your favorite influencer is a humanitarian now
on media literacy and infographic activism
Lately social media and the news alike have been pretty much swamped with with posts about conflict in Israel.
or, rather: a conflict escalating toward genocide. A conflict which Human Rights Watch, a neutral international nonprofit dedicated to reporting on abuses worldwide, flagged as apartheid and persecution as early as 2021. Note that persecution is considered to be the eighth of ten steps in escalating toward genocide, with the ninth step being extermination. As of October, Human Rights Watch has not revised that ruling and has documented civilian casualties and war crimes on both sides, while acknowledging systemic repression of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli authorities.
This isn’t a post about international conflict beyond the paragraph above. While I do strive to provide correct information whenever possible, I am definitely not the right person to report on an international conflict in an area I’m unfamiliar with, and on which plenty of people are, indeed, reporting.
Talk of conflict in Israel is so pervasive that you cannot open social media without seeing commentary on it. There are posts highlighting tragedy and violence, and posts of infographics sharing “save Palestine” in bubblegum pink lettering with lots of bullet points but no discernible sources. There are posts decrying that everyone should be posting their stance on the conflict on social media (dirty cowards!!), and there are posts by beautiful influencers with thousands of followers about how deeply saddened they are by violence on both sides (my favorite genre of post).
Recommended read: Posts about Posts by comedian Ginny Hogan. Discusses the types of posts we see on social media, particularly the types of posts in times of conflict directing others to post in a certain way.
your favorite influencer is a humanitarian now
Lately I’ve been seeing hundreds of wishy-washy posts from influencers vaguely discussing how they’re saddened by violence and war, and perhaps even working it into their regular content.
The aesthetics of being so, deeply saddened by tragic global events (and be not mistaken, all things on social media are fundamentally influenced by aesthetics) are a soft, sad, and sensitive beautiful woman. It’s hard to find fault in a beautiful sad woman. Very Ophelia, very 18th-century fainting couch, very Daisy.
When one is genuinely invested in an injustice, the emotion is often rage and not sadness, but the aesthetics of rage do not serve the pretty influencer as well as the image of a beautiful, sad girl.
This isn’t to say that these influencers and the women managing their accounts are intentionally disingenuous— rather that we the consumer need to learn to view social media with increased media literacy that accounts for the motivations behind the posts we see on the internet. There is a tangible benefit to a beautiful woman with thousands of followers posting vaguely about how saddened she is about global violence— it avoids taking a side that might offend any side while could be read as in support of either. It plays on aesthetics we as a culture find acceptable— beautiful, sensitive women are allowed to and should be saddened by violence.
(I know some of you are saying “Hey, Maddy, this sounds a lot like internalized misogyny. Let girls be girls.”.
The idea that all women are irreproachable does not make for a useful feminism. That aside, this is not necessarily a reproach of the women themselves, rather a call to critically consider the motivation of the influencer and the content they chose to, or not to share. )
I think ultimately when it comes to posting on social media about global tragedies we post because we feel helpless, and posting makes us feel like we’re doing something. Maybe that is true of the influencer is well, but it’s worth remembering that most people with social media followings are extremely social media savvy—
They’re posting in a certain way because they know it will benefit them. I’m not at all saying these people are bad people (I do not know the person) or even that what they’re doing is wrong. Rather, everyone posts on social media in a way they think will benefit them most, and that is extremely important to keep in mind when engaging in content online always.
Read: are influencers people? the answer may surprise you for context on why I separate the word “influencer” from the person running the account.
“post your stance on international conflict you dirty dirty coward”
One of my other least favorite genres of posts is posts calling to action readers or influencers to post in favor of a certain side, because surely the reason they most not be posting is cowardice.
Okay, so let’s talk about that for a moment— Why do we care that an influencer’s stance lines up with our own?
My “influencer” account primarily shares outdoor advice and trail guides— why would you want to go to the person who writes your trail guides for international news?
Social media has created a world in which we have perceived endless access to people, but not the actuality of it. We develop parasocial relationships with online personalities— relationships in which we, the observer, feel connected to a person through consuming their content, a person who is not connected to us in turn. We the consumer fill in the gaps of their personality and build up an image of this person that is never and could never be true to form.
The consumer cares deeply that the influencer’s morals line up with their own because to agree furthers the depth of the parasocial relationship. When the influencer behaves in a way that is not in accordance with the way we the consumer would like them to behave, it feels like a betrayal.
Ultimately we shouldn’t care what our favorite beauty influencer thinks about anything beyond lipgloss. It is not everyone’s job to have a well-informed comment on everything.
Perhaps our wanting influencers to speak on topics we care about comes from not only the wanting our values to line up with all the content we consume but also the perception that the influencer has perceived social power, and ought to be posting a certain way to “raise awareness”. We’ll be diving right on into some of the complications of awareness raising on social media very shortly.
On the idea that it is cowardice not to post on social media about certain issues:
The second part of the rhetoric of “silence is violence” aka “post in support of this you coward” is the idea that the reason someone might choose not to post about a conflict or humanitarian issue can only be cowardice.
Perhaps obviously, this is a fallacy. There are a lot of reasons someone might choose not to post that are not cowardice, and I’ll lay out my own reasons here:
As mentioned above, I think it’s dangerous to set the precedent that we should care what our influencers think on everything.
When I did share more on issues like this, there were several times I found out after the fact things I had shared were inaccurate or intentionally misleading. For a while I started manually fact-checking everything. I found a lot of inaccuracies in viral infographics. I stopped sharing the genre altogether.
Honestly, there is no way for me to share in a way that doesn’t benefit me and that makes me feel icky. If I share my stance on something, I get hundreds of people who already agreed with me doubling down and congratulating me for having the “right” stance. contrary to popular opinion, I actually do not get that many people vehemently arguing with me or calling me names. I maybe get two unfollows, and the people who already *wanted* me to agree with them add a little tally in my “good person” column, and I literally concretely benefit because people like me more, and the currency of an influencer account is likeableness. It just doesn’t feel right. I think it’s really important to note that by and large, the people who follow me on social media are very similar to me, and almost always already agree with me on most topics, thus dulling my ability to effectively raise awareness, especially on a topic already largely discussed.
It feels hollow to post. It feels like doing something to tick a box, doing something because it feels like I should, and not doing anything meaningful at all, because it’s not. Even when I shared deeply informative posts about global conflicts, most people just clicked straight through. Piling on and posting when everyone else already is accomplishes little except making me look good to the people who already agree with me.
I just don’t at my core believe social media is a good place to discussed nuanced issues. There’s no way I could articulate all this, this whole long article, in a story slide or two on Instagram, so I’m not going to. Social media is designed to exploit addiction psychology, profit off our insecurities, and escalate conflict. How can a platform operating with those key goals in mind ever do more good than harm?
It’s a feeling of helplessness that drives us to post on social media about violence we cannot prevent and one of the easiest ways to impose a sense of control, or at the least order, is to shame the way that other people post, and influencer-types are certainly an easy target.
(I get it. see section your favorite influencer is a humanitarian now. It’s not that I think influencers are beyond reproach, but rather we should make sure our reproaches rely on actual media analysis and not popular fallacies).
Still, lately it feels like what you post on social media is a litmus test for whether or not you’re a good person. We speak in extremes— if you do not post this, then you are this. We’ve created a pressure to share or use social media in a certain way; when everyone is compelled to share in a certain way, to have the same opinion and articulate it correctly, the stances themselves become devoid of all meaning because they are compelled.
Moreover, if you don’t agree with me on this key point then I am writing you off as a person is… terrible, and a lot of the loudest rhetoric on social media reads like this. Imposing your morals, world view, and sensibilities on someone you don’t know, refusing to try to understand their viewpoint is a phenomenon that seems to happen equally on both sides of the political fence and ought to be equally condemnable in both instances.
bubblegum lettering and infographic activism
When it’s all said and done, social media is probably a terrible place for activism. While there are (arguably) good parts about social media— undeniably, it can “raise awareness”, facilitate the dissemination of information, and uplift marginalized voices— ultimately the framework of the apps themselves, designed to exploit the worst parts of human psychology, preclude them from being an effective tool for social change.
Apps like Instagram and Tiktok rely on a variable ratio reinforcement schedule, where users are seemingly randomly rewarded with likes or views in a way designed to keep users on the app. This is the same strategy used at slot machines in Vegas and linked directly to addiction psychology.
In the context of Instagram, variable reinforcement schedule works in that users do not know when they will be rewarded with likes, or views, or online social interactions when they open the app, and as a result users dopamine reward system (the same neurological pathway involved in addiction) is triggered every time they open the app.
The more emotional the topic, the better it will perform on Instagram because this dopamine reward system is triggered and you stay on the app longer. Thus social media apps stand to benefit from pushing highly emotional content.
I recommend reading the article People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much by Ian Bogost published in 2021 in The Atlantic, which provides an excellent look into topics of human anthropology and the ways in which platforms like Facebook capitalize on human nature to promote violence.1
Infographic activism reportedly raises awareness about important causes and topics, but “raised awareness” is just vague enough to be difficult to measure. What good is that raised awareness if it is limited to sharing a graphic and logging off, especially if that graphic is riddled with factual inaccuracies and oversimplifications?
Neutrality, objectivity, and frankly, facts do not fare well in the social media landscape.2
As stated by Angela Mao in Stanford Rewired, “Even when a creator is not intentionally trying to spread misinformation, posts that try to boil down complex geopolitical situations into 10 slide posts tend to oversimplify and misrepresent them.”
The aesthetics of the posts themselves are also worth discussing. The entire purpose of Instagram is to use aesthetics as a tool, and the topic of aesthetics in infographic activism probably deserves it’s own in-depth post. (Or master’s thesis, check this out!)
Aesthetics in themselves are a tool of propaganda— according to page eight of Avery Beard’s 2022 Master’s Thesis Activism, Aestheticized: Instagram Infographics, Visual Politics, and Online Advocacy, “focus on aesthetics shifts attention away from the material reality of a political situation to the spectacle of it”.
Beard also references quote by communications theorist Marshall McLuhan: “the medium is the message”.
Extrapolating from ideas put forth in Beard’s thesis how does Instagram, with the ugliness of its algorithm and its bubblegum letters and graphics made in Canva, distort the reality of violence?
@so.informed and infographic activism
Very interestingly, the account that came up time and time again in case studies of infographic activism was @so.informed. I’ve seen graphics from this account every single time I logged on to the internet this week.
Most case studies were usually not overtly critical of so.informed, but rather analyzed the use of aesthetics to captivate an audience on Instagram. Here’s a quick list of where you can find and read those case studies:
Activism, Aestheticized: Instagram Infographics, Visual Politics, and Online Advocacy, Avery Beard, page 30-38.
How social justice slideshows took over Instagram, Terry Nguyen, Vox
One particular article called out so.informed for “repackaging the work of actual scholars” amongst other incidences, including building a platform off Nigerian-American Activist Ijeoma Olou’s identity in naming the account So You Want to Talk About (previous name of so.informed; the account name was changed to so.informed after this incident), a name strikingly similar to Olou’s book titled So You Want to Talk About Race.
How “Anti-Racist” Instagram Accounts Can Actually Cause Harm To People Of Color, Zeahaa Rehman, Refinery29
Earlier this week I sat in front of my phone looking at a graphic from so.informed and debating if I should reshare it to my Instagram story. If so, what should I say with it? What do I have to add to this conversation? What would the actual results be of me resharing that graphic?
Can I guarantee anything about the correctness of the graphic? Can I guarantee that I understand the history of its creator? (At the time I didn’t know anything about allegations of profiting from the work of marginalized scholars; even so, I have watched many many activism accounts with the same aesthetic focus do terrible things online. I’m just not sure the types of people capable of using social media for personal gain, or rather people social media savvy enough to exploit the nature of how we interact with the algorithm to massive success, are good humanitarian touchstones).
Would sharing the graphic do anything other than make me feel good about myself for just a second? And what would my reasons be for sharing, if I know I fundamentally do not believe that any good can come from trying to have nuanced conversations on social media?
It used to be that sharing things like that made me feel like I was helping, like I wasn’t just passive while the world happened all around me.
Now, staring at the share button I just feel more helpless than before.
lighter topics & things!
Oh well hey, thanks so much for making it to the bottom of this post, I know it was a bit of a bear. If you’ve got thoughts on this I would love to hear them, feel free to leave a comment below!
It’s been a busy few weeks for me, so here are some small announcements & lighter reading:
My handknits shop is live for the winter! If you’re looking for handknit heirloom-quality mittens, hats, scarves, sweaters and winter hiking/ski gear inspired by traditional Norwegian and Irish knitting, this is for you. The code NEWSLETTER20 gets newsletter subscribers 20% off all items in my shop including knits, photo presets, and eBooks.
I finally finished writing my most-requested blog post How to Kayak Camp for Beginners! This includes packing lists and tips, route planning, and a list of destinations and guiding services to go with them. This article took four months to write, but was definitely worth the effort to create such a comprehensive free resource.
Over the winter, I’ll be working on a series of guides designed to help aspiring indie writers, photographers, and content creators figure out where to start. I’ll cover topics like basic SEO and making money from blogging in 2024, getting started on Substack, and how to create, publish, and market eBooks (oh hey, I’ve already written that one!)
Thanks for reading and hope you’re having a wonderful sunday!
xMaddy
parts of the last two paragraphs excerpted/paraphrased from don’t pay instagram— a little light self-plagiarism but it’s my newsletter and i’ll recycle if i want to!
see page 22 of Beard’s thesis for examples and case studies