1A Day, Black Women's Resistance, and the Power of Memes in Shaping Politics
A look at upcoming events, Shannon Malone Gonzalez’s research on Black women’s witnessing and resistance to police violence, and social media’s role in shaping political discourse.
On the Horizon
🚨TODAY🚨 September 17th @ 3pm EST: “'Is She Electable, Though?’ Gender Bias in the Media” with Meredith Clark for the Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy. Register here!
🚨TODAY🚨 September 17th @ 5pm EST: “Technology, Culture, and the Reproduction of Inequality” with Tressie McMillan Cottom for the Duke Alliance for Identity Inclusive Computer Education’s “Identity & Computing Lecture Series.” Register here!
📚🇺🇸Wednesday, September 25th: Get excited for 2024’s “First Amendment Day”, an annual event hosted by the UNC Center for Media Law and Policy.
Here is the line-up for the day:
Breakfast with Bubba on First Amendment Day | 8:00 AM - 9:30 AM | Freedom Forum Conference Center
A discussion with Bubba Cunningham on college athletics, ACC expansion, and NIL policies.
Intercollegiate Ethics Debate: Speaking Out Against Not Speaking Out | 10:30 AM - 11:30 AM | Freedom Forum Conference Center, Carroll Hall
UNC’s Ethics Bowl team debates First Amendment issues related to NDAs and the Speak Out Act.
***Banned Books Reading | 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Front steps of Manning Hall | Public reading event celebrating Banned Books Week with our very own Francesca Tripodi!***
UNC Voter Registration Drive | 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM | The Pit
Nonpartisan voter registration drive hosted by the UNC Office of Student Life & Leadership.
Book Bans and the Marketplace of Ideas | 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM | Room 5048, UNC School of Law
A panel discussing the history and current state of book bans in the U.S.
AI & 1A: How the Press is Harnessing New Technology | 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM | Webinar
Panel discussing AI’s role in journalism and its implications for the First Amendment.
***CITAP Panel: Election 2024 | 3:00 PM - 4:15 PM | Freedom Forum Conference Center, Carroll Hall
CITAP researchers discuss media, disinformation, and democracy ahead of the 2024 U.S. presidential election.***
First Amendment Trivia Contest | 4:30 PM - 5:00 PM | Freedom Forum Conference Center, Carroll Hall
Trivia contest testing knowledge of First Amendment rights.
Keynote: Clashes on Campus - Student Protest & the First Amendment | 5:15 PM - 6:30 PM | Freedom Forum Conference Center, Carroll Hall
Keynote talk by Lindsie Rank on student protests, free speech, and universities' role in civic education.
Witnessing and Resistance: Black Women's Survival and the Emotional Toll of Police Violence
Shannon Malone Gonzalez's recent works place Black women's strategic resistance at the forefront of understanding state violence and its psychological impacts, particularly in the context of witnessing police brutality online. Malone Gonzalez is a faculty researcher at CITAP and an assistant professor in the UNC Department of Sociology. In ""We Got Witnesses" Black Women's Counter-Surveillance for Navigating Police Violence and Legal Estrangement", co-authored with Faith M. Deckard, Malone Gonzalez looks at the way Black women employ different modes of counter-surveillance (or witnessing) to navigate police contact. These types of witnessing include:
Physical witnessing, mobilizing others in close proximity to interactions with officers; virtual witnessing, using cellphone or social media technology to contact others or record interactions with officers; and institutional witnessing, leveraging police or other institutional contacts as interveners to interactions with officers. Black women mobilize witnessing to deescalate violence, gather evidence, and promote accountability.
In "Mourning for Strangers: Black Women, Sequelae, and the Digital Afterlife of Police Violence," Malone Gonzalez, along with co-authors, Shantel Gabrieal Buggs and J'Mauri Jackson, considers the ways that sequela—the repeated exposure to police violence through social media—operates as a technology of Black women's mental health. This work shows how such exposure results in long-term grief, depression, and anxiety.
These reverberating effects are an intentional outcome of racist, sexist, and specifically anti-black systems.
Across interviews, black women make intimate connections between victims, the black community, and collective experiences and risks of police violence. They explicitly discuss how this identification process separates them from other social groups, particularly white people. They see how white people may or may not be similarly impacted by incidences of police brutality, particularly when the victim is black. Research has found that white Americans are not only less likely to be victims of police brutality but are less likely to be psychologically impacted by police violence or express empathy towards black victims of police violence. For our respondents, these additional outcomes of police violence do not seem unintended, as spillover effects would suggest. Rather, as sequelae makes clear, these reverberating effects are an intentional outcome of racist, sexist, and specifically anti-black systems.
Together, these studies not only highlight the proactive strategies Black women employ to resist police violence but also underscore the profound mental health consequences of living under constant threat and exposure to state violence, both physically and digitally. Malone Gonzalez’s work offers critical insights into the structural dimensions of state violence and its wide-reaching impact on Black women’s mental and emotional well-being.
Publications and Appearances
Shannon McGregor, speaking on a panel moderated by Tech Policy Press's Justin Hendrix titled "Platforms and Elections: The Global State of Play," highlighted the complex and often contradictory role of social media platforms. She pointed out that while these platforms can exacerbate issues like extremism and hate, they also serve as tools for liberatory and progressive movements:
The same things that many of us do, the very critical work to show the issues of extremism and other forms of hate that are being exacerbated by certain affordances of platforms, those very same platforms and tools also make it possible for liberatory and progressive movements to happen.
Shannon underscored the important role of researchers and civil society, particularly in the Global South, in holding platforms accountable. She argued that if platforms are struggling in the Global North, they’re unlikely to succeed elsewhere and stressed that public accountability is a powerful tool for addressing wrongdoings while recognizing positive actions where deserved.
McGregor further critiqued the fragmentation of media systems, which makes comprehensive research more difficult, but also allows for deeper analysis of power dynamics. On extremism, she pointed out, "We don’t have extremism because of social media. We don’t have extremism because of Fox News, necessarily, either. This is a social problem with historical roots." She also criticized the narrow focus of fact-checking, stating, “Simply correcting individual facts without the context […] does a greater disservice to the truth.” McGregor argued that this reactive approach, increasingly prevalent in response to media fragmentation, misses the larger societal issues that need to be addressed.
Shannon McGregor also spoke with Reuters on the role social media is playing this election season. Author Stephanie Kelly discussed how “[b]oth the Democratic and Republican parties have drafted content creators, or influencers, to push information on their party's policies and their candidates.” Shannon told Kelly, "(Social media) both is what people think and shapes what people think.”
Affiliate Highlights
In their latest paper, affiliate Blake Hallinan, along with co-author CJ Reynolds, explores how YouTube creators hold the platform accountable through what they term "user-generated accountability." The study, based on an analysis of 250 videos, reveals how creators use content to highlight YouTube's failures, from automated moderation to discriminatory policies. While creators often express frustration with the platform's lack of transparency and poor communication, they also recognize its positive aspects. By making public calls for accountability, creators and their audiences become active stakeholders in platform governance, pushing YouTube to address concerns. Hallinan and Reynolds argue that these practices offer important insights into how platform governance can evolve to better serve diverse stakeholders.
Alice Marwick and affiliate A.J. Bauer spoke with NBC News about “How AI images of cats and ducks powered the pet-eating rumor mill in Springfield, Ohio.” “You no longer have to know a little bit of Photoshop. That certainly has sped up the memeification of this ‘eating cats and dogs’ trope. Whereas it might have taken a little bit longer or it might have spread a little less far without AI, I think AI is allowing it to spread much more quickly at scale,” A.J. told NBC News.
That certainly has sped up the memeification of this ‘eating cats and dogs’ trope. Whereas it might have taken a little bit longer or it might have spread a little less far without AI, I think AI is allowing it to spread much more quickly at scale.
“Anyone with access to generative AI can spin up dozens of these images in no time at all,” Alice added, also noting that “since 2016, we’ve been sort of working in a meme economy in politics.”