What do you understand by settler colonialism’? Explain with reference to an example of a settler colonial nation. 2. ??Define digital allyship and provide a

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SI: Marginality and Social Media

Social media technologies complexly intersect with and affect Indigenous subjectivities. Facebook and Twitter, on one hand, have become home to more or less organized hate groups, facilitating what Matamoros-Fernández (2017) has called “platformed racism” (p. 930). Research has found Indigenous people disproportionately bear the brunt of practices of troll- ing, cyberbullying, and other forms of digital violence (Campbell et al., 2010). The effects of these forces are far from immaterial, but can lead to both real trauma at the level of the individual, and the ongoing marginalization at the level of whole social groups (Carlson et al., 2017). In these ways, social media offers another platform through which the settler colonial “logic of elimination” (Wolfe, 2006) can be enacted.

But social media have also offered opportunities to power- fully resist, refute, and reject this logic and work toward imag- ining and realizing different futures for Indigenous peoples. From the online Zapatista movement in Mexico against gov- ernment subjugation (Wolfson, 2012), to the Canadian #IdleNoMore activism for Indigenous sovereignty (Grundberg & Lindgren, 2015), to the #SOSBlakAustralia protests against the forced closures of remote Aboriginal communities (Carlson & Frazer, 2016), Indigenous peoples globally have leveraged social media technologies to their own ends—challenging

dominant discourses, organizing feet-on-the-streets activism, and producing anti-colonial collectives.

Researchers have also been interested in how social media is implicated in Indigenous peoples’ more “everyday” political expressions, performances, or representations of the self (Lumby, 2010; Petray, 2011). Moving beyond earlier debates around the “authenticity” of online expression, more recent work has sought to understand the political work of social media performances. Petray (2011) argues, for instance, that “self-writing,” where Indigenous Australians overtly perform their identities online, constitutes an everyday form of “micro- activism” through which pejorative stereotypes may be chal- lenged. This work has demonstrated social media—as “an arena for political struggle” (Harris & Carlson, 2016, p. 460)— provides Indigenous peoples promising though uncertain polit- ical possibilities in refuting the forces of settler colonialism.

925261 SMSXXX10.1177/2056305120925261Social Media <span class="symbol" cstyle="Mathematical">+</span> SocietyCarlson and Frazer research-article20202020

Macquarie University, Australia

Corresponding Author: Ryan Frazer, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. Email: [email protected]

“They Got Filters”: Indigenous Social Media, the Settler Gaze, and a Politics of Hope

Bronwyn Carlson and Ryan Frazer

Abstract Social media technologies have had ambivalent political implications for Indigenous peoples and communities. On one hand, they constitute new horizons toward which settler colonial forces of marginalization, disenfranchisement, and elimination can extend and strengthen their power. On the other hand, social media have also offered opportunities to resist and reject the violence of colonization and its ideological counterparts of domination and racial superiority, and work toward imagining and realizing alternative futures. In this article, we draw on insights from settler colonial studies and affect theory to chart the politics of “affect” through the stories of Indigenous Australian social media users. We first argue that the online practices of Indigenous social media users are often mediated by an awareness of the ‘settler gaze’—that is, a latent audience of non-Indigenous others observing in bad faith. We then outline two responses to this presence described by participants: policing the online behaviors of friends and family, and circulating hopeful, inspiring, and positive content. If “policing” is about delimiting the things of which online bodies are capable, then an affective politics of hope is about expanding a body’s capacity to act and imagining other possible futures for Indigenous people.

Keywords Indigenous studies, affect theory, settler colonial studies, social media

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Over the last decade, social scientists turned to ideas of “affect” to better understand the processes through which political subjectivities and collectives are produced and maintained. Most often understood through Baruch Spinoza’s dictum of “the capacity to affect and be affected,” this work has looked at what affects do in the formation of subjectivi- ties, rather than what they are (Ahmed, 2013). A focus on affect has helped scholars parse the complex forces that pro- visionally cohere to produce particular political arrange- ments—that is, how forces “beyond” both the material and discursive move, stabilize, and transform subjects.

Increasingly, media and communications studies scholars have put to work these ideas to analyze the messy, complex, and often unstable forms of political sociality now facilitated through social media. Most commonly, this work has sought to understand how affect is implicated in the production of digital “publics” (Hipfl, 2018; Papacharissi, 2016). Analyses have included how the affective force of “anger” can rally a people around issues of social justice (Blevins et al., 2019); how anti- fascist activism can be reframed and intensified through notions of “love” (Persson, 2017); and how “eudaimonic” (i.e., mean- ingful, joyful, and inspiring) memes can be used to “circulate joy” among Facebook publics (Rieger & Klimmt, 2019).

In this article, we chart the everyday politics of affect through the stories of Indigenous Australian social media users.1 We conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 41 participants across five Australian communities, in which we discussed what kinds of content they posted online, what they thought constituted “proper” and “appropriate” online behavior, and what factors figured into their views on what comprised “good” online behavior. Rather than ques- tioning the “authenticity” of these performances of the self, we instead asked the following: What work do they do? Which online actions and expressions do they make possible, and which others do they foreclose? And which broader rela- tions of power might be working to guide, shape and pre- clude these online expressions?

Through our analysis, we argue that the online practices of Indigenous social media users are often mediated by an aware- ness of the “settler gaze”—that is, the knowledge of a potential audience of anti-Indigenous others observing in bad faith. The people we spoke to described two main responses to this latent presence. On one hand, some articulated a responsibility to moderate and “police” the online expressions of their family, friends, and kin, particularly when they were concerned these expressions might be used against them in some way. On the other hand, a smaller group of participants described actively sharing content that produced an altogether different image of Indigenous futures—one that exceeded the dominant settler colonial narrative of Indigenous “decline”—in what we broadly describe as an affective politics of hope. In both cases, however, we suggest the affective expressions of these Indigenous social media users can be understood as already enabled and delimited through existing Indigenous–settler power relations and regimes of surveillance.

Social Media and Affective Politics

Political scholars across disciplines have found difficulty articulating the political relations, connections, and arrange- ments that now emerge on social media (Castells, 2015). In an age of “fake news” (Albright, 2017), dispersed and seem- ingly “unorganised” White supremacist networks (Nagle, 2017), and the frantic workings of “cancel culture,” more traditional forms of political analyses appear increasingly inadequate to describe the more decentralized and “rhizom- atic” forms of political action that social media makes possible.

Perhaps most influentially, political scholars Bennett and Segerberg (2012) describe these online political arrange- ments as “connective action.” They define connective action as a more “personalised,” less centrally organized, and more provisional political formation. The personalisation of the political, Bennett (2012) argues elsewhere, “is perhaps the defining change in the political culture of our era” (p. 37). Rather than being elicited, organized, and held together through hierarchical models of political “membership,” online political movements “are developing relationships to publics as affiliates [. . . ] offering them personal options in ways to engage and express themselves” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 760, emphasis added).

Increasingly, there has been a turn to ideas of affect to understand these more dynamic and “affiliative” publics of digitally mediated action (Hipfl, 2018). While theories of “affect” have diverse provenance (Pile, 2010), much of the recent work in media studies has drawn on broadly Spinozan conceptualizations of affect as the ability to affect and be affected. That is, focusing less on the clearly felt or easily articulable dimensions of everyday experience, this work pays attention to what bodies can and cannot do, say, and sense. Affect does not set analysis only on questions of iden- tity, representation, or complete, unified, and static forms. Instead, it emphasizes connections, in-betweenness, provi- sional unity, circulation, and emergence. It asks how bodies are connected to other bodies and what capacities these con- nections might produce or preclude. It is an approach that, as scholars are increasingly recognizing, appears particularly well-suited for the messy, contingent, and diffuse political formations that often transpire on social media.

Papacharissi (2016), for instance, elaborates the idea of “affective publics” to understand online movements that exceed more traditional political solidarities. Affect is, they explain, “the drive or sense of movement experienced before we have cognitively identified a reaction and labeled it as a particular emotion” (Papacharissi, 2016, p. 316, emphasis added). For Papacharissi, because it is pre-cognitive or non-representable, affect leaves open possibilities for alternative political arrange- ments. “Its in-the-making, not-yet-fully-formed nature is what invites many to associate affect with potentiality,” they write (Papacharissi, 2016, p. 316). Papacharissi (2016) argues that it is through the affective registers of Twitter hashtags, for

Carlson and Frazer 3

instance, that undifferentiated “crowds” are rendered into more clearly defined “publics,” which “come together and/or disband around bonds of sentiment” (p. 308). This leads to a much more open, complex understanding of the political affordances of online connections. Rather than focusing on the readily identifi- able structures and meanings of political arrangements, the notion of affective publics sees politics as potentiality: what is and what is not politically possible on social media.

A growing body of literature has tracked empirically the emergence, formation, and dissolution of these affective publics on social media. Knudsen and Stage (2012), for instance, argue from their case study on climate activism that “affect plays a prominent role as a way of creating inner rela- tions among the activists and as a way of connecting to the outer world” (p. 154). Blevins et al. (2019), more recently, explore the affective registers of tweets around Black rights movements in the United States and, in particular, how they produce counter narratives to those circulated by legacy media. “By telling their own stories, on their own terms,” they write,

[T]hese “affective publics” disrupted the power typically held by mainstream news outlets and in the process changed the conversation from one that focuses on basic story elements [. . .] to one in which the meaning of the event is more internalized. (Blevins, 2019, p. 14)

More than just the discursive content of tweets, the affective registers of hashtags used in Twitter dialogue around police brutality worked to internalize and intensify an audience that supported Black rights. Persson (2017), on the contrary, explores the “excessive” aspect of affect and emotion in online political activity. Focusing on the affective politics of Twitter use during an anti-fascist protest, they argue that in understanding online expressions, we must understand to which publics they are connected, and which they produce. Persson (2017) writes, “To feel in public is a way for people to discharge their own individual emotions in front of others, but it also becomes a way of being part of a public based partly on shared emotions” (p. 9, their emphasis). This work shows that through the circulation of affect that publics are produced, rather than just gathered or contained.

Social Media, Indigenous Activism, and the Project of Decolonization

This recent turn toward affect provides new and exciting avenues for understanding the political relations, move- ments, and arrangements that social media makes possible. Rather than relying on more traditional conceptualisations of collective politics as ideology or group membership, affect points toward the more diffuse, affiliative, and indeterminate registers of digital politics. While scholars have applied this thinking to the political potentialities opened up for margin- alized groups, such as Black populations in the United States,

little work on affect has explored the political engagements of Indigenous social media users. This is a significant over- sight, as a growing body of research shows that not only are Indigenous groups situated differently within regimes of power—most significantly, colonial power—they also use and experience social media differently than other popula- tions (Hutchings & Rodger, 2018; Matamoros-Fernández, 2017). Relations between Indigenous and settler colonizer populations are reproduced and reimagined through the con- nections made possible through social media (Carlson & Frazer, 2020; Frazer & Carlson, 2017).

In settler colonial Australia, Indigenous people constitute a distinct social, cultural, and economic group. By many metrics, Australian Indigenous peoples are subject to the worst social, economic, and educational outcomes in the country. Paralleling the experience of Indigenous popula- tions elsewhere, two centuries of concerted effort at elimina- tion, dispossession, and disenfranchisement by colonial forces have wrought great violence against Indigenous Australians. Scholarship on Indigenous–settler relations in Australia documents the ongoing workings of colonial log- ics, which work to ignore, contain, and erase Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures, subjectivities, and claims to Country (Maddison & Nakata, 2020). Indigenous Australians, however, remain in existence—socially, culturally, and spiri- tually strong—owing to centuries of successful anti-colonial resistance, political organization, and cultural resurgence. Because of this broader politics, there are different stakes for Indigenous people in being online: both in terms of the pos- sibilities it brings about and the risks it carries.

A growing body of work documents the myriad benefits social media offers Indigenous populations, such as in find- ing friends and family lost through past policies of forced removal (Carlson, 2013); participating in significant cultural practices, including language regeneration and Sorry Business (i.e., practices of mourning; Marshall & Notley, 2014); sustaining networks of trust, help, and care (Hefler et al., 2018); and, most importantly for this article, engaging in political processes of self-expression and self-representa- tion (Petray, 2011).

Moving beyond earlier concerns around the “authentic- ity” of online identities, more recent work has conceptual- ized social media as “a vibrant stage of constructing authenticities” (Androutsopoulos, 2015, p. 74, emphasis added). Social media has been understood as a platform through which multiple expressions of the self can be made (van Dijck, 2013; Zhao et al., 2008).

This is particularly significant for marginalized groups such as Indigenous peoples. Since colonization, racist stereo- types of Indigenous people have worked to sustain and legiti- mize the settler colonial state. The founding national myth of terra nullius (i.e., empty land), for instance, posited Australia as a land without people, free for British forces to appropri- ate without negotiation, treaty, or compensation. Deleterious colonial policies across the last two centuries have been

4 Social Media + Society

based on racist representations of Indigenous people as, vari- ously, lazy, alcoholics, neglectful parents, and criminals (Augoustinos et al., 1999). Moreover, scholars have docu- mented the ways in which mainstream media and govern- ment discourse, even that which is “sympathetic,” is implicated reproducing what is called a “deficit discourse”— a discursive formation that Fforde et al. (2013) describe as “a narrative of negativity, deficiency and disempowerment” (p. 162). This narrative constitutes a way of identifying and defining Indigenous people by that which they supposedly lack. Significantly, researchers have consistently found this discursive formation in fact perpetuates that which it claims to only describe (Fforde et al., 2013).

One of the ongoing critical questions, then, has been who has the power to represent Indigenous peoples and communities in Australia. “Mainstream media in Australia and elsewhere has presented limited opportunities for Indigenous input,” Desmarchelier et al. (2018) argue, “and have instead focused on reporting from the perspective of the colonizers” (p. 150).

In this context, new media, including social media, has often been understood as providing opportunities to tell other stories, to produce other cultural identities, and to paint other futures (Brown & Nicholas, 2012; Carlson & Dreher, 2018; Frazer & Carlson, 2017; Titifanue et al., 2018). Desmarchelier et al. (2018) write that “where Australian Indigenous people have access to and/or control over forms of broadcast media, there is a noticeable dilution of mainstream/Whitestream narratives of Indigeneity” (p. 151). Looking at Indigenous- controlled digital media, they argue that “Indigenous empow- erment is strongly evident in the positive portrayals of identity and culture” (Desmarchelier et al., 2018, p. 161). In this same vein, Hutchings and Rodger (2018) argue that “social media platforms like Twitter are important tools that can be utilised by Indigenous peoples to make explicit and powerful challenges to Settler ideas of what defines contem- porary Aboriginality” (p. 86).

As this work has demonstrated, there is a complex politics of “being Indigenous” on social media (Petray, 2011). To express one’s Indigeneity online is to defy the colonial proj- ect of elimination (Wolfe, 2006), at both corporeal and dis- cursive registers. For Indigenous social media users, to have control of how oneself and one’s social group are represented is to challenge forces that define them in terms of what they lack, and to make possible other futures.

But scholars have warned against the tendency in social research to amplify the apparent benefits of new media while downplaying its dangers (Bennett, 2012). Digital technolo- gies have ambivalent consequences for Indigenous peoples (Brown & Nicholas, 2012). As work across the disciplines of sociology, media studies, and cultural studies has shown, social media can also work to extend and intensify the colo- nial “logic of elimination” (Wolfe, 2006). Online, Indigenous Australians are subject to racism, trolling, cyberbullying, doxing, gossip, and lateral violence (Matamoros-Fernández,

2017). Moreover, while they might facilitate the continuation and performance of culture, they also open possibilities of its appropriation (Brown & Nicholas, 2012). While social media has opened new doors for Indigenous people in political par- ticipation, to express themselves, to take power over their own representation, others have argued that it has also pro- duced new ways of silencing dissent. Dreher et al. (2016), for instance, argue we must pay attention not only to the politics of giving “voice” but also the politics of “listening.” This, they suggest, turns attention from the question of who gets to speak to one of who is heard.

Ultimately, this work shows clearly that Indigenous peo- ple’s use of social media does not exist in some politically neutral space, somehow free from the broader forces that constitute contemporary Australian settler colonialism. Rather, we must also pay attention to how Indigenous peo- ple’s online engagements exist in relation to broader colonial relations, which might work to delimit, silence, and police what is possible for Indigenous people online.

The Project: An Affective Politics

This article emerges from a national research project funded by an Australian Research Council Discovery Indigenous grant (ID: IN160100049) exploring the giving and receiving of help between and among Indigenous social media users.2 The aim of the research is to better understand the lived experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people on social media as it relates to accessing and sustaining net- works of trust and support. This project was inspired by a desire to understand how, in a context of ongoing settler colonial marginalization and widespread distrust of settler institutions, Indigenous social media users might be produc- ing other networks of help, trust, and care through the less “formal” connections facilitated by social media.

Over the last 2 years, we have been talking to Indigenous social media users across various parts of Australia, conduct- ing semi-structured interviews that focus on their online practices, and engaging with Indigenous service providers to see how social media figures into their organizational prac- tices. We have conducted face-to-face, in-depth semi-struc- tured interviews with 41 Indigenous participants from communities across New South Wales (Wollongong and Dubbo), Queensland (Cairns), and the Northern Territory (Darwin). Participants were selected on the basis that they were over the age of 18 years, identified as Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, and were active social media users. Participants came from a wide variety of ages (18–60 years of age) and backgrounds: political activists, university stu- dents, stay-at-home parents, community workers, and Elders. To ensure anonymity, participant names have been omitted from this article.

The collected data were qualitatively analyzed using an Indigenous research methodological framework. Indigenous frameworks encourage researchers to center and elevate

Carlson and Frazer 5

Indigenous perspectives, voices, and experiences (Rigney, 1997; Tuhiwai Smith, 2012). We were particularly guided by Torres Strait Islander academic Martin Nakata’s (2007) notion of the “Cultural Interface”—a concept he developed to denote the site of symbolic and material struggle that continues to envelop colonized peoples. For Nakata, the Cultural Interface is a space of interaction, negotiation, and resistance, whereby the everyday expressions of Indigenous people can be under- stood as both productive and constraining. For this article, it encouraged us to see social media as always already mediated by existing Indigenous–settler relations. However, and impor- tantly, the Cultural Interface is also a space of possibility, in which these mediated relations can always be challenged and dismantled.

To explore the ambivalent political possibilities of social media for Indigenous people, we draw on these insights from settler colonialism studies and recent developments in theo- ries of affect to frame an affective politics of Indigenous social media users. Hipfl (2018) explains that “affect is not individual, it is always relational” (p. 7, emphasis added). Affect is what binds us together, what moves us, and what makes us capable of feeling and acting upon the world. Affect circulates between, across, and through collectives— sticking to some bodies, gliding off others, both reifying and transforming subjectivities in the process. Following the research outlined above, we are interested in Indigenous social media users’ capacity to affect and be affected online.

A significant, though often overlooked, element is the role of audience in producing affective publics. Most research on Indigenous peoples’ use of social media has focused on the productive engagements of users between one another, in collectives, and communities, and, in the process, it gener- ally assumes a homogeneous, neutral audience. In this arti- cle, and following the work of Litt and Hargittai (2016), we are interested in the differential affects of Indigenous social media users, depending on who they presuppose their audi- ence to be. We ask, how does the awareness of an audience shape what users share and who they become on social media? Thus, we are interested in understanding social media not only as a platform through which people might connect with one another, but a stage on which users’ online interac- tions might be observed by others. A focus on audience, we suggest, broadens the scope of analysis. While we talked to individual users and asked them about their personal experi- ences, beliefs, and practices, a consideration of the role of audience encourages an understanding of how the affective capacity of individual users is always enabled and delimited by broader collectives—imagined or otherwise.

Our analysis moves through three sections. In the first sec- tion, we discuss the role of what we call the “settler gaze” in mediating Indigenous peoples’ social media practices. We argue that, in the context of the settler state, Indigenous users’ interactions can be reasonably positioned as “potentially sur- veilled.” In short, we demonstrate that many Indigenous social media users are often aware of the possibility of

nefarious onlookers, people who are ready to co-opt sensitive and esoteric knowledge or use everyday internal conflict against Indigenous peoples. The following sections focus on two distinct responses to this nascent awareness.

On one hand, people we interviewed very often talked about their self-identified responsibility in ensuring that fam- ily, friends, and kin did not engage in behavior online that might present a risk to their families and communities, includ- ing sharing cultural information or engaging in “drama” (boyd, 2014). Users described “keeping an eye” on younger family members, privately messaging friends to mitigate online drama, and self-policing their own online practices.

On the other hand, a smaller group of participants described an entirely different response to the settler gaze: circulating what we describe as an affective politics of hope. Several participants explained that not only did they avoid engaging in conflict, drama, and other forms of “negative” online behaviors that might be used against the broader com- munity, they actively sought to produce positive, hopeful, and “eudaimonic” content. This “hopeful” mode of online activity, we suggest, worked to imagine other possible futures for Indigenous peoples that exceed the settler narra- tive of Indigenous lack and decline.

The “Settler Gaze” on Social Media

In interviews, we asked all participants