In the previous sections we have analysed how the two campaigns, Parasite Street and PSOT, positioned themselves in relation to Benefits Street, how they utilised platforms and technology to configure this positionality, and how they propagated messages related to their counter-discourse and sought engagement with public audiences. In this section we expand upon and discuss our analysis to extend and enrich the understanding of counter-discourse activism as it is relevant for the CSCW, social computing and human-computer interaction research communities. We structure this discussion around issues pertaining to (i) audiences and successes, (ii) control and ownership and (iii) power and privilege.
6.1 Engaging audiences and understanding successes
Our analysis of Parasite Street and PSOT highlighted the ways in which both sets of activists, from the outset, had imagined audiences for their work; however these audiences were complex and, moreover, the ways in which social media and other digital services were used to reach them were multifaceted.
In the case of Parasite Street, the creator (SR) was driven by an aspiration to disrupt and inject alternative discussion into an existing Twitter stream around the first series of Benefits Street. His ambition was to reach out to and promote discussion amongst those who were already tweeting in relation to the programme’s broadcast; in doing so, he envisaged that those consuming and reflecting upon the programme’s dominant discourse would be confronted with an alternative narrative around state benefits. However, in order to reach this wider audience, the campaign had to make use of an initial, smaller, audience of Internet-savvy, politically-aware social media users who were likely already aware of the problematic politically-charged messages embedded in poverty porn television programming. These users were accessed primarily through SR’s existing personal online social network; this network was not only large (relatively speaking), it also included many well-known and influential left-wing journalists, political activists and bloggers. SR had access to this powerful and sympathetic audience and was able to speak directly to them through a counter discourse on the Parasite Street website that had an attractive ideological fit; this in turn provided the means to build a user base that was necessary for the crowdspeaking event. This, in turn, allowed the existing online discussion around Benefits Street to be disrupted, ultimately reaching the intended audience of social media users who were not necessarily already reflecting upon the values inherent in such television shows.
PSOT was perhaps more complex in its processes of engaging with its audience(s). In many respects, the ambitions of this campaign were similar to those of Parasite Street in that the campaigners wished to disrupt the existing discourse around state welfare, benefits and the othering of a whole town and its community through the promotion of an alternative narrative. As noted, however, much of the campaign’s social media activities, as well as the PSOT website, were focused on actively promoting positive stories and news of the local area. These stories were then propagated to those liking or following the PSOT campaign on Facebook and Twitter who were primarily people who identified with, or had some personal connection to, the town of Stockton-on-Tees. Therefore, while the primary work of Parasite Street was to rapidly and concisely convey politically-charged content as quickly as possible to a national audience, PSOT (on the face of things) presented itself as a slow-burning campaign that had local values and local legitimacy, carefully posing questions and communicating with what was imagined to be a primarily local audience, in order to build engagement and content over time. This was further supported through the use of offline promotional material related to the campaign, which often quite literally (as in Figure
4) spoke directly to those already living and working in the town. However, the focus on nurturing positive sentiments about the town served, perhaps intentionally, to deflect attention away from the campaigns’ ultimate - and quite subversive – objective; to discredit the creators of Benefits Street. Indeed, the three main events which were organised during the PSOT campaign explicitly targeted the creators, thus deviating from the focus on ‘positive stories’ to directly provoke the production company and challenge the tactics and methods used in the creation of poverty porn television. In many respects these interventions stood in sharp contrast to, and even contradicted, how the campaign otherwise presented itself on a daily basis; hence while the primary audience for the campaign was imagined to be local people who would share stories and take part in organised events, the ultimate ambition was to reach those seen to be creating the discourse to be countered in the first place.
Both sets of activists approached their respective campaigns with a deliberate goal; to create what we characterise in Foucauldian terms as a form of counter discourse. However, both campaigns also had differing audiences for their work; for Parasite Street the ultimate audience were those people discussing Benefits Street during its broadcast, while for PSOT it was those who identified positively with the town as well as, ultimately, the makers and distributers of poverty porn. The nature of the different audiences of the two campaigns led to two drastically different approaches to engagement. The use of pre-written, standardised text which explicitly eschewed overtly political language meant that the Parasite Street campaign purposefully appealed to those interested in simple, low-threshold activity as a means of participating in a cause – i.e., it was slacktivist in nature. While the impact of slacktivist campaigns remains contentious (as discussed in the background review), SR stressed that the primary aim of his campaign was to create a frame for discussion, and to propagate this frame as a way of talking about some of the issues being raised. In purposefully appealing to simple, low-threshold political activity (“click this button to share a tweet”) those who identified with the cause were able to spread the Parasite Street message unaltered, quickly, in a sphere where SR perceived there to be a dominant discourse around benefits and welfare. In the context of MM’s work on PSOT, however, such lightweight forms of interaction (e.g. sharing a post written by PSOT) were interspersed with more complex engagements where people with affiliations to Stockton were invited to contribute content, to offer positive news stories and to participate in organised events in the town.
A wider question remains as to whether counter-discourse activism work can be considered slacktivistic by nature. Both SR and MM put in a large amount of time and resource to conduct the campaigns, along with interacting with traditional media to ensure their counter-discourse was widely populated. The online-only nature of Parasite Street aligns the campaign more closely with slacktivism, with SR purposely reducing the campaign to low-threshold political interactions he is able to successfully, in his eyes, propagate the simple, but powerful counter-discourse of Parasite Street. On the other hand, PSOT features a strong online-presence, along with a complex configuration of offline relationships with the residents of Stockton-on-Tees in order to solicit participation in events, contribution of content for the campaigns, and interactions with town officials and residents to coordinate events. From these two case studies it is clear that low-threshold interactions can be a crucial component of counter-discourse activism campaigns, but that this is also dependent on the nature of the engagement and intervention. Therefore, it is unfair to describe them in the negative terms that have become associated with the “slacktivism” label, as the political engagement of organisers and participants, in some cases, can be far beyond low-threshold political engagement.
Regardless of the approaches taken to engage people in the counter-discourse, we might imagine that the perceived successes of the campaigns were measured by how far they reached their intended audiences. Our interviews with the respective activists reveal that the effectiveness of each campaign was measured using a range of methods by their creators, with (as might be expected) importance given to social media metrics such as ‘shares’, ‘likes’, ‘engagements’ and video views. Conversely, both stated they were not interested in the precise details and number of these social media metrics, and used them more as a rough gauge to whether their discourse was being shared. In this vein, they acknowledged that any evidence of wider groups or significant individuals engaging with campaign content was similarly, if not more, important as it was an indicator of how far and wide their counter-discourse was being propagated. In the case of PSOT, for instance, the moments where Love Productions themselves interacted with the campaign were valued as important signifiers of success, as were messages from people from outside of the Stockton area. For Parasite Street, the mention of the website by UK politicians, the invitation to author commentaries in mainstream media, and to be interviewed on television, were seen as critical successes. As such, although the quantification of success through measures of interaction and shares was viewed as important by the activists, a more nuanced understanding through interactions with supporters and observation of wider networks allowed them to evaluate their success in their own, often personal, terms.
This raises difficult questions for researchers whom are interested in understanding the effectiveness of activism and counter discourse on social media. In some instances, the outcome of the activist cause itself might be measurable, as noted on a small-scale by Crivellaro et al. (
2014), and might even be related back to the activists’ actions; however, in more complex and wide-ranging cases (such as national issues around welfare as discussed here) this would seem to be unachievable. Related work by Potts et al. (
2014) explores the way success might be measured, and the authors conclude that more work needs to be done around facilitating activists to leverage specific platform affordances in order to meet their campaign goals. Though elements of the activism discussed here have definite parallels with the social media marketing strategies frequently adopted by commercial organisations and corporations, conventional deployment of typical social media metrics when assessing brand and impression management (Hoffman and Fodor
2010; Peters et al.
2013) seem ill-equipped to provide deep insight into the impacts of activism.
6.2 Control and ownership
In both campaigns, the presentation and manipulation of information aggregation on social media was important for positioning each campaign alongside the existing discourse. Our analysis shows how both campaigns used a central, conventional website as an authoritative space to present elements of their message in ways that could not be explicitly contested. However, when it came to engaging with and orchestrating their message via social media, each campaign had different approaches to maintaining control of their message.
Parasite Street was primarily concerned with explicitly positioning its alternative discourse alongside that which was seen to be the dominant reaction to the show. The campaign deliberately and explicitly chose to “hijack” the hashtag #benefitsstreet which was being promoted by the TV broadcaster - a strategy that has been used successfully by grassroots movements in the past to disrupt the marketing campaigns of commercial entities, corporations and government agencies, e.g. through the hijacking of the McDonalds’ Twitter promotion hashtags #McDstories (Mcfedries
2013) and #CheersToSochi (Pegoraro et al.
2014) and the #myNYPD law enforcement public relations campaign (Jackson and Welles
2015). In their analysis of the #CheersToSochi hijacking, Pegoraro et al. (
2014) draw specific attention to the loss of message control by the original corporate entity - a clear objective of the Parasite Street campaign in this instance. Usage of the Thunderclap platform also allowed orchestration of large-scale tweeting at strategically important times, rapidly revealing the campaign to a wide audience in a firestorm (Pfeffer et al.
2014). Due to the deliberate use of #benefitsstreet and the timing of the Thunderclap alongside the start of the broadcast, Parasite Street was able to inject over 2000 tweets into the Twitter stream associated with Benefits Street at exactly the moment viewers would be looking at the Twitter feed. While with this comes the ‘danger’ of entering the unmoderated public discussion on Twitter, Parasite Street issued deliberately packaged pre-fabricated tweets and share text to set the terms by which the campaign would be discussed on social media.
The Parasite Street campaign’s practical attempts to create appealing tweets speaks to the general research challenge of constructing messages with a high likelihood of being retweeted or gaining momentum in a social network (e.g. as discussed by André et al.
2012; Comarela et al.
2012; Alonso et al.
2013). Understanding the impact of pre-crafted messages on social media has been explored empirically in mainstream politics; for instance, Bronstein (
2013) found the levels of persuasion displayed in US presidential election candidates’ posts equated to more comments and likes. At the grassroots level, Juris (
2012) found that appealing to mainstream, non-activist social media users was difficult due to the diffuse, non-centralised nature of the #Occupy movement and the subsequent lack of any agreed, actionable demands and political stances. In our analysis above, we suggest that SR’s use of social media sharing technology allowed the campaign’s message to remain unchanged. The simple pre-fabricated tweets were carefully crafted by SR to include evocative and persuasive language (“You’ll LOVE Parasite Street”, “Still angry about #benefitsstreet?”, see Fig.
1c), and the affordances of the sharing mechanism meant this message would not be modified (easily) by those sharing it. This addresses the issue identified by Juris (ibid) by enforcing a specific language and political framing into the tweets of Parasite Street’s supporters. The possibility of these messages being retweeted by other users in the Twitter network extends the reach of Parasite Street beyond the users interacting with the website, and maintains the original persuasive language crafted by SR.
In the example of PSOT, the maintenance of control over discourse on social media was enacted primarily through the use of language to communicate to their audience and through the choice of platforms with which to engage with these audiences. While PSOT did have an active Twitter account, this was primarily used to direct people towards the PSOT website or its Facebook page. On the few occasions where Twitter was used to invite discussion (e.g. when an episode of Benefits Street was starting to air), in contrast to Parasite Street, PSOT actively avoided using #benefitsstreet. In ways that echo the use of the hashtag #sealfie by Inuit communities, the PSOT campaign used its own hashtags as a means to make a conscious effort to distance themselves from the predominant online discourse around the television show. In a further means to instil control, PSOT used YouTube and Instagram primarily as ways to broadcast media related to the campaign; this was particularly explicit with their YouTube account which had comments disabled and was used as a way of enabling video content to be embedded on the main PSOT website or to be shared via the PSOT Facebook and Twitter accounts. Such usage of the video-sharing platform is now common by organizations - and referred to by Kim (
2012) as the
institutionalization of YouTube. Also, as noted, Facebook was the primary platform with which the campaign conversed with its audience; this appeared to be a further deliberate attempt to maintain rigid control of the discourse.
While PSOT presented a locally authentic identity and conveyed a spirit of being “bottom up” through the sharing of peoples’ own good news stories, discussion on the Facebook page was carefully controlled by only allowing followers to respond to posts made by a small group of people central to the campaign. As such, it purposely disallowed the public from proposing their own topics of discussion within the community page; this presented a context where it was seen to be fair to remove any comments and posts that might be considered to be deviating from any central and consistent message. Mascaro et al. (
2012) studied this process of agenda setting by administrators of the Facebook page for the Coffee Party, an activist-initiated US political movement. Control over the social media discourse was implemented by allowing only administrators to initiate posts; although general group members were able to comment on these posts and engage in polyvocal discourse, the ability for moderators to set the tone of the discussion for each post, curate the entire page, and carefully erase comments that challenge the discourse of the political movement, facilitated strict top-down control and ownership of the Facebook discourse. This was echoed, although at a smaller and in a less politically explicit manner, by PSOT. It should be noted, of course, that the practice of carefully curating Facebook timelines so that they reflect a predetermined performance or message has been previously studied extensively for individuals (e.g. see Zhao et al.
2013; Zhao and Lindley
2014). Ammari and Schoenebeck (
2016) recently discussed how Facebook groups are used to include and exclude certain voices from discussions around societal issues (in their case fatherhood and stay-at-home parenting) while Crivellaro et al. (
2014) revealed that although Facebook seemingly provides a space for polyvocality in activism it can also be carefully moderated and managed by a privileged few, i.e. comments can be moderated out (or just simply proposed for moderation) - a practice that Crivellaro et al. relates to Hauser’s notion of ‘gentle violence’ (Hauser and McClellan
2010). It should be noted that platforms themselves play a key role in facilitating or restricting this process, with the use of “Terms of Service” enforcement by Twitter and Facebook to suppress anti-government activism during the Arab Spring being studied in detail (Youmans and York
2012).
Both campaigns therefore raise further questions around their attempts to take and maintain control and ownership of the online discussion; these include issues around the practices of curating individual messages and aggregated timelines but also around the power, governance and inclusivity of their campaigns.
6.3 Power and privilege
While both sets of activists configured their work as primarily bottom-up and grassroots in-as-much as they were contesting dominant discourses being communicated in a top-down manner by media organisations and other powerful entities, both of the main protagonists had access to networks of power not normally available to grassroots movements.
For example, Parasite Street utilised a mailing list to access a loosely connected set of activists and organisations considered authoritative and credible when publicising the campaign. Previously, Juris (
2005) in their analysis of anti-globalization activist networks also describe how the “creation of broad umbrella spaces, where diverse organisations and collectives converge around common hallmarks while preserving their autonomy” allows activists to loosely organise and cooperate. SR’s involvement in the hacktivist collective Undergr0und, along with his reliance on the activist network NEON and the UK Uncut social media account, are clear examples of such loose activist networks. UK Uncut defines itself as a “grassroots movement taking action to highlight alternatives to austerity” (UK Uncut
2016), and is aimed at countering the UK government’s austerity programme. Parasite Street, on the other hand, is aimed at the abuses of the super-rich and the problematic depiction of benefits claimants on TV. Since these political aims are ideologically related, SR was able to publicise Parasite Street on UK Uncut’s Twitter feed due to its operation as an “umbrella space” for members of the activist network. However, this is a privileged, closed space that is unavailable to many. Later in the campaign, Parasite Street even utilised traditional broadcast news media i.e. extremely powerful modes of communication unavailable to the majority. Though PSOT, in contrast, localised their audience, they also had privileged access to platforms, networks and services, such as placing advertising on local government refuse vehicles and in print. The former is a completely closed space, exclusively reserved for use by local government, and the latter is generally financial costly to utilise and publicize.
This privilege serves to muddy the definition of both campaigns as grassroots and activist in nature. Similar muddied terrain, in which a seemingly bottom-up campaign has obfuscated beneficial links to official power structures, has been explored by marketing scholars such as Beder (
1998) via the term “astroturfing”: a grassroots movement created or supported by a company or organisation who may utilise “specially tailored mailing lists, field officers, telephone banks and the latest in information technology” in order to create a grassroots movement without any legitimation from the public. The term is heavily loaded as scholars often use it to denote subversive, malicious actions by corporations; for example, Beder describes how electricity companies attempt to influence legislation through the use of astroturfed advocacy groups. Similarly, Mix and Waldo (
2015) raise awareness of the ethical implications of NGOs and corporations using astroturfing to influence democracy. Marketing researchers have also studied how brands on social media are promoted by seemingly “activist influencers” (Booth and Matic
2011) who are often covertly puppets of commercial organisations. For instance, organisations may identify social media users who may have large reach (such as someone with thousands of Instagram followers) and who are tangentially related to a product, before contacting them directly to advocate, covertly, for a brand. As such, in many respects the selection of activists by local government councillors in Stockton-on-Tees might be considered somewhat analogous to these examples in that MM was targeted to influence the discourse around Benefits Street series 2, and was seen as a local “celebrity” with influence. However, whilst the exact motivations of the councillors are unknown, it can be imagined they are poles apart from the motivations that drive more typical commercial users of activist influencers or astroturfing techniques. Nor should we conclude that MM was unaware of any aspect of his own role in the campaign.
An alternate view of MM’s involvement in PSOT, and even the use of well-connected activists and celebrities by SR in Parasite Street, is that it was a deliberate and intentional leveraging of followers or fans for a political cause. Bennett (
2014), for instance, describes how Lady Gaga motivates her fans through social media to take part in her chosen activist causes. However, such use of privileged digital media spaces (e.g. through mobilisation of hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers) further blurs the boundary between activism and “digilantism” (digital vigilantism). Numerous examples exist of the leveraging of Twitter followers in order to spread views or incite action (see Associated Press
2016), and research studying the Reddit investigation of the Boston Marathon Bombings notes the potential for digilantism to provide positive civil investigation; however, the literature also warns of the susceptibility of the process to give way to speculation, leading to potentially devastating societal effects (Nhan et al.
2015).
Finally, though Nielsen (
2013) observes when discussing #Occupy that the majority of online activism still uses ‘mundane internet tools’, he also reminds us that the use of such tools also limits participation and risks exclusion in itself. The PSOT campaign can be seen to be attempting to address this issue of exclusion by taking a multiplatform approach to propagate the campaign message. On the one hand, the campaign actively uses “mundane internet tools”, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, in order to interact with a population who have ready access to social networking and prerequisite technology. It further leverages this techno-privileged audience by asking for them to contribute content using their own media (“Submit your photos, videos, etc.”). In contrast, the campaign also conducts work in physical spaces through events such as the Loudest Whisper, and locally-oriented advertising. However, in both cases outputs and further information of the events and about the campaign in general are situated on websites. Parasite Street emphasises this problem even further, as the primary focus towards just online social media platforms excludes those who do not regularly use these, do not engage in live tweeting practices, or do not have ready access to the required technology. Whether this somewhat exclusionary focus has a detrimental effect on either campaign is not clear, but the power afforded to each activist through the selection and placement of content in digital spaces has considerable influence over participation, and subsequent interaction with the campaign. While research on digital civic engagement and action has begun to pave the way for less-privileged digital forms of engagement (see Vlachokyriakos et al.
2014), the warnings of Nielsen (ibid) remain prescient not only for activists when designing campaigns, but for academics as a venue for further study.