Brooke Foucault Welles: The really interesting thing about hashtag activism in particular is that it becomes this kind of shorthand organizing principle for people who have experiences that don’t normally get covered in mainstream media or by mainstream press. To come together and share those experiences and the collection of those experiences does two interesting things. 

So first it validates them right: so you’ve experienced something, I’ve experienced the same thing. If we can connect those experiences, then suddenly, our experiences collectively feel more real. And when people can collect these things together, they become newsworthy in themselves. So we’ve seen, over time, the mainstream press maybe not covering individual incidents, but covering the hashtag and the collection of those incidents as a newsworthy event. 

Noshir Contractor: Welcome to this episode of Untangling The Web, a podcast of the web science trust. I am Noshir Contractor and I will be your host today. On this podcast we bring thought leaders to explore how the web is shaping society and how society in turn is shaping the web.

Our guest today is Brooke Foucault Welles — you just heard her talk about #Hashtag Activism, the title of an award-winning book she recently co-authored. She’s a professor of Communication Studies and a core faculty member of the Network Science Institute at Northeastern University. She’s also the director of the Communication Media and Marginalization Lab at Northeastern. That’s CoMM for short. She studies how online communication networks enable and constrain behavior, with particular emphasis on how these networks both enhance and mitigate marginalization. And in 2019, she was a general co-chair for the 11th International ACM Conference on Web Science. Welcome to the podcast, Brooke.

Brooke Foucault Welles: Thanks Nosh. It’s great to be here.

Noshir Contractor: First, Brooke, I want to start by congratulating you on the publication of your book #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice which you co-authored with Sarah Jackson and Moya Bailey, and was published by MIT Press earlier this year. I also want to congratulate you on being recognized by the international communication association with a 2020 applied Public Policy Research Award that was associated with the publication of this book.

I want to start with the title of the book. #Hashtag Activism. What does that mean to you?

Brooke Foucault Welles: Thanks, Nosh. So it’s an honor obviously to both publish the book and receive an award for our work and hashtag activism. You know, it was a term that was coined by the press that kind of malign this form of activism that emerged around the so called Arab Spring and the Occupy movement where folks use the internet as a way of organizing and proliferating messages of resistance and solidarity with marginalized communities.

We kind of co-opted or hijacked that term to really interrogate the role of the web can play in advancing progressive social justice movements. And our argument in the book, and more broadly in our body of work on hashtag activism is that hashtag activism is a logical and sensible extension of the use of media by resistance movements and social justice activists, dating back to the historical Black press and the civil rights movement and everything in between. Hashtags in particular have become associated with social justice movements in a way that’s meaningful and powerful and affecting social change.

Noshir Contractor: And you’ve talked about in your research talked about several specific hashtags that you have looked at over the years, things like “Girls Like Us,” “Ferguson,” “my NYPD,” what did you find when you were looking at these specific hashtag”

Brooke Foucault Welles: Yeah. So the really interesting thing about hashtag activism in particular is that it becomes this kind of shorthand organizing principle for people who have experiences that don’t normally get covered in mainstream media or by mainstream press. To come together and share those experiences and the collection of those experiences does two interesting things. So first it validates them right: so you’ve experienced something, I’ve experienced the same thing. 

If we can connect those experiences, then suddenly, our experiences collectively feel more real. And when people can collect these things together, they become newsworthy and themselves. So we see over time, the mainstream press maybe not covering individual incidents, but covering the hashtag and the collection of those incidents as a newsworthy event. As you know, in communication, mainstream media coverage is still the gold standard for setting an agenda and create a policy change.

Noshir Contractor: And from a point of view of web science, what insights have we gained by looking at the role that hashtag activism is playing in changing society and transforming the public discourse.

Brooke Foucault Welles: That’s a great question. So, one of the things that’s really striking about web science as a set of tools and also just sort of logic of thinking about the world, is that these conversations have always been happening but they’re happening in private, and in a way that was really hard to track, especially at scale. And now we can — Not only can activists and and people,  regular people find each other online, but we as researchers can find those spaces and reflect on them more fully and completely. Obviously we don’t have access to everything that’s happening, but we have access to so much more. And so much more of the kind of routine everyday organizing efforts that are going on. And so web science gives us the tools and the access to study that and understand how it works.

Noshir Contractor: Indeed, your book covers this topic quite extensively, but it ends in about 2017. A lot of people call the summer of 2020 a global reckoning on social justice. Given everything that we’ve seen recently, what new insights or what generalizations do you think about and reflect upon in light of these social justice movements?

Brooke Foucault Welles:. So one thing people will often ask, when they ask about this book, is why these particular events or why did this happen in the way that it did. And of course, we don’t have the counterfactual world where Ferguson didn’t happen or the Me Too movement didn’t happen or some other thing didn’t happen. 

But one of the things that I think gets lost when we talk about hashtag activism is that there are, of course, the sort of these spectacular events. So, high profile murders draw a lot of attention where people rally around and there’s massive spikes in certain hashtags. But these networks get built. So, the web is sort of inherently networked and these networks persist, right, so these conversations are still going on. It may be quiet ways. And so it’s not as if people stop talking about Black Lives in 2017 and didn’t talk about it again. In fact, they’ve been talking about it the whole time. And these networks kind of laid dormant. They weren’t covered in the media. And then another horrific incident happens. Lots of people are paying attention and we suddenly see not only the activation of the folks who are talking about these things in 2017 and 2018, but this whole new swath of folks who are suddenly in tune with what oppression and marginalization looks like because they’re seeing it and they’re experiencing it in their everyday lives. So I think, I think part of the reason we have that sort of massive surge of attention and the sustained both online and offline protest is that the networks are there and the networks are building, feeding each other and sustaining each other to keep this movement going.

Noshir Contractor: You raised two really interesting points. One is that these networks, if you may, go through periods of dormancy or latency and not much in the public eye, but they’re all there, and then they occasionally will surge in visibility. And the second thing I also heard you mention was that in many cases these networks are not exclusive with each other, that there’s a lot of overlap amongst these various networks and they sort of build on a symbiotic relationship amongst them.

Brooke Foucault Welles: Mmhm. I think that’s right. So we, you know, in the book, we focus on race and gender justice and we do have examples where it’s one or the other. But almost all of them involve both race and gender justice because, of course, those things are intertwined and I’ll add you know in this sort of COVID, pandemic era, environmental and health justice are also intertwined with all of those things. So we see the kind of multiplicity of oppression and marginalization coming to bear and really being discussed in these networks and grappled with in real ways.

Noshir Contractor: And another major contribution that you’ve made to web science is co-editing a volume called the Oxford Handbook of Network Communication. Along with your own work in that area, you’ve talked a lot about the transformative power of networked counterpublics. How does the term networked counterpublics relate to hashtag activism?

Brooke Foucault Welles: Yeah, so this is, thanks in huge part to my co-authors, we coined this term to get here. But it’s an extension of public sphere theory. So, very briefly, you know, publics are groups of people who engage in democratic deliberation. Certain folks, historically, and presently are excluded from those kinds of deliberations so, people of color, LGBTQ folks, women and so on, aren’t full participants, or aren’t always full participants. They form counterpublics. And, you know, fast forward to the networked and online era. Of course, these things are playing out online as well. So “networked counterpublic” really captures this idea that there are groups of marginalized folks who are coming together online to discuss issues and then also advance counter narratives in the mainstream. So it’s kind of a heady theoretical term, but it also has these really applied consequences and implications that we, we can see it happening in these coalitions of folks on the internet bridging across web pages, blogs, different social media platforms and so, to really create an advanced an agenda for social change.

Noshir Contractor: Now this might sound as though the web is just absolutely superb and fantastic and utopian for celebrating network counterpublics, hashtag activism, etc. And yet there are stories on the web, where, for example, in the gaming community, there was a lot of attacks against female members of the community, etc. Can you talk about how the web might be having the dual edge effect — both positive and negative — in the context of some of these issues?

Brooke Foucault Welles: Yeah, of course, that’s right. The very same systems that enable progressive racial and gender justice activism, among other things, also enable regressive radicalization and harassment. And I also note that although I think the architecture of the web is set up to be open and available for everyone, they have corporatization of the capitalization of the web has created the structures that are that are actually hard for marginalized folks to engage in. So the fact that we have Black Lives Matter or Me Too is not entirely because of the web, but sort of, in spite of some of these corporate structures in place.

So one of the things I think web science in general, you know, in society in general, frankly, really needs to grapple with right now is what does it being an open Web actually look like and how might a web serve better the cause of justice better, more than the flow of information sort of unfettered, in ways that can be harmful. And, you know, there are no right answers to that. But I’m confident the web science community can figure them out.

Noshir Contractor: So are you suggesting that we need to have a hashtag activism that focuses on the design of the web and to open the web, #OpenTheWeb?

Brooke Foucault Welles: I love that idea. Sign me up.

Noshir Contractor: Great. Well, I think there are many who would agree with you on that. So, based on your perspectives and all the scholarship and activism practitioner work that you have focused on in your own research and scholarship, what do you consider some of the most significant issues that need to be further addressed by web science?

Brooke Foucault Welles: For sure, #OpenTheWeb is one of them, so how can we think about not just ethics and websites but justice in web science and how we optimize a web for justice in order to correct the current and historical harms. You know, I would also love to see a tighter integration in, you know, not just the social sciences and engineering and stem sciences, Which I think web science does really well, but bridging into the arts and humanities as well. So I think there are space to come up with interesting collaborations and interesting futures for the web, when we bring in kind of the full spectrum of folks working on these spaces.

Noshir Contractor: I think that’s that’s a very inspiring idea. Can you just off the top ot to put you on the spot — Can you think of a couple, couple of strategies that you would offer if hashtag open the web became a thing? And someone approached you and said, What’s the, what’s one thing we can do to stop in that direction? What would you come up with?

Brooke Foucault Welles: That’s a great question. So you know immediately, one thing that comes to mind is creating activist-centered tools. So activists are now working within the sets of tools that are provided by corporations which you know comes with things like surveillance of their data, corporate control over what they can and can’t say. So more open access tools, things that folks can use on their own terms, where they can retract their data if they so choose, or maybe end-to-end encryption in such a way that they can’t be surveilled comes to mind easily. You know, I would also love to see obviously more Black Indigenous and minority ownership over some of these systems. So, promoting, not only the, you know, kind of educational pipelines, which I think we’re increasingly sensitive to but also the corporate pipeline. So how do we get folks who are not just developers, but CEOs of companies and organizations working in this space and obviously then collaborating with folks like that to make sure that their businesses are sustainable, you know, well researched and accessible to everyone.

Noshir Contractor: That sounds really exciting. You mentioned that one of the things that web science does well is cultivate collaboration between the social sciences with STEM fields science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and you also advocated for bringing in more of the arts and the humanities. Can you give an example of a web science project, can you point to one that has done that well, or a hypothetical project that could do that really well?

Brooke Foucault Welles: There’s a book called Data Feminism, which is just a lovely example of, of how embracing the arts, humanities, social sciences and technical sciences, yields new insights on how to observe and subvert power on the web. So, I totally recommend folks read it. And they did a lovely job, which is integrating across all of these things, showing how, you know, systems can oppress people but also help people kind of subvert those oppressions through clever hacks and understanding both the art and the science of the web.

Noshir Contractor: And so, in what way did the arts and humanities contribute to this effort?

Brooke Foucault Welles: So in some ways by studying sort of arts and artist collectives and gives inspirational ideas about how to think differently about power and organizational structure, right? So folks often have very different ways of organizing over there. So that’s one concrete example. I think other ways, you know, sort of applying web science tools in order to create things that don’t have sort of capitalist monetary value, if that makes sense. So things that are lovely to engage with are beautiful, but aren’t necessarily efficient or profitable, I think helps scientists think differently about the value of their work so engaging these exercises a student or practitioner might inspire new ways of thinking about what it is we’re doing here.

Noshir Contractor: That’s really good. Well, in closing, here, I wanted to ask you a question that is relevant to our current times. And so what is the one or two most significant things in your opinion, that would have been significantly different, or for better or worse during the COVID-19 crisis, and then the other crises that have now come along with that, to what extent would this have been different without the web? Can you conceive of what today would have been without the web.

Brooke Foucault Welles: So I’m going to give this response from my own sort of unique perspective as a, you know, an American, living in Massachusetts raising kids. At a federal level, we had a pretty complete failure of communication, right? So, so, that’s an interesting example of when centralized communication really broke down, in terms of what to do and how to do it, but we saw lots of people rising up on the web and taking that spot disseminating good information, science-backed information on how to handle ourselves during a pandemic here in the US. My friend’s an epidemiologist, suddenly got zillions of followers on Twitter. You know, rectly. I don’t think that would be possible without without the social media or web. because folks are looking to scientists di

The other thing I want to lift up is just the incredible work of teachers and educational technology-makers to create opportunities for children to stay connected and sustain learning, you know, as a parent of kids in that age category. It’s been incredibly helpful not only you know for their benefit, but for my benefit as someone who then needs to work and find a way to educate children and work at the same time. The fact that those tools exist and that they can be disseminated locally, you know, regionally and even globally and kids can continue to have learning experiences engage with one another and with educators all over the world is pretty incredible. So I’m grateful for that.

Noshir Contractor: And I’m glad that you preface it by saying that you were making these observations as an American based in Boston, because we know that these kinds of privileges that we might have here are not necessarily universal and that while the web is the World Wide Web, the benefits of the web are not necessarily worldwide. And so your points are really well taken up there.

I want to again thank you so much for talking with us about the work you do. You are uniquely positioned as one of the rising stars in the area of web science, both in terms of the research you do, in terms of the activism you do, translating it into applied areas working across a variety of disciplines. And I also want to take a minute to thank you for helping build a community of web science. You’ve been one of the organizers of web science conferences in previous years, and you’ve been very active and engaged member of that community. So thank you again very much for taking time to talk with us today.

Brooke Foucault Welles: It’s my pleasure.

Noshir Contractor: Untangling the Web is a production of the Web Science Trust. This episode was edited by Molly Lubbers. I am Noshir Contractor. You can find out more about our conversation today in the show notes. Thanks for listening.