The Hollow Clicktivism of Hijacking a Twitter Publicity Campaign

Tuesday’s #myNYPD Twitter campaign, an attempt to show off New York’s Finest serving and protecting the citizenry, resulted instead in a deluge of tweets sharing images of police brutality and mocking the police department, a trend which proceeded to spread across the nation.

The hijacked publicity stunt raises an old yet prescient question: Can using the internet and social media platforms as a megaphone for the masses actually be a mechanism for social change? Or are they doomed to be forums for frivolity and the proliferation of hollow spectacle?

Part of the answer hangs on whether the social web actually makes it harder for institutions to control their message. Democratising communication was one of the early promises of the open, decentralized web—but how level is the playing field, really?

The #myNYPD Twitter fiasco is a good testing ground for the issue. I brought it up with Mike Arntfield, a veteran cop who also happens to hold a PhD in digital media. He told me that social media can be a double-edged sword for police departments, or any powerful institution.

“Obviously the ability of social media to go viral and essentially be symmetrical leads to the dissemination of information beyond the control of police,” he said. “Whereas in the past, police departments could call the local media and deliver any message they wanted, now social media has created a discourse that they can’t really control.”

According to Arntfield, many police departments are required to take a carefully engineered, even surgical approach to public communications and their public image. Social media allows citizens to destabilize the desired narrative of police departments—like the idea that the NYPD is comprised of friendly, loveable cops—and turn the conversation their way.

The backfired NYPD publicity campaign is case in point, said Vincent Manzerolle, a researcher at the University of Western Ontario studying the political economy of digital communications.

“I do agree that this particular example reflects how these new media platforms can speak truth to power in a way, albeit in a kind of cathartic manner,” he said. “Twitter is a platform to link together all the ways that this imposition of power is being felt locally. It offers a way for people to connect their grievances with police.”

But Arntfield cast aspersion on the assumption that all online communication is created equal.

“The nature of Twitter—and this is why many public figures have Twitter and not Facebook—is that it is the most friendly platform for institutions. It has a number of features designed for institutions and public bodies. If this had happened pre-Twitter or on another platform, it might have occurred much differently.”

It might have gone even worse for the NYPD, he said.

As Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said, the medium is the message. Not all tweets are created equal. Some originate from users, like the NYPD, with thousands of followers and little blue checkmarks that validate their legitimacy.

Manzerolle refers to Twitter as “kind of a stock market of online personas,” which means that certain users’ messages have more currency than others. Though the NYPD’s dominant message was ultimately upturned, they still get to be the ones to set the frame of reference and crystallize the outcome into a narrative that benefits them. Arntfield notes that, disaster or not, this was a campaign designed by PR professionals.

Considering NYPD commissioner Bill Bratton’s response to the PR fiasco, the proof is in the pudding. He embraced the bad photos along with the good, and said it wouldn’t derail their efforts.

“It’s not going to cause us to change any of our efforts to be very active on social media,” he said, reported the Washington Post. “We’ll continue to go forward,” he said. “It is what it is. It’s an open, transparent world.”

“Send us your photos, good or bad,” he said. “We really broke the numbers.”

Bratton returned to his post as police commissioner in 2013 after a 17 year absence, and he has been working hard to improve the departments public image, making social media a cornerstone of his tenure. Immediately after being sworn in, he started a Twitter account, and precincts across New York have been experimenting with local accounts to communicate with their neighborhoods.

However, Arntfield suggested the unpredictable world of social media is forcing law enforcement to cede some control of their message. Reacting to the commissioner’s cool-headed response to the fiasco, he said “The response represents a paradigm shift in terms of how police departments confront social media. They are no longer in denial that a great number of people take exception with the way police do business.” But, this is only true, Arntfield quickly added, “If it’s genuine.”

The other possibility, Manzerolle pointed out, is that the Twitter blitzkrieg will prove to be little more than a cathartic public outpouring, letting people to purge their long-held resentment toward the police. Whether that was the premeditated intent or an accidental consequence, “It’s almost a kind of bloodletting—just get it out of your system,” he said.

Whether that actually translates into a broader dialogue about police violence and the impunity with which police forces act violently is another thing altogether. Perhaps it only served to “placate the Twitter mob,” Manzerolle said, “sending out a cathartic message that doesn’t incite a riot.”

Manzerolle notes that the issue of police violence is at the nexus of intersecting forms of repression, like class and race, but that’s a complex issue, and “the platform doesn’t deal with complexity very well,” he said. “The spectacular nature of police violence is more amenable to the speed of communication at which Twitter discourses proliferate.”

It could just be little more than gleeful trolling. And that raises the question of whether internet trolling, even if it does serve to attack hierarchies of social power, could ever coalesce into real-world action. “The next step is how merely speaking the truth translates into actually suing that truth to do something to change the very real structures of violence and power,” Manzerolle said.

It’s possible the message the public sends via social media could impact the decision-making of people who have actual power, he said. “It could be positive or negative. The real question is how deep does it go?”

Arntfield was also optimistic. He suggested that social media could help keep police in check: The fact that it’s easy for the public to snap police officers on duty and broadcast that information to the world could lead to a reduction in the kinds of violence that are the reason the department needs to run publicity campaigns in the first place.

“The uncertainty of being recorded and the somewhat indiscriminate nature of it through devices has made officers are very wary about getting involved in situations where there’s a strong likelihood that footage will end up on social media,” Arntfield said.

Though the hijacking of the #myNYPD can be seen as a valuable exposé of police brutality, the limits of the platform may serve to stymie real change. Will it lead to a serious discussion of  heated issues like police brutality and repression? Or is it empty “clicktivism” or “slacktivism?” The NYPD seemed more than happy to subsume it under the banner of “open discourse” and carry on with business as usual.

The social web can be a powerful way to start a conversation. We just have to remember to take it offline, too.