- 03/09/2020
- Category: Commentaries
The digital revolution has transformed the way people advocate for social justice issues. Nowadays, not only march for social causes offline, but people also fought for social justice issues through social media and online petitions. Due to the vast scope of social media networks, these posts and petitions can reach millions of people outside the place of conflict. This was reflected in the recent case of #blacklivesmatters, which shows how social media provides the opportunity to scale up social justice issues[1]. However, the online world also has its social justice problems. This article aims to discuss what are the best ways to advocate for these social media’s online issues to create a safer and equal online space in the future.
Social justice is “justice in terms of wealth, opportunities, and privileges within a society”[2]. In the online world, there are at least two social justice violations. Firstly, online hate crimes are done by fellow social media users to one another through expressions of hatred, discrimination, or violence to other people due to their background[3]. Research has shown that there is a direct link between online hate crimes to physical hate crimes in which the former can leads to the latter[4]. Secondly is online propaganda in the form of hate speech presented in Facebook ads, which are emotional posts that target certain races and posts aiming to reduce voters turnout[5]. Users also do the second by spreading the messages through ads, which could also be done by an institution, political actors, etc. In both examples, the perpetrators could be anyone, and the harmed groups are the people targeted by online communications. Furthermore, more stakeholders must be taken into account besides the users (civil society or companies), such as social media platforms as the regulator in the platform and government as law enforcers.
Currently, several actions have been taken to address the issues of online social justice. The government of the U.S. and the U.K. has published Facebook violations of privacy. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Facebook with $5 billion for the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which makes the largest penalty ever sued by FTC[6]. From the business side, recently, big companies from Unilever, Honda, and Microsoft have shut down their ads on Facebook with further plans to halt advertising on Twitter. These come after several civic society organizations push the companies to ban their ads on these platforms with the campaign #StopHateforProfit as some of the ads contain hatred towards a certain race, religion and are used for political purposes[7]. The campaign has turned out to be successful as Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would increase its moderation policies towards ads and give warnings to ads that violate their policies[8].
From the campaign’s success, it can be learned that the best way to address the online social justice issues is by turning the online campaign to concrete offline actions, which in this case are done by the companies who ban the Facebook ads. However, continuous monitoring must be done to ensure an online environment whereas there is no discrimination against anyone regardless of their race, religion, or any other background. To achieve this, once again, the private, government, and civil society must work together.
To begin with, the government must set specific standards while still upholding free speech, which must be complied by companies not only the big ones like Facebook and Twitter, but also the emerging ones like TikTok. The FTC has created a sort of certification that Facebook must quarterly to ensure they conform to the rules[9]. The European Union have set their own with the GDPR, but of course, enforcement is needed. In addition, the U.S. and U.K. must take action, but all the government in the world, as the social media giants, are now virtually everywhere. Therefore, establishing an international standard is very important in this situation, and the United Nations could be a start. The Secretary-General has just published a roadmap for digital cooperation that highlights digital human rights and digital trust and security[10]. The roadmap must further be institutionalized in the form of agreement of local legislation by the member state themselves.
Meanwhile, contrary to fake online news which is accessible to anyone and therefore can be moderated more visibly, ads and posts in social media can specifically target certain people and are not visible to others. This can influence their mindset and create prejudice towards certain groups. If further intensifies, this mindset can be translated into real actions that can hurt people as we have seen in the surge of #blacklivesmatters.That being said, the businesses and civil society must continually monitor the big social media giants’ policies, as they are the users of these services. For instance, this can start as small as reminding other users if they use social media to increase hate speech by reporting their post or reporting ads.
Author: Theodore Great
Editor: Amelinda Pandu Kusumaningtyas
[1] Mundt, M., Ross, K. and Burnett, C.M, 2018. Scaling Social Movements Through Social Media: The Case of Black Lives Matter. Social Media + Society, 4(4), p.205630511880791.
[2] Oxford Dictionary, n.d. Social Justice. In: Lexico Dictionaries | English. [online] Available at: [Accessed 15 Jul. 2020].
[3] stophateuk.org, 2020. What is Online Hate? | Stop Hate U.K. [online] Available at: [Accessed 16 Jul. 2020].
[4] Williams, M.L., Burnap, P., Javed, A., Liu, H. and Ozalp, S., 2019. Hate in the Machine: Anti-Black and Anti-Muslim Social Media Posts as Predictors of Offline Racially and Religiously Aggravated Crime. The British Journal of Criminology, 60(1), pp.93–117.
[5] Abril, D., 2020. These big businesses are all boycotting Facebook ads. Fortune. [online] Jun. Available at: [Accessed 3 Jul. 2020].
[6] Rodriguez, S., 2019. How Facebook stumbled to the edge of a government breakup. [online] CNBC. Available at: [Accessed 15 Jul. 2020].
[7] Abril, D., 2020. These big businesses are all boycotting Facebook ads. Fortune. [online] Jun. Available at: [Accessed 3 Jul. 2020].
[8] Ibid.
[9] Rodriguez, S., 2019. How Facebook stumbled to the edge of a government breakup. [online] CNBC. Available at: [Accessed 15 Jul. 2020].
[10] United Nations, 2020. Report of the Secretary-General Roadmap for Digital Cooperation. [online] pp.1–39. Available at: .
