Opening up my Twitter stream today, it was impossible not to see hashmarked tweet after hashmarked tweet encouraging a stay of execution for Georgia inmate Troy Davis who is set to die by way of lethal injection this Wednesday. It’s a controversial case in which seven of the nine witnesses have recanted their testimonies and the level of legal inaccuracies associated with the trial have caused many to begin using the catchphrase “Too Much Doubt” when discussing his case.
However, barring a miracle, it looks like the state of Georgia will kill Davis tomorrow at 7pm EST. He lost his final bid for clemency earlier this morning as the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles ruled that Davis, 42, should die for killing Mark MacPhail, an off-duty police officer, in a Savannah parking lot in 1989. That should be the indicator that all hope is lost. Actually it’s not as the Supreme Court can still intervene, although that isn’t expected to happen. Still, all day long, various forms of social media have been abuzz with links to online petitions to help spare Davis’ life. It’s a noble effort, regardless of your opinions of the death penalty, to see so many young people (many of them left-leaning) using social media as a form of activism and protest. Sadly, none of it will save Davis’ life. I’m not even sure that social media should be able to stay an execution. Here’s why.
To date, Amnesty International alone has delivered more than 630,000 letters asking for a stay of execution. Former President Jimmy Carter (who was once Governor of Georgia mind you), along with Archbishop Desmond Tutu, 51 members of Congress, a host of celebrities, and even death row supporters have all petitioned the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles for clemency in the case of Davis to no avail. The members of the pardon and parole board are a stubborn bunch if there ever was one. So why then, would they begin giving a hoot what people on Facebook and Twitter have to say? In reality, it’s feasible some of the good ol’ boys who are in charge of Davis’ fate have never heard of Twitter or Google + or any other form of online social interaction that could help change Davis’ fate. In fact, if you’re waiting on the power of social media to save Davis, he’s cooked. However that’s not the only reason social media activism shouldn’t be able to spare a life.
Many of the people retweeting petitions and posting notices on their social media accounts had never heard of Davis until a week ago — or less. Reading and signing a physical petition, or writing a parole board takes effort and research at the very least. Retweeting a petition for clemency in a capital murder case only takes dexterity in one finger as you click a button. Online activism, while noble and potentially powerful, typically involves the short-winded enthusiasm of the uninformed. If Troy Davis is the triggerman and he’s guiltier than sin, there would still be just as many wide-eyed folks on Twitter sending around links to save his life today. Frankly, that’s uneducated and unwise at the very least and potentially dangerous at the extreme.
Who gets to decide who becomes the social media darling for stays of executions anyway? Davis isn’t even the only person schedule to be executed by the state tomorrow. Ever heard of Lawrence Russell Brewer? Didn’t see his name on Facebook yet? He too is set to be executed tomorrow for a case that has flown far below the radar, despite how much it shocked the nation. He’s the same individual in Jasper, Texas who dragged a black man to his death behind his truck for two miles in 1998. It’s a case that also heavily involves race, and if the white supremacists wanted to push this via social media, they easily could. Brewer isn’t even remorseful of his crime, but should a last minute social media push be allowed to influence his execution? I think not, and that’s exactly the way it should be.
this is a surprising post. i’m certainly surprised that you take a dismissive position on the strength of social media in circumstances like this one. even your position on the execution of someone who’s death sentence has been seriously called into doubt seems a little flippant (there’s a reason why no one is publicizing the death of lawrence russell brewer – there is no doubt of his guilt; indeed, he is proud of his actions).
for starters, this is a little too reminiscent of malcom gladwell’s dismissal of social media’s role in the arab spring and in general as a protest movement. there was, rightfully, a lot of pushback to that position based on the argument of the strength of weak ties. seeing a lot of retweets brings issues to the attention of folks who might not otherwise have known (in this case, a possible wrongful execution).
if we accept the premise that knowledge is power, then this is inherently a good thing. someone who hasn’t heard about troy davis last week now has, has heard his story, and can make up their minds about the particulars. why is that a bad thing? because retweeting it won’t change a parole board’s mind? sure, maybe it won’t, but maybe these folks are getting wise to america’s horrible tendency to execute (which is fancy way of saying KILL) about 50 people a year (putting us in the esteemed company of china, iran, and saudi arabia as the most executing-est countries in the world).
now, i’m not naive enough to think that this will lead to any serious changes in the criminal justice system and particularly the death penalty. considering the cheers received by rick perry during a recent debate where he defended his and texas’s record of executing potentially innocent men (see here and especially here), that would be stupid. but social media is a crucial (and growing) part of the information exchange these days. dismissing retweets because they won’t make a difference is silly. those retweeters are potentially more informed than some of the 630,000 petition signers (not letter writers – those folks signed a petition) you mention in the post. and guess what, they didn’t make a difference either! but that information is key: how many people today know about troy davis that might not have otherwise? how many young ones found out through social media?
i think there are important questions about social media’s role in affecting change. but i don’t think social media really had anything to do with the recent publicity around troy davis; that has mostly to do with the fact that he’s scheduled to die tomorrow. maybe a more concerted effort on twitter and facebook starting 6 months ago might have made a difference, maybe not. at the very least, people’s awareness (and a lot of them are social media users) has been raised about the possible injustices that exist in system that metes out death.
i’ll close with a link to a story about a family member of someone who died in a recent and truly horrific killing, one in which a death sentence seems almost justified. her letter (pdf) to a DA considering whether to pursue the death penalty is worth reading in full.
Great comments Krieg. Good stuff on numerous levels. The thing is, I’m not questioning social media’s role or ability to create social change. That’s valid and real.
The reality is, there are tens of thousands of people who recognize the name Troy Davis and our jacked up death penalty system due to the social media push this case got. That’s well needed. Since I didn’t mention that, I’m glad you did.
However, I take umbrage with the rapid amount of people retweeting this in the 11th hour, and doing so only to look as if they care via Twitter. The “oh, I should probably retweet this” factor.
I’m assuming (slightly) but not everyone passing this along via social media really cares. It just looks good if you do it.
There was a similar social media push (on a smaller scale) for a stay of execution with Stan “Tookie” Williams. Millions of people got behind that — and it was popular to do so — but what if both of these men are murderers? Do we lobby for the pardon of guilty men when it’s socially acceptable to do so? It’s the GROUP THINK aspect of social media that genuinely worries me. That’s what I wanted to get across.
Thing is, despite his good aims, renouncement of gangs, and other noble actions, Tookie probably was a murderer (I did, however, support the cause for his clemency, and he was the topic of an anti-death penalty essay in 7th grade). Troy may very well not be a murderer. I wanted people to know this, so, in addition to attaining some of those 600,000+ signatures for amnesty in person, I posted the petition on Facebook. In person, I found people who were completely gung-ho with the petition and people who were too apprehensive to sign it. The funny thing is that in most cases the people who didn’t sign it due to a lack of knowledge surrounding the case looked up more about it online, only to then sign the online petition. In addition, one of my professors actually dedicated a class to critically analyzing the death penalty after she read further about the case at my recommendation. A great thing about social media is that the proliferation of knowledge can be coupled with the proliferation of information, allowing people to know the details behind what they are supporting, rather than just knowing what it is.
the point about social media group think is well taken, and i’m probably less dismissive of that solely on the basis that most other media sources are either entrenched, institutional nightmares hidebound on protecting a legacy/bottom line (i’m looking at you newspapers) or function as mouthpieces for reactionary, occasionally racist voices (i see you talk radio). don’t even get me started on cable news.
while social media sites like twitter and facebook do promote group think, i think the other side of the coin is that we now also partly control how we receive information – the fact that you’re twitter feed was blowing up with RTs about troy davis says a lot about who you are following and thus you as well.
the blessing is that you are receiving information you might not have received through previous channels from (presumably) trusted sources (now, whether you’re friends/folks you follow are themselves getting information from trusted sources is another question). the curse is that this information might suck and that you might be missing out on other also-relevant information (e.g. the death of newspapers is bad for information gathering at state and local levels, meaning really important issues/potential corruption are likely going under-reported).
i’d also push back on the group think thing by saying that might be a function of both information overload and the format. because we’re consuming much more information, people are simultaneously learning more things that pique their interest while having less time to act on it. it’s a question of earnestness too – you can probably look at your twitter stream and say who really cares and who doesn’t. but also, tweets are like text messages to the void – very few are elegant or profound. seeing enough of them might make you dismiss the content based solely on the abbreviations, misspellings, and the like.
and for real finally, information overload is bad because it keeps us locked up on the internet instead of making a real person-to-person, non-virtual difference. with complete acknowledgement of the irony, read this blog post for a better explication of this thought.
Great post Jonathan. Its nice to hear a little sober push–back against some of the hype that surrounds the intersection of social activism and social media.
@kreig: just to clarify– Gladwell’s article was written a year ago, six months before the events we collectively have come to call the “Arab Spring.” He does discuss the use of Twitter in the Iranian “Green Revolution” though.
daniel:
first, i before e, i before e.
w/r/t gladwell, see this very brief and still dismissive piece from gladwell right as egypt was heating up, and this transcript from a conversation with fareed zakaria (it’s about 2/3 down the page) where he is still dismissive of social media’s role and impact in the arab spring.
i don’t think his argument that social media is but one tool in the box is incorrect, but gladwell strikes me as almost entrenched and unwilling to see how this tool can overcome certain disadvantages of previous technologies.
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A very real problem being discussed in these comments is the false idea of Social Media Exceptionalism. Social media systems are just communication tools. Like all communication tools that came before they have their own set of strengths and weakness. But they are always tools. They should not be confused with causes or catalysts.
Every popular uprising happens through communication, using the best communication methods of its time. The Arab Spring happened to use social media tools to organize, merely because those are the best communication tools of our time. Facebook and Twitter certainly assisted in the organizing of loosely connected people into protests, but they didn’t cause the protests, nor did they provide everyone in the protests with shared strong social ties equivalent to the strength of the ties we have with our closest friends and family.
Many who’ve publicly disagreed with Gladwell’s stance seem to think “strong social ties” is just a term he made up when in fact he was referring to definitions of relationships used by sociologists. Camping out together in Tahrir Square until Mubarek was overthrown may have been a shared experience by lots of people with a common goal, and they certainly now share a common bond. But this is not the same as the bond you share with the people you see and interact with every day of your life, which is a core part of the definition of strong ties.
As for social media’s role in the Arab Spring outside the region, I’m very bothered by the fact that the popular narrative ended with Mubarak’s resignation. What’s happening in Egypt now looks very much like a popular revolt that has become yet another military takeover, like every other change of power in the country since WWII. I see this in real news stories, but the only person I see tweeting about this is an Egyptian who I started following while she was sharing photos of the Tahrir Square protests. If social media was building strong ties, then I don’t think we’d see the military still in charge in Egypt — a viable transitional government would have emerged from Facebook. But it didn’t.
Gladwell’s point revolved around this sort of understanding, but I think the backlash against him was about something else entirely — it was about believing that the way we spend so much of time has real value to society and isn’t just a form of private entertainment lived out in public. I’ve beaten this horse before, but I find the widespread misunderstanding of Gladwell’s original article a really disheartening commentary on the state of media studies.
As for Jonathan’s article, I find the idea that popular opinion should override judicial opinion to be terrifying. Yes, the courts make terrible mistakes, sometimes intentionally and for draconian purposes. But they provide a mechanism to protect us from our worst impulses of mob rule, the consequences of which can include witch trials and lynching. The nice thing about mechanisms is that when they get broken you have a chance to fix them. When you circumvent the mechanisms, you circumvent the chance to fix them.
Social media provides no inherent checks or balances to the information being shared — we are more likely to share something that plays to our established beliefs, no matter what those beliefs may be. Once you step back from the content and look at the behavior, it’s hard to tell the difference between an uninformed retweet about Troy Davis being innocent and an uninformed retweet about Obama being born in Kenya. But if you happen to believe passionately in one of these positions, you will likely applaud the retweet without regard to the fact that the person who did it knows very little about the matter. This use of social media as a way of shouting for political ends actually encourages and rewards ignorance, which poses considerable risk to the future of our civil society.
Great post, Jonathan. I appreciate your willingness to dive into a thorny issue.
It seems like to me social media in the Troy Davis execution demonstrates the next level of the mob mentality that has existed for thousands of years. But in Davis’ case, the mob has been turned on its head.
Usually, mobs take people to execution (The Apostle Paul in Ephesus as described in Acts 19, the Salem witch trials, lynch-mobs in the American south). For Davis, the mob wanted to set him free.
I don’t know much about mob psychology. But it seems to me that, other than objective, the mobs act in a similar way historically as in the Davis social media frenzy.
Some folks with information (not necessarily facts), point out a tantalizing cause. They bring together a few like-minded friends, and poof! You’ve got a pretty good group going. I think that group turns into a mob when the cause seems interesting and surface-level agreeable, and the cost of joining the group is ridiculously low (Clay Shirky, anyone?).
Now you’ve got something dangerous. A large group led by a few folks who have an informed opinion, but made up mostly of people who know just enough to hop on board.
I agree with your conclusion, Jonathan. Mob rule should not rule. Social media is just another way to mob.
I don’t know much about it, but is this also the case with Occupy Wall Street? I’d love to hear from some one who knows more about either mob mentality or the OWS protests.
Exceptionally well executed blog post
What a frankly good writing!!
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