Did anyone have police brutality and a presidential incitement to violence on their 2020 lunacy bingo card? No? I saw a tweet recently that sums up the state of things quite well — and I’m paraphrasing because it was quickly lost to the endless scroll, like so much these days: “Remember last month when we were worried about murder hornets? Simpler times.”
This year continues to outdo itself. At the time of writing much of the US is swamped by protest and panic. The conflict was sparked by the shocking death of George Floyd on May 25 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
This incident, one in a demonstrable pattern of targeted violence, is about human life and death, and equality. The big stuff. But it is also bringing to a head the conflict that has been brewing between US President Donald Trump and Twitter, between right-wingers and news media, around the role of social media in promoting and combating disinformation.
Technology is central to this matter, and to how its shock waves are being transmitted worldwide.
Floyd, an African American, died in police custody after being restrained and detained by a white [Colonialist American? Previously European American?] policeman. I write “restrained”, but there is no doubt that this was an act of police brutality. There is video footage of the cop kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes while Floyd can be heard repeatedly saying he can’t breathe, and ultimately passing out. He was later declared dead.
Over at Facebook a decision was taken to leave the presidential utterings unsullied, saying they had fallen foul of neither their fact checks nor community guidelines
And it is all out there on the internet for anyone to see: nine harrowing minutes of footage of a murder, filmed by a passer-by on a mobile phone camera. Footage that went viral on social platforms; platforms that enabled people to communicate and plan protests in response, and to call on their elected officials for justice and change. The same platforms Trump used to threaten protesters with “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”.
Trump initially embraced Twitter as an alternative to the “fake mainstream media” that he liked to blame for any unfavourable reports. Now he is railing against it for labelling his tweets as part of their evolving response to mis- and disinformation on the platform. The “shooting starts” tweet, for example, was tagged as glorifying violence. And a tweet about the validity of mail-in votes suffered the indignity of a fact check label.
Over at Facebook a decision was taken to leave the presidential utterings unsullied, saying they had fallen foul of neither their fact checks nor community guidelines. And this action prompted a virtual walkout (since we’re all working at home anyway) by Facebook staffers, and a re-emergence of the “hactivist” collective Anonymous, which took down the Minneapolis police department website in a suspected distributed denial of service attack.
Trump responded with characteristic restraint — signing an executive order aimed at directing the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to firm up rules on social media companies’ legal protections under the Communications Decency Act. Trump wants to see social media companies, such as Twitter, held liable for content shared by their users. The order is expected to be opposed, and would still have to go through an FCC process, so stay tuned.
But it is a national matter with international implications. The EU Commission, for example, has publicly supported Twitter. Actually, the whole thing is a national matter with international implications, in a fraught environment already facing off against the conjoined twins of coronavirus and economic crisis. The issues here are layered and the players intertwined.
Yesterday, we saw everyone from schoolchildren in France to the soccer moms of Sandton taking to Instagram to participate in the #blackouttuesday campaign — people profoundly separated from the matter by degrees of distance and opportunity, but united in outrage and support for the Black Lives Matter movement. It is a perfect metaphor for the blurring of our online and offline lives, and the shrinking of our global village existence, at this juncture in history — the outcome of which is still very much up for grabs.
A final challenge: to the South Africans sharing black square images and using the#blacklivesmatter hashtag, I assume you’ll be as outspoken on local racism from now on too, ja? During our long, dry and dire lockdown there have been at least 11 civilian deaths at the hands of police. #justsaying
• Thompson Ferreira is a freelance journalist, impactAFRICA fellow, and WanaData member.
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