We Will Not Be Silenced

September 09, 2020

RACISM

Exploring the suppression of Black voices on social media

If you’ve been paying attention to your social media feeds, you’ve probably noticed that they’re going back to “normal”. And by normal, I mean that you’re not seeing as much content from BIPOC as you were in the weeks after George Floyd was murdered. This isn’t just my imagination; people have been talking about it on various social media platforms.

Suppressed on Facebook

My first personal experience of it was on Facebook, where my article The Loneliness of the Sole Black Employee was being suppressed. While I express my hatred for racists, there’s nothing in there that would violate Facebook’s terms of service. See for yourself:

[embed]https://medium.com/@SHurleyHall/the-loneliness-of-the-sole-black-employee-working-while-black-2fd59e1bfbd5[/embed]

There are a couple of reasons why I think this article might have been suppressed. Here are the messages people told me they saw:

  • This article has been reported as offensive

  • This article violates community standards

  • This URL is blocked

That means that:

  • Someone flagged or blocked the article because their feelings got hurt

  • The Medium publication the article was in at the time (I’ve since removed it) had aroused Facebook’s ire by posting too often to the platform.

  • Facebook’s algorithms are automatically flagging the article.

When I talk to other BIPOC they support this last idea, as they’ve also seen legitimate content by BIPOC flagged or removed. The irony is that it’s far harder to get actual hate speech and violence banned.

Even more disturbing is that Facebook didn’t just remove that article; it removed most of the anti-racism articles I’d posted in June and July. Although I and others have questioned why, via Facebook’s reporting tool, nothing has happened and that content is still gone.

A Facebook Anti-Suppression Campaign

With the original article, friends took up the cause, running an active anti-suppression campaign on Facebook. One particular friend was a warrior queen on my behalf. She put out the word, and asked people to share.

My sister, who knows marketing inside out, ramped things up by adding a couple of hashtags: #boostSharon and #amplifySharon. Another friend pasted the “offending” article in full in a Facebook post, and asked people to share. Luckily for me, all of them had lots of connections.

People I didn’t even know liked, shared and commented, so ironically the suppressed article reached far more people than it would have otherwise. Maybe Facebook actually did me a favor by trying to suppress it. The whole exercise demonstrated the power of collective action. When we refuse to be silenced our voices are loud.

Is LinkedIn Suppressing BIPOC Voices?

Meanwhile, on LinkedIn, I’d noticed declining views for my anti-racism posts, and I wasn’t the only one. Aaisha Joseph shared her evidence in a hard-hitting article titled LinkedIn: The Moderator of the Black Professional Voice? We Need Answers.

[embed]https://medium.com/@SHurleyHall/the-loneliness-of-the-sole-black-employee-working-while-black-2fd59e1bfbd5[/embed]

“due to centuries of racial social conditioning by self-seeking capitalists, many of our White counterparts have taken extreme issue with the idea that racism even exists and the notions of a white supremacist world structure — so in an effort to keep the cycle of oppression going and appease the White man’s conscience, Black speech I believe is being silenced.”

She urged LinkedIn to do better, but we’re still waiting to see what comes of that.

How to Fight Suppression on Social Media

If a social media platform decides to remove your content, you’ve got a couple of choices. You can complain by reporting an error via the platform, and you can ask your network to take up the cause and report the error, too. Those actions can work, but they also take time. Meanwhile you might find, as I do, that fewer people are seeing your content.

The other action you can take is to create your own platform. I decided to start an anti-racism newsletter so that people who wanted to see my articles could be sure they would. And I started it on Substack so those who wanted to offer support to what I believe will be a lifelong campaign have an easy way to do it.

[embed]https://medium.com/@SHurleyHall/the-loneliness-of-the-sole-black-employee-working-while-black-2fd59e1bfbd5[/embed]

Social Media Must Do Better

All social media sites need to do better. They must stop privileging the voices of racists over those of anti-racists. They must stop preventing Black people from getting their anti-racism messages to a wider audience. They must stop hiding what they should be amplifying.

It’s clear that many social media algorithms don’t think it’s acceptable for Black people to call out racism. I don’t care. Racism isn’t over, and we will not be silenced.

Read more on this issue in:

[embed]https://medium.com/@SHurleyHall/the-loneliness-of-the-sole-black-employee-working-while-black-2fd59e1bfbd5[/embed][embed]https://medium.com/@SHurleyHall/the-loneliness-of-the-sole-black-employee-working-while-black-2fd59e1bfbd5[/embed]

© Sharon Hurley Hall, 2020

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This article was originally published on Medium. If you’re reading it anywhere else, it may be stolen.