The Controversy Around Educational Guides on Instagram
Instagram post graphics by Dear Asian Youth, Simplified, and Diversify Our Narrative / Cover graphic design by Janice Kim
Eight days after the death of George Floyd, Instagram users noticed others on the app begin to share a single image that, by the end of June 2nd, 2020, had flashed across millions of mobile screens.
It was a picture of a simple black square—a flat, four-sided image that attempted to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, which had swept the country last summer in the wake of the Minnesota man’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. A week earlier, the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag on Instagram had been filled with petition links against police brutality, Venmo and Cash App usernames for donations, and information on upcoming protests. On June 2nd, the hashtag was quickly drowned out by the black squares.
Within hours of when the squares went viral, some people criticized the posts as mere performative activism—a term used to describe those on social media who champion a cause publicly just to bolster their own image.
The “Blackout Tuesday'' squares, as they became known, sparked a debate over online activism that is still ongoing. Throughout the summer of 2020, information graphics, posted using Instagram’s image carousel feature, were used by pages such as Diversify Our Narrative, Dear Asian Youth, So You Want To Talk About, Simplified, and Blossom. Unlike the black squares, in 10 images or less the administrators of these pages aimed to educate their followers on the effects of systemic racism.
Critics say these graphics oversimplify social issues and leave people with a surface-level understanding of otherwise complex subjects. Yet administrators of these pages say their information graphics have a lot to offer to the public.
For 23-year-old Mitchell Rosenberg, founder of the politics account Simplified, infographics on the app can guarantee that more people become aware of current events. “Not everybody is going to go read [an entire] article in The Washington Post or in the New York Times or watch the news for an hour every day,” he says. “We now have the opportunity with these platforms to meet people exactly where they already are. You can spend two minutes reading a post and walk away with something new.”
Walking away with new information is something that one of our writers Sophia Montalban, 21, takes from the informational guides on social justice issues. “It was so much [information] coming at you, all at the same time… but there were so many things… that I learned literally just on Instagram,” she says. With an expanded understanding of social justice from these posts also came a pressure to constantly re-post these graphics. Montalban explains, “It really was almost like if you didn’t [re-post] you didn’t care [about racism].”
Therein lies another issue for many critics of online information graphics. Some say that if people are only reposting the information in order to prove that they care about the cause, but then do no other form of activism, such as going to protests or donating money to organizations actively combatting racism, then the activism is preformative. In other words, the act of reposting information is not enough activism to contribute to the cause in a meaningful way.
“A lot of [Instagram users] think that their job is done after they've re-posted something,” says Jasmine Nguyen, 20, co-executive director of Diversify Our Narrative, whose Instagram account has over 200,000 followers. “[But sharing posts] does spread awareness. [It] isn't necessarily a way to solve the problem, but… a lot of the time, people wouldn't have been aware [of the problem] otherwise.”
Like Nguyen, Meg Nakagawa, 21, administrator for Blossom, an Instagram account encouraging further conversations around mental health in Japan, sees her posts not as a complete guide to understanding mental health but as a starting point. “My page is not meant to educate you on every single topic to the full extent. It's literally just a conversation starter,” she emphasizes.
Nakagawa has seen first-hand how those conversations can be crucial first steps into real change for many. In a culture where mental health is generally dismissed, Nakagawa has found that the online community she has created through her Instagram informational posts has become a support system for many. “I have received so many [direct messages] from people saying, ‘Your page has inspired me to go to counseling,’ or ‘Because of you, I'm seeing psychiatrists’... That is one or two extra people in this world that are getting the mental health support they need [now],” she says.
Similarly, Diversify Our Narrative (DON) has created a community through their Instagram page focused on the link between education and racism. They have recruited hundreds of organizers onto their team, posting information graphics on the ways that the education system has failed to teach students about systemic racism. “They actually work with their local school districts to push anti-racist books in their curriculum,” Nguyen says about the community’s volunteers. This is one way that DON has managed to translate their online activism off-screen.
Mya Sato, 17, co-director of social media for Dear Asian Youth (DAY), expresses how complex it can be to discern which issues to speak on and when, particularly when many of these accounts are run by volunteers. “We're talking about providing education, that is [already] so hard to do, [and] as young people, we're still in school. We have to somehow make it digestible for everyone, and at the same time to be able to comment on every issue somehow simultaneously,” she explains.
As an Asian-American-run Instagram page focused on addressing the effects of racism on their community, DAY often has multiple internal conversations about which issues they should make educational guides on. When commenting on issues outside of their own racial demographic, DAY is acutely aware of when to say what, “We should not be occupying spaces that aren't ours to speak, because what happens is that will dominate those spaces, when in fact [those communities] are capable of speaking for themselves.” Sato says that this is why it is so important for them to have diversity within their organization, and why they created a diversity and inclusion task force within the organization that evaluates their social media posts before they are published.
Regardless of whether the activism does manage to translate into the “real world,” critics say that there is far too much room for misinformation to spread through these graphics. Some graphics do not list their sources, so Instagram users may never know where the information in those posts comes from. Coupled with the familiar and visually appealing design commonly used for informational posts, these guides often go viral. It’s important for both the consumers and creators of this content to critically think about the information distributed through these posts.
The responsibility of providing accurate and approachable information for broad demographics is one that Instagram page administrators should not take lightly. “It's weird to feel like you have the power to put out whatever words you want and people are going to see it,” said Rosenberg of Simplified. Aware of the dangers of misinformation, Rosenberg and his team of 75 volunteers work to create fact-based posts, “We're not feeding you misinformation. We're not even telling you what to believe. What we're doing is trying to give you the facts, so that you can form your own opinion.”
Even then, flashy aesthetics and professional graphic design can give any post a feel of authority. Writer and sociologist Eve L. Ewing warns about the dangers of not questioning the sources of these educational materials in her own post. Made on the popular graphic design platform Canva, Ewing created a post with the statement “Graphics like this can be a helpful teaching tool, but some of the ‘racial justice explainer’ posts that go viral grossly oversimplify complex ideas in harmful or misleading ways or flat-out misstate facts.” In her caption, Ewing urges that we “make learning accessible, but let’s keep it accountable too.”
“I think that because we are in an era of understanding what the Internet really can do, and how marketing fits into that, that we'll continue to see how equity and representation, and all those different ideas fit into that equation,” explains Mya Sato of Dear Asian Youth. “It's hard to put a definitive idea of like, is this the best way to go about it? And if so, how? But I do think that it's a learning curve. And we do need to be paying attention to how we disseminate information and how we present it as well as what we present our information on.”
STORY ANA SANDOVAL
COVER GRAPHIC JANICE KIM