The Internet is a Wild Place

Or, all the things I learned about the right, social media, influencers, and the world in the past two weeks.

About two weeks ago, I decided to start a new instagram account. I was feeling like I wanted to do some more public speaking and writing and as my professional world was crumbling around me, it felt important to talk about it. I’ve used this space and similar ones to write publicly for more than twenty years and it seemed like short-form video was getting more traction than blogs or written content. I started the account, @drerinkfletcher, left it open to the public, told people I know they could find me there if they wanted to hear my some of my opinions, and I started posting.

In the preceding months, one of the organizations I work closely with had started working with content creators (folks on TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, etc. with medium to large followings) to promote some of the findings of the research we had done and to amplify its influence. After speaking with many of them, I wanted to better understand what they were doing, their processes, what drove them to do what they did and how they saw the value of the content they were producing, particularly as it came to promoting progressive causes. Like any good researcher, I wanted to know how much time it took up, what challenges one encountered doing it, what choices you had to make, what skills needed to be learned.

Alongside, I kept seeing comments about how the right was winning on content. One statistic (which I cannot verify), said that for every one social media post or piece of content promoting a progressive cause, 500 posts promoted right-wing causes. While much of the left spent the last fifteen years trying to defend traditional media from the accusations of bias and ‘fake news,’ the right was creating their own ecosystem of ‘alternate facts’ that ran rampant through social channels, amplifying misinformation and disinformation, and ultimately, likely, swinging the election in favor of the current administration. Part of me wanted to know if I could do it, too. Could I be part of the group providing balance in that space, bringing my voice and expertise to conversations that needed to happen? Had I been sitting on the sidelines too long since I decided to largely stop posting on social media and blogging? I wanted to feel this out.

I did not really mean for the account to blow up into a save-USAID type account. I also posted about taxes and filmed countless drafts about unemployment and the general dismantling of the federal government. I had plans for re-upping explaining economic concepts for pareto efficiency and sunk costs. I thought, and talked with my friends, about what my value add could be. How could I offer my experience and expertise in a way that didn’t feel reactionary, that filled a gap, that was useful?

On the first day of the new administration, an executive order came out stopping all work related to foreign assistance, leading to the layoff of thousands of my colleagues and friends around the world. Disease monitoring, medicine distribution, food distribution, school-building, important research, all ground to a halt overnight, endangering lives and livelihoods around the world. Foreign assistance from the United States had directly and indirectly been a significant part of my work and livelihood over the years and I knew that it was not a space that was well-known to the American public, so it also felt like a space that needed to be covered. As I had one contract canceled and heard from more and more of my colleagues that they were losing their jobs and being furloughed, I felt helpless. I couldn’t sue the federal government due to language in my contract and it felt like we were all being railroaded and no one was stepping up to counteract the very clearly wrong messaging.

The first couple of posts were viewed by my friends and then five days in, one started to get some traction outside of that group. I watched the numbers go up, from 100 views to 200, from 200 to 500. When I posted a follow-up mentioning I could not respond to all of the comments, a friend laughed at me, saying how could there possibly so many in an account that was barely five days old. I started working on different angles, thinking about how to promote a more nuanced view of the situation, not because I was scared, but because I did not want the backlash to back me into a corner, because I wanted to make sure that I talked about what we needed to do better, as well, even as foreign assistance was being dismantled.

I never got the chance.

The last time I checked, the post had over 13,000 views and hundreds of comments. The comments ranged from repeating lies that had been amplified on other platforms about corruption, fake programming, waste, and abuse, to personal attacks on my appearance and voice, to telling me to get over it and to suck it up and to call a “w@mmmbulance” (which I guess is thing like right-wingers calling liberals snowflakes?), to wildly unrelated claims about immigration and citizenship (clearly did not watch the whole video, but I digress). The comments were angry and I honestly found many of them silly. The fact that strangers had decided to spend time engaging with my post in this way struck me as a bit ridiculous, but here I was, learning about the influencer life and what you’re up against. I thought I had prepared myself for the worst of it, but I did not really know what was out there.

On the prodding of a friend, I stopped reading the comments. I noticed that despite outwardly saying they were silly and meaningless, they were starting to get to me. I was spending so much time on social media that I had worked really hard to protect and decrease. I needed to stop and I knew it.

Today, standing in the check-out line after having been hit over the head over and over again by the price of groceries (since when is frozen spinach $3? And the egg shelf had less than twenty cartons of eggs, leaving me to pay $10 for a 18), it was stopped for me. I opened instagram to find that my brand new account had been suspended under the community guidelines.

I screenshot the notice, sent it to a friend, posted it as a story on my now very old and private instagram account, started the appeals process, and started to think. What could I possibly have said that violated community guidelines? Did I say something wrong? After looking at them the answer is none at all. I did not do any of the below things, though I imagine that somehow, enough people had reported me under one of the below to get not just a single post censored, but the whole account.

The internet is nearly impossible to know. For years, I had twitter constantly open on my computer, monitoring dozes of conversations, taking stock of new research and wildfires, and statistical methodologies. A friend recently told me he thought twitter had only been for porn. In spite of every hour of the thousands I spent on that platform, I had had no idea that people used it that way. Naive, maybe, but there is so much hiding, so much we do not see from our little bubbles. The full extent of the power of social media and the extent to which mis- and disinformation fills our ears was only mildly known to me before this. There are whole corners of the internet where conversations grow from evil little seeds and take over the dominant narrative, regardless of the facts. They grow into vines, strangling dissent and reason, infecting angry readers and taking over the truth, shutting down voices that do not fit their narrative.

The internet is a wild place. And I know we have to keep talking over it, trying to get in a little space to let the sun shine through the weeds and vines to reveal the truth. I am not done talking. But I am going to take a little break.

From Meta: “What do our Community Guidelines cover?

• Intellectual Property – Making sure you have the rights to post the content you share.
• Appropriate Imagery – We don’t allow nudity on Instagram, with some exceptions, like photos of post-mastectomy scarring and women actively breastfeeding. Nudity in photos of paintings and sculptures is OK, too.
• Spam – This is not allowed on Instagram (creating or submitting unwanted email, comments, likes or other forms of commercial or harassing communications).
• Illegal Content – We don’t allow support or praise of terrorism, organized crime or hate groups on Instagram. Offering sexual services and selling firearms and drugs are also prohibited.
• Hate Speech, Bullying and Abuse – We remove credible threats of violence, hate speech and the targeting of private individuals. We do not allow attacks or abuse based on race, ethnicity, national origin, sex, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, disability or disease.
• Self-Injury – We do not allow glorification or encouragement of self-injury, including eating disorders. We do allow content that references self-injury and eating disorders if it is for the purpose of creating awareness or signposting support.
• Graphic Violence – Graphic violence is not allowed and we may remove videos or images of intense, graphic violence to make sure that Instagram stays appropriate for everyone. If shared in relation to important and newsworthy events, and this imagery is shared to condemn or raise awareness and educate, it may be allowed.”