The protests against police brutality that were sparked by the death of George
Floyd at the hands of four Minneapolis Police Officers have been labelled as the Biggest
Civil Rights Movement. The wide scale protests on local, national and international
levels has not only brought about legislative changes (New York repealing section 50
a), changes in Hollywood and opened room for diversity and inclusion as well as proper
representation but has also created a whole generation of activists and advocates.
However, coordinating and organizing protests on such large scales would have been
impossible without the aid of social media platforms.
Olivia Rudgard in her “A decade on from the Arab Spring, social media has
changed how people protest; Social media has the power to spread messages and
bring people out onto the streets. It can also spread propaganda and disinformation”
article, discusses the rhetorical situation of how social media has not been as beneficial
as people had hoped a decade ago. In the Telegraph Online article, Rudgard provides
the readers with a summary on the current Black Lives Matter protests going on and
then moves on to compare the role of social media in the protests by stating, “In 2020,
the online platforms are more complicated than it was a decade ago.” Since Rudgard is
a US Technology Reporter, Rudgard adds in her own insight into the role of social
media and technology by stating that “the claims of executives like Facebook’s Mark
Zuckerberg that unfettered free communication between all people is unambiguously
good now seem somewhat laughable.” Throughout the article, Rudgard criticizes social
media for spreading misinformation but also acknowledges how vital it has been by
stating, “it’s undeniable that social media has been a huge help for spreading the word.”
Rudgard while explaining the benefits of social media and how it has helped bring
people closer, also addresses the issue of social media algorithms and how
coincidentally, it seems that people of color and minorities do not have an equal
platform as others. She also provides examples of leftist and right-wing social media
users and how the protests are viewed differently by the two sides by stating, “Social
media posters have stretched to claiming that Mr Floyd is not really dead, and that
George Soros, the billionaire who is a frequent target of right-wing, antisemitic
propaganda, is funding the unrest.” and “while left-wingers have suggested that violence
is being started or provoked by right-wing agitators and white supremacists.” This
provides the readers with an understanding of Rudgard’s neutral stance and her critical
tone. The purpose of her critical tone is to evaluate how much has changed since the
vital role social media played in the Arab Spring of 2010 and to shed light on the fact
that many companies such as Facebook are not regulating information on their websites
properly. The target audience for this article are people aged 35 and older. This can be
understood by the wordy and lengthy title of the article as opposed to something that
would be considered attention catching or even “clickbait”.
In Jessica Guynn’s “ACLU: Police used Twitter, Facebook to track protests”
article, Guynn summarizes how according to the ACLU, the police had been tracking
protestors in Missouri using Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. According to the article,
Geofeedia provided data to the police by sifting “through real-time feeds of social media
posts to deliver analysis to clients, including the locations of users.” After this discovery,
Instagram and Facebook cut off Geofeedia’s access to public user posts and to a
topic-based stream of public user posts, while Twitter suspended Geofeedia’s account.
Guynn’s stance throughout the article is neutral which can be understood by her
succinct article filled with informative language in it. This can be understood as Guynn
uses statistics such as, “The ACLU uncovered Geofeedia’s reliance on data feeds from
social media through a public records request of 63 law enforcement agencies.” Rather
than explaining the situation in depth, by including which protests’ protesters were being
monitored, Guynn simply summarizes ACLU’s statement. The main purpose of this
article was to inform Guynn’s audience as opposed to giving her own opinion on the
issue because throughout the article Guynn uses third person language, quotes as well
as comments from others such as, “But, McKesson said, “we remain as committed
today as we were yesterday and remain undeterred by this recent discovery.”” in order
to explain the increased surveillance of the protesters. This may also be because the
target audience for The USA Today is mostly people who want to be up-to-date with
world events but not have to read an article as long as one in the New York Times. The
article
In the New Yorker Magazine’s “Second Act of Social-Media Activism” article, the
author, Jane Hu discusses the role of social media in organizing and coordinating
protests as well as educating new activists and protesters on how to safely protest. Hu
also references Zeynep Tufecki’s “ Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of
Networked Protest” as she delves deeper into the relationship between social media
and protesting in movements such as the Arab Spring 2.0, France’s “Yellow Vest”
Movement, Puerto Rico’s RickyLeaks and the Hong Kong protests among many others.
Hu also delves into digital activism and how at many points it has gone wrong proving
that offline conversations are much more fruitful in keeping a movement alive longer
than solely relying on online organizing and rallying people.
The New Yorker Magazine’s founding editor, Harold Ross stated that the
intended audience of the magazine was for a metropolitan audience, mostly the upper
middle class. Jane Hu, the author of the New Yorker Magazine article “Second Act of
Social-Media Activism” writes for the cultural criticism section of many websites and
newspapers including The New Yorker, The New York Times, Bookforum, The Nation,
The Ringer, and The Awl. The “Cultural Criticism” genre that she writes for is an overlap
between social and cultural theory. In essence, Hu is a culture critic who provides
criticism and analysis on culture as a whole. In this article, Hu provides the audience
with criticism on social media activism and the paradigm shift in activism culture due to
social media. Hu’s informative and critical tone can be picked upon easily due to her
language being informative as she states the benefits of organizing and coordinating
protests on social media as well as the disadvantages of doing so. This also conveys
her critical stance on social media activism as Hu believes that offline conversations
give people the chance to delve deeper into issues and address them as opposed to
simply tweeting something and moving on with one’s life. Hu’s article is most likely
intended for new protesters and activists or even people who are just curious about how
protests are organized since Hu explains the many different ways of organizing,
something that one would hope organizers know much about. Since the medium is a
magazine, it can also be understood that the intended audience are not organizers as
organizers are much more likely to read newspaper articles as opposed to opinion
pieces. Hu develops her relationship with the audience by providing personal stories
and conversations she has had with organizers and by also giving her audience
examples of different organizations as opposed to cherry picking stories in order to fit
her narrative. Hu’s rhetorical situation is well developed and well thought out due to her
being able to clearly convey her thoughts on social media and activism.
The “Anatomy of a Protest: Spatial Information, Social Media, and Urban Space”
article of Sage Publications deals with the rhetorical situation of Protests and its
relationship to Urban Space and Social Media. In the article, the authors, Alireza
Karduni and Eric Sauda Since this article is a research article, Karduni and Sauda keep
a neutral stance throughout the article. The research nature of the article is understood
as the article is broken up into different segments; Abstract, Introduction, Literature
Review, Data Source and Methodology, Anatomy of the Keith Lamont Scott Protests,
Discussion, Conclusion, Notes and lastly, References. This might also have been done
since the intended audience for the article are researchers and fractionating the article
would help the researchers find information more easily. as they discuss the Anatomy
of a Protest while using informative language, providing examples and including graphs
and charts. The main purpose of this article was to dissect how protests occur as well
as how social media and urban spaces can aid or harm any protest efforts. Karduni and
Sauda organize their article in different segments; This is so that the intended audience,
that is researchers can use the research and article in order to better understand what
Karduni and Sauda were trying to communicate through their article as well as their
findings. Throughout the article, an informative tone is used since the article is a
research article filled with different data and information on different protests with the
focus being on the Keith Lamont Scott Protest.
In all four articles, the authors delve deep into the relationship between social media and
protesting. Despite the articles dealing with the same rhetorical situation, the genres in which the
articles were written greatly affects how the authors interact with their audience as well as length
of the article. For example, in the research article, “Anatomy of a Protest: Spatial Information,
Social Media, and Urban Space” formal language is used and the article is divided into sections,
whereas in the “A decade on from the Arab Spring, social media has changed how people
protest; Social media has the power to spread messages and bring people out onto the streets. It
can also spread propaganda and disinformation.” the author gave her own opinion on the topic
with little to no statistics and the article was much shorter in length.