Moral Posturing in the Internet Age

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Six months in, hope for the new year has all but withered away. In January, America juggled the Israel-Palestine conflict with a messy impeachment trial at home, all the while managing escalating tensions in Iran. Bushfires raged across Australia, and Britain finally bowed out of the EU. Coronavirus spread around the globe collapsing stock markets and putting pressure on destabilising oil prices. So-called ‘murder hornets’ migrated to Europe and America, and 20,000 tonnes of diesel leaked into the Arctic Circle. It has been a year of radical social change and, by natural extension, political sensitivity. 

On 26 March 2020, 46-year-old bouncer George Floyd died during an arrest by a police officer in Minneapolis. Police officer Derek Chauvin apprehended Floyd for allegedly trying to spend a counterfeit $20 note on cigarettes. During the arrest, mobile footage showed Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for nearly nine minutes. As of 3 June 2020, protests – and forceful retaliation – continue across the United States and have begun to find form around the globe.

George Floyd’s death has necessarily sparked conversations about race and police brutality worldwide. Twitter has enabled users to share petitions and funds, encouraging tangible momentum for different movements. On Instagram, many individuals chose to show support for the Black Lives Matter human rights movement by posting a black square and committing to not posting anything else on Tuesday 2 June.

But many black commentators are unsatisfied; as ‘Blackout Tuesday’ “intend[s] to allow people to consider how best to fight against racism”, critics have argued that a timeline full of hashtagged black squares obscures and censors informative posts also carrying the #BlackLivesMatter tag.

Brands too have leapt on the hashtag-friendly trend of social justice; Nike released an advert telling consumers not to “sit back and be silent” and instead to “all be part of the change”. How Nike – recently called out for their human rights record – imagines this change remains unclear.

L’Oreal’s “speaking out is worth it” campaign has also been flagged as posturing. “Where was my support when I spoke out?” said the former face of L’Oreal, Munroe Bergdorf, who was cut from the brand in 2017 for her comments on the Charlottesville tragedy.

Brand-piggybacking on social justice is nothing new. Last year, Electronic Arts made headlines for their inclusion of a digital ‘No Room for Racism’ football kit in their flagship game, FIFA 20. Pride has also proven a lucrative option for marketers on a budget; last year, WWD noted the opportunism of campaigners: “LGBTQ Pride has gone mainstream, if the scores of rainbow splattered marketing campaigns that now pop up during June are anything to go by.”

The central question will always be whether these companies would support a movement if profits were at risk. Disney coming out in support of “the entire Black community” on their English language Twitter page is not likely to alienate a consumer base. But when pressed, the company is still happy to cut black faces from Star Wars posters if it risks interfering with the Chinese market. It’s not just Disney.

The blithe, academic language of PR-speak is well-suited to making these statements. The goal is to appear a part of the conversation, not to change it. And at all levels of popularity – from leaders to influencers to people with friends on Instagram – the model answer is to appear to say something while remaining distinctly apolitical. The brand – and ultimately the individual – strives to give itself a sense of identity without actually becoming anything concrete. Like a horoscope, it’s specific enough to make you believe in it but still vague enough to avoid any pushback.

The difference is that an organisation cannot have political stances on Iran, or fears about the Coronavirus, or views on race. Supporters may argue that there Nike has a moral obligation to use large platforms to influence social change in the right direction. But who is Nike? Its shareholders, its CEO, the majority of its workers, or its comms officer? And if this relies on waiting for a viewpoint to already be deemed more or less the right direction by its audience, what good does a Tweet really do?

There is nothing brave about telling a load of people who already agree with you what they already think. In this case, you have to ask what the appeal is for individuals who buy into the bright lights of social media moral posturing. Slavoj Žižek once alluded to ‘the delusion of green capitalism’, in which the trauma of impotence around social issues becomes motivation to “frantically and obsessively” act, to make our contribution as an individual. Perhaps, then, it is the need to identify that drives support for the unsupportive.

So says the philosopher, faced with an overwhelming task – be it racism or climate change – the consumer finds comfort in guilt, because “if we are guilty then [social change] depends on us”. When the solution seems out of reach, it is palatable to atone for sins by paying a little more for an ‘ethical’ cup of coffee or retweeting a shoe shop. The act of consumption or identification with a product becomes itself a moral action: “In the old days, we were consumerists and then we felt bad and if you wanted to pretend to be an ethical being you had to do something to counteract it. But the offer here is ‘we make it simpler for you. We make the product [and] you can remain just a consumerist because your altruistic nature, solidarity, is included in the price.’”

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), then, is a mixed bag. On the one hand, we do not want to condemn brands like Wells Fargo for their charity, Netflix for their parental leave commitment or Disney for reducing their carbon footprint – but we should recognise that CSR fits into wider ideology. Brands seem to do a good job of effecting meaningful change within their own realms – even if it is tainted by self-interest – but marketers and consumers alike should be wary of the allure of vapid moral posturing.

It is difficult to know exactly what we would want to world to look like at the best of times. It is harder still to know how to achieve it. Our trauma is not unfounded. The individual may feel a moral duty to have a clear opinion on the merits of protesting, rioting or burning down a police station. But these issues are complicated. To remain silent is to be complicit – but the response of rushing to stand up and be counted can be counterintuitive. The comfortable choice is to share an innocuous post by Nike or to publish a black square and to feel that we have a moral stake in a difficult issue.

If #BlackoutTuesday has illuminated anything, it is that the starting point is to ask the affected what we can do. It is to provide a platform for all voices to be heard, where relevant. Merely “demonstrating your capacity for care and global awareness” is not enough to change the world. Rather, as consumers and companies, we may wish to provoke discourse on sensitive issues – not with the hope of getting likes, but of influencing policy and perception. Meaningful change cannot be achieved in a day, a month or a year because it evolves, gradually, stubbornly, out of that first conversation.

Words by James Reynolds

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