well. Thank you. Both of you and Dave for being part of this as well as the audience and America team for helping to put this together so hopefully this will be this will be the first of many that the political reform program and fellows program do. Thank you all very much.