Asian American Digital Political Participation
93.7% of participants signed an online petition between 2018 and 2019. 76.6% have re-tweeted or shared a post and 59.6% have used a hashtag in relation to social and political issues. Over half of the participants have used the hashtags #MeToo, #Asians4BlackLives, #NoDAPL, and #NotYourModelMinority.
In connection to immigration detention and deportation, 42% also have used #NoMuslimBanEver in response to travel bans barring entry from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen beginning in January 2017. Only 7.3% have used #ReleaseMN8, a 2016 campaign about the deportation and detention of Southeast Asian eight Cambodian Americans in Minnesota detained by ICE.
31.2% of participants have used #OscarsSoWhite, which critiqued the lack of diversity in Hollywood and mainstream media.
How are Asian Americans using the Internet?
Results from survey data collected between February - April 2019
About 80% of respondents use the Internet to learn about their identities.
“I currently use the internet to learn more about my identities and communities.”
83.6% of respondents use the Internet for popular culture.
“I currently use the internet to learn or read about popular culture.”
85% of respondents use the internet to get more involved in social movements.
“I currently use the internet to find ways to get more involved in social movements and campaigns.”
63.5% of respondents participate in online communities tied to local groups.
75.5% of respondents have social networks with similar political beliefs.
“I participate in online groups that are directly connected to groups I am also part of in my local community.”
“Most of the people in my social networks have similar political beliefs as my own.”
Almost all respondents are currently or have been involved in online and/or local community campaigns and movements.
77.2% of respondents use Facebook on a regular basis. 69.2% use Instagram regularly and 52% use Twitter regularly.
70% of respondents use Facebook for engaging in political issues. 57.3% use Twitter and 40.4% use Instagram.
“Which best describes the frequency of your online and/or local community involvement in campaigns and social movements?”
“Which platforms/apps do you currently use on a regular (daily or multiple times weekly) basis?”
“Which apps do you currently use for discussions, updates, and critique on social, cultural, and political issues?”
What are the possibilities and limitations of online platforms for organizing?
On what we need to create social change
“Organizing on social media—clicktivism makes it easy for folks to sit behind a computer, just donate and not show up. Change is not meant for comfort. Winning change, we can’t do it when we’re sitting at home. We have to be uncomfortable.
With social media, there's also a sense of instant gratification and having to achieve things right away. Change doesn't happen right away. We don't win right away and we don't build right away. It takes hard work, commitment, and long hours.
- Sara, Chinese-Vietnamese Housing and Labor Organizer
On messaging through social media
“Information moves so quickly now. I find two things that are really limiting for us in our work. One is, when we have to shorten messages for social media to be framed in a particular way to be appealing and compelling, the depth of analysis can’t be there. Second, the idea that we always have to be on social media to get message out overpowers what the message is rooted in. Both can be challenging to long-term movement work.”
- Padma, South Asian Policy Director
On Instagram and political education
“On Instagram, my focus has been fashion and self care. It’s inherently political, but it’s more about the aesthetic as an image based platform. It’s a surface-level connection to community. People will find me through hashtags like #filipino and I’ll direct them back to Twitter and Facebook to get them more engaged. Instagram is a place I connect well to people who are in early stages of their activism. In direct messages, some people come out to me, asking what my experience was, like how to come out to parents.”
On discursive forms and format
“I see the most variety of opinions on Facebook. It’s where a lot of people get their news and where I personally find people of older generations and family members. It’s also so immediate with Facebook, how you can post a news story and people respond to it right away. Once you share an article, it becomes a mini forum for you to comment, like, love, sad or angry face. Facebook is the place and the place to go and get visibility, especially in text formatting.
What’s interesting is the retweet and the quote tweet. You can quote a tweet and completely disagree with it. You can get retweeted and then trolls come into your comments. My connotation is that sharing something on Facebook is an endorsement, but that’s not the same on Twitter.”
- Lou, Filipinx Digital Storyteller and Writer
On building community online:
“Twitter is the most robust platform for really rich cultural commentary and dialogue, and also an amazing place for humor.
“I write for a feminist publication, and the funniest corner of the Internet is always sassy feminist Twitter. It’s a form of solidarity that’s fun and also politically powerful. There’s room in our conversation about solidarity in how you’re seen and how you find your community. When I tweet about annoying shit that happened to me, I can tweet about that and other South Asian women get it and they have that shared experience. That’s one of the most important ways around building community online.”
- Aya, Indian American Communications Strategist
On the limits of digital activism
“Digital activism is a really first world concept. For example, 60% of South Asia is rural. There’s no electricity. 1 million Aadhivasis are being evicted from their land so companies can move in and build factories. This is happening at a rate where the Internet is not strategic platform to respond as quickly as we need. Petitions won’t stop land evictions. It’s not always digital.”
- Munira, Bangladeshi Political Campaigner
Have you quit, left, or deleted any applications before?
If so, why?
55% of Asian American and Pacific Islander survey participants left a platform to take a break from it. Participants included mental health as reasons for leaving. One participant shared feeling overwhelmed and depressed in using a platform, while another described their experience as “social media re-traumatization”, that it was overwhelming to see racist and problematic posts by friends and colleagues.
40.8% left because they were worried about privacy, and 34.6% left to protest a company’s actions or policies. Additionally, 51% shared that they stopped using a platform because they lost interest and 33.7% have stopped because they started using a different platform instead.
Some included technological reasons, such as storage space limitations and changes to the platform’s UX. Others shared being too busy or not having bandwidth to fully engage in the platform.
On deciding to leave Twitter:
“I found myself getting overwhelmed by Twitter. It’s really easy to accidentally scroll through Twitter for 2 hours, especially when the algorithm changed, and you can’t even finish your feed. It’s sucking my life force.
[However] I owe so much to Twitter though. I got on 2008 when it just started to take off. There were so few people on it so that you could form meaningful relationships with people. [Then] the scale of Twitter—how public it was all of a sudden and conversations weren’t just a corner of the internet, but could get pulled and put on CNN. There was the tactic of people coming after you in sustained way. I saw my friends get attacked during Gamergate; it took a different tone and those tactics evolved in Trump era.”
That feeling of immersing yourself in an issue is so tied to soaking in Twitter for hours. If I wasn’t doing that morning and night, I wouldn’t have my finger on the pulse of what others were feeling. For all of those reasons, I understand I’m missing a lot by choosing to step away from Twitter.”
- Kari, Chinese American Digital Organizer