How Social Media Feeds Racism

After Facebook realized in 2012 that 83 million users on the social media site were fake users, they instituted the real name policy, weeding out what they considered “fake names.” Unfortunately, the policy failed to consider authenticating Native Americans whose names weren’t considered to be real by Facebook’s real name algorithm.

This caused several Native American Facebook users — as well as several other marginalized groups — to be suddenly locked out of their accounts, effectively shutting them out of their digital social circles. At the same time, Facebook’s advertising algorithm allowed alt right advertisers to sell their anti-semitic paraphernalia on the site, and it wasn’t until Facebook was notified by ProPublica that their engineers were able to identify the problem.

Examples like these leads one to conclude that racialization extends beyond the users of these websites, who are often the focus of linguistic analysis by researchers like Bonilla and Rosa, who make a strong case for social media as a way for racialized groups to “unmark” themselves by using hashtags like #ifTheyGunnedMEDown. They reference Auge and Boellstorff to label social media as a “non place” or a “virtual world” that allows those who are marginalized or feel displaced to connect with peers. Though social media’s primary goal appears to be to connect users, one cannot forget that these large companies, once called social networks, have recently entered the business of mainstream media, a category in business that oftentimes either racializes or ethnicizes minorities.

Bonilla and Rosa note how the spreading of Travon Martin’s hoodie clad figure triggered a hashtag activism. The issue is that not every twitter account is equal and though viral hashtag campaigns can serve to unite victimized individuals, large mainstream institutions own twitter accounts as well. As of now, CNN has 38.8 million Twitter followers and 28.9 million Facebook followers; MSNBC currently has 1.95 million Twitter followers and around 2 million followers on their Facebook page; and Fox news has 16.7 million followers on Twitter and 15.6 million followers on their Facebook page.

These numbers gain relevancy when 67% of Americans claim that they get news from social media, according to a Pew research. This means that mainstream media has…

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