Graphic by Victoria Pickering via Creative Commons.
#BlackLivesMatter protest.
MAX RHOADS ’25
OPINION EDITOR
Over the last 20 years, social media has become a powerful force in our world. According to an analysis of survey data by Kepios, as of 2024, about 62.3% of the world uses some form of social media, amounting to 4.95 billion people. Because of its accessibility and wide reach, social media has become a method of dispensing information about a variety of topics, including the paramount social and political issues of our world. In some ways, this can do a lot of good, largely in how it can inspire previously uninformed people to learn more about various causes. However, there are many pitfalls.
The murders of Breonna Taylor in March 2020 and George Floyd in May of that same year — and the lack of justice for both — sparked such a large national outcry that the Black Lives Matter movement experienced a resurgence. Thanks in part to sites such as Instagram and TikTok, this galvanization sparked a global reckoning with racism and anti-Blackness. In countries such as England and Belgium, statues of historical figures that had upheld racist systems were taken down or vandalized. The idea of defunding the police grew massively in popularity.
However, amid genuine concern about the issue of racial inequality was performative activism, a phenomenon where people take a stance on a social or political issue for social clout rather than out of genuine convictions. On June 2, 2020, many Black music artists started the hashtag #BlackoutTuesday, posting a black square on their Instagrams in an attempt to pause business as usual. However, the original intent got lost, as corporations participated without the broader context, and thousands of people posting black squares under the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag drowned out important resources and information. Most of the corporations that participated did little else to support the Black Lives Matter movement, both during this time and after the initial fervor had died down.
In the years since, change has been slow to occur. At this point, Breonna Taylor’s killers have still not been brought to justice, one of them being quietly fired instead. Most cities in the U.S. have made few, if any, steps toward defunding the police. While the information disseminated on social media inspired many non-Black people to continue unlearning racism, most major non-Black social media creators stopped talking about it once the issue was out of the spotlight.
After Oct. 7, 2023, and the bombing campaign on the Gaza Strip that followed, more people became aware of the oppression of Palestinian people. This was due in large part to the Palestinian reporters on the ground sharing videos on Instagram and TikTok. For the first time in years, support for Palestinian liberation was a popular belief. More people learned about the Boycott, Divest, Sanctions movement — a movement whose goal is to put economic and political pressure on the state of Israel— and called to boycott corporations that either financially supported Israel or retaliated against their employees for speaking out about Palestine.
As of February, the cause is still picking up momentum, both online and offline. Furthermore, there are many similarities between this resurgence of the pro-Palestine movement and that of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020. One can only hope that, unlike with BLM, the attention towards these issues is not solely performative.
