Facebook is a great platform for instant mass communication; most know this in the midst of sharing adorable cat videos and daily personal updates on what one may have eaten at lunch or had seen on the block that day. These connections and the ability to share other people’s voices and words at a touch of a button can be easily used to spread the word of breaking news, popular and unpopular opinions, and raise awareness to international tragedies and disasters. In the grand scheme of things, however, the rhetoric of Facebook activism is an easily criticized one when answering the question: What is it actually doing for the people we are supposedly being activists for?
Let’s rewind back to 2014, the time where our feeds were filled with videos of people participating in and nominating others for the Cold Water Challenge and Ice Bucket Challenge. When these challenges were launched, they were both supposed to involve active donations towards different charity organizations and movements, the Cold Water Challenge being a donation to a charity of the nominee’s choice and the Ice Bucket Challenge being a donation to the ALS Association. Ideally, organizations should have seen greater success in donations alongside the awareness factor of doing these challenges publicly. However, there appeared to be a lack thereof due to various reasons such as the donation aspect being misconstrued as an optional point of the challenges, reclaiming the challenges by a majority of users as something to do just for fun, and general annoyance after the trend reached an overwhelming point. When we’re speaking of raising awareness for something, such as the ice challenge being specific to donating to ALS charities, it is ideally a greater degree more successful in influencing people to support a designated organization whereas a challenge that is open-ended can lead to not raising awareness to anything at all. In this case, we see potential failure in this type of activism.
Shifting to a more international perspective regarding war and natural disaster, the margin of error in Facebook activism is a lot more prevalent and can often times reveal a darker side of human nature: narcissism. In the last few years, the emergence of temporary profile picture “filters” have arisen to the mainstream in showing “support” to victims of various natural disasters and acts of terrorism, such as the attacks on Brussels or last spring’s earthquake in Nepal. The temporary filter usually takes the form of the nation’s flag or some type of transparent color overlay with a symbol resembling the tragedy as a method of showing awareness and condolences towards victims of these events. While these filters may continue a conversation amongst one’s Facebook following, whether it is by them asking questions about what happened or by influencing others to utilize the filters as well, the use is often criticized as being insensitive or having no impact on relief efforts for those victims.
The fact of the matter is that the use of these filters really does nothing to contribute to relief efforts and sadly appears to have become just a trend to give a sense of self-justification along the lines of “Oh look, I have knowledge and I feel sorry for these people so I’m going to show it by putting this filter over a picture of me at my summer barbeque while people are dying!” When it comes to relief efforts, victims need a lot more than just a filter showing one is aware of the problem happening. As with the cold-water challenge, where the purpose of donating to a charity became lost somewhere down the road, people are often forgetting that there is a bigger picture in ways to be an activist for these types of disasters.
While the filters may bring awareness to a subject, there is much more that can be done to leave long-lasting and positive effects on those affected by tragedy. Encouraging others to donate to a charity along with using the filter (whether it be by including a link to a charity or a list of references for relief efforts and what more can be done to help) is a great way to influence others to refrain from only using a filter. It’s important to remember here that when it comes to these tragic circumstances, a filter itself isn’t going to give refugees homes, give medical attention to those in need of disaster relief, or fund a charity research organization by itself.