Data Versus Democracy
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algorithmic social media, and reverse-chronological social media—give certain
people access to more information and/or a larger audience, each type of
platform privileges different voices and different messages, and each platform
privileges different kinds of group organizing.
A Movement Emerges as “Leaderless” Activists
Organize on Twitter
As I watched the events in Ferguson unfold from a distance, I observed the
organizational structure emerge in real time. In the beginning, there was little
organization to speak of. People who were physically present, and those who
weren’t, were sharing information—some true and some later debunked.
Much of this content contained the hashtag #ferguson, which I followed in its
own column on TweetDeck (alongside a column containing the tweets of
journalists who had proven trustworthy, to me, in their reporting). The early
content that I observed was raw—information, emotion, decentralization, no
singular community voice.
However, the community present on the ground had needs, and these needs
shaped their conversation, and it began to take on a structure. As police
formed barricades, protesters communicated both police locations and
their own locations to each other, so they could avoid arrest, escape the
tear gas, or form larger in-person groups to support each other. When
police brought out tear gas, LRADs, or started firing rubber bullets,
protesters shared that information with each other. Some took that as a cue
to avoid the area, others as a cue to swarm in with their cameras and
document what most of the press was not. When people needed medical
assistance and ambulances could not make it through the police line or a
crowd of protesters, they used Twitter to get the word out to those who
might help. And, of course, experienced protesters shared tips for dealing
with the police tactics that were emerging—where to find gas masks, how
to make makeshift ones, why you should rinse eyes with milk instead of
water, where to get earplugs, etc.
Twitter gave every participant a platform, and the #ferguson hashtag gave
those participants an audience. Twitter also allowed people to “participate”
from a distance—offering words of solidarity, connecting with organizations
in other Midwestern cities, and offering expert tactical advice. But as word of
the unrest spread, Twitter also allowed people to interfere, both locally and
from a distance. Many who were talking about Ferguson were using the same
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Chapter 4 | Domestic Disturbance
hashtag as those trying to organize in Ferguson. Not all those talking about
Ferguson were being helpful, and not every message being retweeted was
worth amplifying.
But the hashtag didn’t just give individuals a broadcast platform, it gave people
a way to find each other—a “hacked public space” 9 that functioned as a kind
of digital community center. That led to real personal connections and
conversations—a way of building community and a way of vetting for agitators.
Rather quickly, several voices emerged that were (1) demonstrably present,
(2) reliable, (3) accessible, and (4) had a large reach. When the hashtag became
noisy, or there wasn’t time for every individual in the community to vet every
claim of fact, these voices emerged as leaders who could be relied upon.
They weren’t just the people who knew and published the best information,
they were also reliable conduits—people to tag when sharing information,
so they could amplify good and pressing information to the community.
One of these emergent leaders wasn’t even from St. Louis. DeRay McKesson,
a middle school administrator from Minnesota, 10 heard about the protest
online and quickly made his way down to support the movement in person,
mainly on the weekends. By virtue of his expertise with both protest and with
Twitter, he quickly became an emergent leader of the movement. And a target
of the police. In an interview with The Atlantic, he remarks on the emergent
nature of the Ferguson protest leadership:
Ferguson exists in a tradition of protest. But what is different about
Ferguson, or what is important about Ferguson, is that the movement
began with regular people. … There are structures that have formed
as a result of protest, that are really powerful. It is just that you did
not need those structures to begin protest. … Twitter allowed that
to happen. 11
McKesson doesn’t go into specifics in this interview about what most of those
structures are. But we’ve already noted several of them. First, as McKesson
does stress in that interview, a movement can begin with anyone. Social media
gives everyone a voice, and if it’s heard by the right core group of people, it
can rapidly be amplified to a national or international audience. The leadership
of the movement is also emergent. It may end up being people with deep local
roots—like St. Louis alderman, Antonio French, who was a major voice on
9Dorothy Kim, “The Rules of Twitter,” Hybrid Pedagogy, published December 4, 2014,
http://hybridpedagogy.org/rules-twitter/.
10Noam Berlatsky, “Hashtag Activism Isn’t a Cop-Out,” The Atlantic, January 7, 2015, www.
theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/01/not-just-hashtag-activism-why-
social-media-matters-to-protestors/384215/.
11Ibid.
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53
Twitter and who was arrested for alleged unlawful assembly12—it may be
people who come to Ferguson from elsewhere to join in and take up the
charge—like McKesson—or it may be people who are already speaking to a
national audience about racial injustice at the hands of the police—like Alicia
Barza, the founder of #blacklivesmatter, a movement that predated Ferguson
but which rose to much greater public visibility as a result of Ferguson. 13
Perhaps most importantly, the structure of the movement was agile and
responsive to the needs of the moment. The leaders and the communicative
strategies that emerged were the result of specific needs in the face of
unanticipated circumstances. The combination of hashtags and
@-mentions, the bifurcation of public tweets and direct private messages,
the use of text and embedded Vine videos and livestreams, even the
sharing and charging of phones—all of these specific practices that
emerged were born of the needs of the moment, in conjunction with
the affordances and limitations of the technology. To many outside the
movement—or simply lacking in Twitter literacy—it likely seemed chaotic
and “unplanned,” but given the community’s fluency with the tools, it
allowed them a flexibility they would not have otherwise had. In fact,
without Twitter and Vine, it’s likely there would not have been a movement
to speak of. Or, in the words of McKesson, “Missouri would have convinced
you that we did not exist if it were not for social media. ”14
Who Decides What Stories Get Told?
For all of Twitter’s ability to facilitate both community organizing and the
proliferation of the message, its overall user base is still fairl
y small. According
to Pew Research, less than one-fourth of American adults used Twitter in
2014.15 And given the racial tinge to the unrest and the high degree of social
media segregation in the United States,16 it’s no surprise that it took so much
time for the news to hit the mainstream. In fact, there were over 1 million
tweets with the #ferguson hashtag before the first mainstream news story
12“Michael Brown protests in Ferguson met with rubber bullets and teargas.”
13Elle Hunt, “Alicia Garza on the Beauty and the Burden of Black Lives Matter,” The Guardian, published September 2, 2016, www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/02/alicia-
garza-on-the-beauty-and-the-burden-of-black-lives-matter.
14“Hashtag Activism Isn’t a Cop-Out.”
15“Social Media Fact Sheet,” Pew Research Center, published February 5, 2018, www.
pewinternet.org/fact-sheet/social-media/.
16Robert P. Jones, “Self-Segregation: Why It’s So Hard for Whites to Understand Ferguson,”
The Atlantic, published August 21, 2014, www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/
08/self-segregation-why-its-hard-for-whites-to-understand-ferguson/378928/.
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Chapter 4 | Domestic Disturbance
about the unrest.17 It didn’t help that Ferguson police were actively working
to control and contain the story, relegating (most) journalists to a “press pen”
where they were kept far from the physical confrontations and fed police
press releases, arresting journalists from The Washington Post and The Huffington
Post while they filmed police activity, and even firing rubber bullets at a camera
crew from Al Jazeera.18
But ultimately, the mainstream media did hear the story—and not just the
police’s story, but the protester’s story as well. The FBI heard the story, too,
and investigated (and later censured) the Ferguson Police Department for
their actions. Amnesty International sent observers who also called out
human rights violations perpetrated against the protesters.
But what if the story hadn’t broken through? What if it had stayed in Ferguson?
It wasn’t just the national mainstream media that wasn’t covering Ferguson
from the start. Facebook was eerily silent, too. As discussed earlier, while
Twitter’s reverse-chronological-order feed was dominated by #ferguson for
many Americans, Facebook’s algorithmic feed was not, sometimes even for
the same people.19 Algorithms make “decisions,” and what they decide impacts
what we see. 20 For whatever reason, Facebook’s algorithm in 2014 “decided”
that the Ice Bucket Challenge was a more appropriate content topic to deliver
to most of its users than the Ferguson unrest. It was only on Twitter, where
a tweet or a retweet immediately put that content at the very top of every
follower’s feed, that the story had an opportunity to take off. This not only
increased the likelihood of those messages being seen (relative to an algorithm
that deemphasized them), it also made the platform useful for organizing,
which ensured that the tweets (and retweets) from the heart of Ferguson
kept coming.
Twitter doesn’t work that way anymore. Not long after Ferguson, Twitter
introduced “While you were away”—an algorithmic interjection into an
otherwise reverse-chronological-order timeline.21 And in 2018, Twitter made
an algorithmic timeline the default. Though they gave users the option to
switch to a reverse chronology of the accounts they follow, the apps frequently
return to the algorithmic default.
17Conrad Hackett, Twitter Post, August 20, 2014, 5:59 p.m., twitter.com/conradhack-
ett/status/502213347643625472.
18“Michael Brown protests in Ferguson met with rubber bullets and teargas.”
19Ibid.
20Zeynep Tufekci, “Algorithmic Harms Beyond Facebook and Google: Emergent Challenges
of Computational Agency,” in Social Media Studies, ed. Duan Peng and Zhang Lei, p. 213,
accessed from https://ctlj.colorado.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Tufekci-
final.pdf.
21Alex Kantrowitz, “An Algorithmic Feed May Be Twitter’s Last Remaining Card To Play,”
BuzzFeed News, published June 29, 2015, www.buzzfeednews.com/article/alexkan-
trowitz/an-algorithmic-feed-may-be-twitters-last-remaining-card-to-p.
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55
The reason for the algorithm is simple. The algorithm increases engagement
and makes the service easy for new users to catch on to.22 Both of those
things increase advertising income and help Twitter make a profit. But that
raises an important question: What happens to the next Ferguson? Will we
hear about it? Or did we already miss it?
In the end, Twitter was a net positive for the people of Ferguson and the
movement that was born hybrid—the physical and the digital each being
critical components of its nature. It facilitated communication and coordination,
as well as the spread of a message far wider than would have been possible
even five years earlier.
As good as that was for #ferguson and #blacklivesmatter, it wasn’t good for
everyone.
You Can’t Just Quit the Internet: How
GamerGate Turned Social Media into
a “Real-life” Weapon
In 2014, a group of activists began to emerge, organize, and spread their
message nationally on Twitter. The battle they were fighting was not new, but
some of the tactics were, as were the means by which they organized and the
realization that they were both many and powerful. This loose coalition of
tech-fluent activists found each other, recruited others, and resisted the
advances of the enemy. The impacts of their tactics online had a noticeable
impact on the “real” (i.e., physical) world.
While those statements are all true relative to the protesters of Ferguson,
that’s not actually what I’m talking about here. In 2014, another group emerged
onto the national scene, also largely via Twitter. That group was GamerGate.
Rather than fighting for social justice, this group fought a decidedly anti social
battle against those they dubbed “social justice warriors,” or SJWs. These
GamerGaters—predominately young, white, straight, and male—decried the
diversification of gaming, considering it an attack against the straight white
male “minority.” But it wasn’t just a battle of words or ideas, it was a battle that
involved threats of physical violence, threats so real that the recipients of those
threats fled for their lives. And it didn’t just stop with GamerGate. Out of that
very group formed a new movement—the so-called alt-right. This movement
not only played a pivotal role in shifting the tone—and probably some votes—
in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, but their culture war led to a shooting
at a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor in December 2016 and the death of social
activist Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.
22Ibid.
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Chapter 4 | Domestic Disturbance
But before we get into the alt-right, first we need to unpack the events that
led to its rise: GamerGate.
Zoë Quinn and the Blog Post from Hell
In 2013, independent game developer, Zoë Qui
nn, released the game
Depression Quest. 23 It wasn’t your stereotypical game. Of course, that’s kind of the point. Ever since the 1980s, the public perception of video games has
been one dominated by role-playing games (e.g., World of Warcraft), first-
person shooters (e.g., Call of Duty), and sports games. The emphasis on
competition, conquest, and violence in these stereotypical games is very
closely tied to the stereotypical gamer—a suburban, adolescent (straight,
white) male. Now there’s nothing inherently masculine about games, nor
about competition, nor even violence. But in Western culture, particularly in
the United States, competitiveness, leadership, and heroism (too often
confused with violence from one of the “good guys”) have unfortunately
become intertwined with an idea of what masculinity looks like.
Quinn’s game—and her image as a gamer—could hardly be more opposite. A
queer-identifying woman, who also implanted a chip into her body so she
could become a “cyborg,” Quinn represents a very different image of a gamer. 24
Likewise, her game Depression Quest sought not to give players a rush of
adrenaline while killing Nazis or protecting Earth from an alien invasion. It
wasn’t even meant to be fun. Instead, Depression Quest sought to raise
awareness of what individuals go through when they experience depression,
something Quinn herself has experienced.25 Whether or not it is a “good”
game (I’ve never played it myself), it will certainly go down in history as an
important game—not only for what it demonstrates that a game could be,
but because of the movement that built up around it.
I wish I were talking about a movement that supported and encouraged
expanding public ideas of what a game(r) could be. Unfortunately, that’s not
the movement that followed.
Quinn had already faced some blowback from “traditional”/stereotypical
gamers about her game and the press that it received.26 A game that pushed
the boundaries the way Depression Quest did, especially one created by a
23Simon Parkin, “Zoë Quinn’s Depression Quest, ” The New Yorker, published September 9, 2014, www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/zoe-quinns-depression-
quest.
24Noreen Malone, “Zoë and the Trolls,” New York Magazine, published July 24, 2017,