Muslim Social Media Crossroads – 3 Critical Questions to Move Forward

The intent of this post is not to create an advocacy one way or another on the following 3 issues, but to create a discussion. Take a look at the questions raised and leave your feedback in the comments.

1) Platform

The gatekeepers are gone.

Traditionally, if you wanted to write something, you wrote it and sent it to a gatekeeper. This might be the editor of your local paper, a magazine, or even a book publisher. Now you can self publish a book, start your own blog, and develop your own Facebook following. If you wanted to be on TV, the news or a casting director had to pick you. Now, anyone can start up their own YouTube channel – and even get more viewers than they would trying to break into regular television.

The benefit of this is that it enables people and projects to build a qualified audience. Niche projects can garner support of interested people from around the globe, but if launched locally only might flounder. The obvious counter to this is that it lets people project authority when they would be otherwise undeserving of it.

One level past this for individuals is the problem of balancing between sincerely doing good work and building a personal brand.

Critical question: How do we approach building our own platforms, and how do we support or withhold support from others’ platforms? 

2) Activism

Many turn to social media as a means of activism. It is a place to raise awareness about causes that might otherwise not receive proper attention. A natural consequence of advocating for certain causes is people questioning why you advocate a certain cause or why you don’t advocate for another cause.

At the basic level, there is the whole #shamegrenade issue – “Why do you raise awareness about Kashmir, but not Syria” and so on.

An overlooked part of social media activism is fatigue. Due to the ease of clicking and sharing, we feel compelled to start advocating for every good cause we see. If we don’t, then our friends (or followers) become judgmental and start asking or demanding we advocate for other things as well. One person simply cannot advocate for every single humanitarian cause, social cause, political cause, and save the whales from Facebook. It is analogous to making every announcement possible after Juma prayer. The announcement session would last for 6 hours. You must be selective about where you put your energy so that you are most effective in the few causes most pertinent to you.

An important thing to keep in mind with activism on social media is that your history is permanent. A more nuanced criticism someone might make of you is why you openly criticized something while supporting something that is seemingly contradictory. Or when you take stances that seem to conflict with one another. It is easier and easier for people to legitimately point out your inconsistencies in what you post. You are accountable to your own track record. See also: #BringBackOurGirls Guide to Recent Internet Debates.

Critical question: How do you prioritize and focus on which issues are important, and how do you decide what to campaign for on social media – and to what extent? Moreover, how do we maintain proper decorum while having these discussions?

3) The Intersection of Social Media and Live Events

It has become customary for events to have an official hashtag. This makes it easy for people to find all status updates about a particular event, and gives you a pulse of what is happening practically in real time. At this year’s ISNA convention, it created a few interesting situations. First was the statement from Dr. Tariq Ramadan, and then there were a number of other incidents that took place which created a lot of fireworks online. I’m not detailing the incidents here because they aren’t pertinent to the point being made – the point being how events will need to learn to manage the social media element. Please note – the remainder of this discussion is general to any Islamic event, not specific to ISNA.

With thousands of people in attendance, and so many things going on simultaneously, it is hard to know about or hear about everything that happens at a conference. At ISNA, a number of things happened that I would never have known about had I not seen them on Twitter.

This presents a new set of challenges to event organizers. From a PR perspective, they are now forced to respond and acknowledge complaints that otherwise could have been overlooked. What are the appropriate channels to raise an issue while at an event – or is posting on social media now the accepted norm?

Critical question: How do we develop guidelines for responsible social media usage at live events? How should organizers react to live feedback during events (especially controversial items that might need well thought out discussion)? 

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