The Wrath of the Retweet and How Hashtags Can Be Reductive to Activism

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OK, OK, OK ! I can hear you objecting that hashtag movements can be important, so yes, this clicktivism intervention does indeed come with a caveat. Viral activism can have its uses by mobilising outrage and making resistance both visible and accessible for a number of worthwhile causes.

#MuteRKelly is a movement that emerged in late 2017 amidst mounting sexual-abuse accusations against disgraced R&B singer R. Kelly. It provided a course of action for thousands of people who didn’t consider themselves activists but simply wanted vigilante justice to prevail where law enforcement had not. The hashtag offered an objective to what had previously been stifled outrage and subdued whispers in an entertainment industry that had never quite managed to convincingly ‘cancel’ the singer.

#MuteRKelly acted as a way of shaming those industry gatekeepers who continued to support the singer despite widespread reports of his disturbing misconduct, eventually resulting in the cancellation of his concerts, the removal of his music from streaming playlists and the breakdown of his professional relationships. The hashtag moved offline and became a real-world protest, even courting the endorsement of #TimesUp, a movement that dwarfed #MuteRKelly despite launching months later, but that undoubtedly contributed to the accelerated unravelling of Kelly’s career. By 2019 R. Kelly had been dropped by his record label Sony Music and was finally arrested on federal charges of sex trafficking and abuse.

There was #Women2Drive, a campaign that pushed new legislation over the line in Saudi Arabia, where women were not allowed to drive until 2018; the #MeToo movement, a social-justice campaign against sexual harassment and assault, which continues to empower victims around the world to speak out against their abusers; and of course #BlackLivesMatter – an era-defining movement that spread across continents in 2014 and went on to become a slogan for a new era of civil rights activism.

So yes, a collective takedown through clicktivism does have its uses.

But what if retweet culture is part of a new mob rule that is slowly killing our free will?

In the age of the retweet, hashtags often make decisions for us. Instead of generating our own views we can simply regurgitate someone else’s. That digital ditto lets us bandwagon ideas rather than forming our own. In our abundantly digital era, we are falling into line without a second thought, and at times abandoning thought altogether.

Consider this for a second: if you had told an adult of sound mind to stick their head in a hot oven back in the eighties they would have told you to go fuck yourself, but here in the twenty-first century you can call it the #HotOvenChallenge and you’ll have people queuing up to singe their eyebrows off for the amusement of their seventy-nine followers.

A true watershed moment for clicktivism happened back in January 2015, creating a social media moment that would perhaps define the limitations of online outrage. You might even remember where you were at the time. I certainly do. It was early in the afternoon and I’d just finished a midweek workout. I was a few days into my short-lived health kick (a New Year’s resolution cliché I’d embarked on in January 2015) and like any gym rookie I was taking mirror pics in the changing room, foolishly expecting to see immediate results. It was while I was on my phone that I saw the news that Islamic extremists had burst into the offices of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and opened fire on their staff , killing twelve. About an hour after the attack, the slogan #JeSuisCharlie was posted on Twitter.

For those who struggled with Key Stage 3 French, ‘Je Suis Charlie’ translates as ‘I Am Charlie’. A statement of resistance and a show of solidarity with the staff members and police offi cers who lost their lives to terrorism, the hashtag was used as an obstinate defence of free speech. It grew into one of the most popular Twitter moments in history, with over 6 million users attaching the hashtag to their posts within a week. It remained at the forefront of our collective conscience for weeks, with the hashtag routinely attached to an assortment of outraged Twitter posts around the world. It was written into an episode of The Simpsons , worn as a motto on Italy’s Serie A football jerseys, projected onto French embassies and even became the name of a public square in France.

This overnight rise to fame thrust the magazine into the global spotlight, taking it from cult to mainstream. Their post-massacre edition carrying the headline JE SUIS CHARLIE became a collector’s item, with asking prices of over € 100,000 on eBay. The publication received a donation from Google rumoured to be in the region of $300,000 and sales of the magazine surged to 7 million copies.

But what had motivated us to share the hashtag so furiously? It wasn’t the carefully considered brainchild of some trailblazing freedom fighter; it was an impulsively composed slogan written by a magazine art director who had never actually bought a copy of Charlie Hebdo, itself a frequent source of outrage, off ending whoever it could whenever it could. Sitting somewhere between Viz and The Onion, the magazine’s radical absurdism could at times make South Park look like Sesame Street. Its extensive back catalogue of controversial images included a depiction of the Holy Trinity in a threesome, a black minister of justice as a monkey and the Prophet Muhammad carrying a bomb in his turban. The latter in this egregious trilogy in fact led to a 2007 lawsuit filed by the Grand Mosque of Paris and the French Union of Islamic Organisations. Eight years later it led to a bloodbath.

So what was it about #JeSuisCharlie that had us falling in line without hesitation?

Maybe you’re an optimistic believer in the power of individual thought. You’d never follow the crowd, right? Well allow me to shit all over your affirmations of volition with the famous Asch Experiment, a study in conformity that makes for pretty grim reading.

It was conducted in 1951 by Solomon Asch, a Polish psychologist who wanted to investigate the extent to which social influence can force us to conform. Fifty male participants from Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania were placed into fifty separate engineered groups, where all the other members had been instructed to give the same wrong answer. The test was to see whether the subject, who answered second-to-last, would go against his instincts by repeating the same incorrect response he had heard from the others.

The pivotal question wasn’t complicated or ambiguous. It had a clear right and wrong answer. It simply required the participants to match up one of three drawn lines of different lengths to a target line. Six-year-olds hopped up on fizzy drinks could have aced it without breaking a sweat. Yet here were fifty college students abandoning their free will in favour of the shared (and obviously wrong) answer a depressing one out of three times . (Over in the control group, where no coercive pressure was applied, fewer than 1 per cent of the participants gave wrong answers.)

If adults can abandon their individual power of thought when deciding something as clear-cut as the length of a line, then what might we do when the options aren’t so obvious? It really is a miracle that society hasn’t completely imploded yet.

Various assessments of Asch’s soul-destroying experiment found that people tend to bow to social pressure for two distinct reasons. The first of these is something called ‘normative influence’, which is motivated by our need to fit in and our fear of rejection. The second is ‘informational influence’, our belief that the group knows more than we do. And sure, you’re probably still reading this thinking you would have never fallen for it, but I beg to differ. Have you ever nodded when you didn’t quite grasp the topic of discussion? Laughed at a joke that went over your head? Bought a sandwich because it was the last one with a particular filling left on the shelf and therefore presumably the yummiest, since everybody else went for it? We claim to be in charge of our own destiny when in reality we can barely take charge of an M&S meal deal.

Some interpretations of the Asch Experiment show that we use the judgements of others to help us form our own opinions. Others suggest that our susceptibility to outside influences increases with the size of the peer group, meaning that while we may not side with one or two cohorts, we are far more inclined to align ourselves with an entire network.

In a political context, this is what John Stuart Mill called ‘the tyranny of the majority’ – the persuasive power of the governing masses at the expense of individual expression. And in the digital world we are ever more pliable under the gaze of public opinion. By its very design, where random musings are sorted into a chronological sequence of posts, social media invites us to fall in line, to follow suit and stay on topic. We are living in the Era of Coercion, in which ‘influencer’ is an actual job title. And when we’re online, as Colding-Jørgensen proved with the Stork Fountain, we are habitual conformists, willing to follow the crowd off a cliff . We don’t fact-check or question. We repost and agree.

Hashtags in response to breaking news stories are like social experiments in groupthink – a term coined by social psychologist Irving Janis in the seventies (a decade defined by the mass conformity of cults, protests and polyester jumpsuits) to explain the psychological phenomenon of shared judgement and its impact on our decision-making. They provide us with an outrage stencil within which our views are supposed to fit, a cookie-cutter belief system that absolves us of any obligation to think for ourselves. We hinge entire conversations on them and regulate our responses to comply with universal opinion. Hashtags demand our compliance and offer no alternative.

So we willingly pretend, feigning offence for the sake of conformity. And this is where groupthink begins its social conditioning. For when a hashtag campaign like #JeSuisCharlie captures the vocal majority it sets a parameter around an accepted set of views, turning Twitter into a playground for vigilante legislators, where anyone who dares to contradict those values must face the wrath of social-justice warriors with their twelve-tweet-threads and Facebook dissertations.

I mean, look at what happened when French actress Catherine Deneuve denounced the #MeToo movement and its French equivalent #BalanceTonPorc (which, incredibly, translates to the far catchier ‘call out your pig’) by signing an open letter that read:

The Harvey Weinstein scandal sparked a legitimate awakening about the sexual violence that women are subjected to, particularly in their professional lives, where some men abuse their power. This was necessary. But what was supposed to liberate voices has now been turned on its head: We are being told what is proper to say and what we must stay silent about – and the women who refuse to fall into line are considered traitors, accomplices!

CATHERINE DENEUVE SAYS MEN SHOULD BE ‘FREE TO HIT ON WOMEN’ read the headlines. She was parodied on Saturday Night Live and dragged through the alleyways of Twitter. All for daring to decry a hashtag. She became the scapegoat of non-conformity, a poster child for misanthropy. She was berated as some sort of self-hating female chauvinist for daring to have an opinion by the same holier-than- thou feminists who, ironically, claimed to advocate for strong-willed women. Catherine Deneuve had inadvertently become the new outrage trend while trying to challenge the rationale of another one.

‘Very disturbing statement by French actress Catherine Deneuve. Normalizing sexual harassment is dangerous and irresponsible. Shame on her and the people who support this. You are part of the problem. #metoo #BalanceTonPorc,’ said one Twitter user.

‘I doubt #CatherineDeneuve would be jumping to the defence of harassers if she weren’t living in a bubble of white, wealthy, privileged, cis womanhood,’ was the contribution from another.

‘FUCK YOU, CATHERINE, WE’RE GOING TO ASK MEN TO TREAT YOU WITH KINDNESS AND PROFESSIONAL RESPECT WHETHER YOU LIKE IT OR NOT,’ shouted Harper’s Bazaar ’s political editor from her Twitter profi le @JenAshleyWright (notching up an impressive 13.2k likes.)

The following week, battered and bruised by popular opinion, Catherine Deneuve apologised for her involvement in the open letter – a U-turn that epitomised the stronghold of groupthink and our reluctance to challenge it.

Hashtag movements like #MeToo and #JeSuisCharlie position themselves on the honourable side of outrage and, in so doing, pressure us to fall in line. We watch the world tweeting along and suddenly wonder whether staying silent makes us seem complicit with the perpetrators: If I don’t join the #MeToo conversation I’ll look like a sex-pest sympathiser. If I don’t say ‘I’m Charlie’ they’ll think I’m on the side of terrorism. The Internet has become a global tyrant, enforcing new boundaries as and when it pleases. And in a world in which trending topics become political agendas and hashtags become rules, we cannot discount the number of people who are simply compelled to agree.

#JeSuisCharlie forced us to make a decision – did we stand with the slaughtered victims and in doing so endorse their freedom to blaspheme and ridicule entire religions and races, or were we on the side of the terrorists? This is not to say that the victims were not deserving of our sympathy and outrage – and acts of terrorism must be condemned – but that our outrage deserved some consideration of its own. We had every right to be furious, but had we assessed why? Were we outraged by the act of terror? By its attempt to silence the free press? By the flagrant disregard for life and liberty? Did we consider the issues that arise when a publication disguises a dissenting agenda as quick-witted and progressive? Or the messy history of French colonialism?

Or did we simply fall in line, repost and agree?

As Roxane Gay wrote in a piece provocatively entitled ‘If je ne suis pas Charlie , am I a bad person?’, ‘demands for solidarity can quickly turn into demands for groupthink, making it difficult to express nuance. It puts the terms of our understanding of the situation in black and white – you are either with us or against us – instead of allowing people to mourn and be angry while also being sympathetic to complexities that are being overlooked.’

So we were gonna be Charlie whether we parle le Français or not.

Many of Charlie Hebdo ’s staunch defenders argued that the magazine was simply a daring send-up of politics that was often ‘misinterpreted’ by its critics. You were supposed to believe that it was being satirically homophobic by calling two women ‘Old Dykes’ on its cover so that we could all laugh at the farcicality of intolerance. UMMMM… I’ll pass.

‘There is a very narrow edge between dangerous buffoonery and freedom of expression,’ said Vladimir Putin in response to the Charlie Hebdo attack. ‘Did those cartoonists need to off end Islamic believers?’

And while I’m not one to side with Putin, the question remains… Did they?

Words: Ashley ‘Dotty’ Charles is a DJ for Radio 1Xtra and a rapper. Outraged is her first book. Preorder your copy here | Photographer: Faith Aylward