Black Twitter and the Rise of Viral Pressure Groups

A few weeks ago, the Washington Post published an excellent piece about the phenomenon of Black Twitter, explaining how this community has used peer-to-peer social software to mobilize around numerous race-related political causes. Recently, Black Twitter activists have enjoyed a number of high-profile successes, such as pressuring a book publisher to drop a deal with a Trayvon Martin murder trial juror, pressuring InterActive Corp to admonish (and eventually fire) a PR executive who tweeted a racist joke, and pressuring singer Ani DiFranco to cancel an event at a former slave plantation. As these examples demonstrate, the political power of this form of activism rests in its high-profile application of public pressure. While tweeting responses to troubling news of racism and racial insensitivity may not “do” anything political in and of itself, it can put a media spotlight on an issue that may in turn lead to real change.

For many decades, professional watchdog organizations (AKA “pressure groups”) like the NAACP, GLAAD, and NOW  have engaged in this form of activism to varying degrees of success. Now, it appears that decentralized groups of citizens are taking it upon themselves to band together around common issues and draw the public’s attention to them through strategic media interventions. The fact that Black Twitter has no organizational center, but is rather an open-ended community of like-minded citizens who find one another via popular hashtags like #PoliticosBlackIntellectuals #solidarityisforwhitewomen, is quite significant. It reminds me a lot of W. Lance Bennett and Alexendra Segerberg’s point that the traditional collective action of  organized social movements is giving way to “connective action,” which describes a more diffuse and personalized style of public engagement that is powered by digital peer-to-peer networks.

That being said, there does appear to be a certain cohesiveness to virtual communities like Black Twitter, even though they are strongly decentralized. It is important to keep this point in mind when thinking about how political causes “go viral” on Twitter and social media platforms in contemporary times. When we say that a political news story, photo, or video “goes viral,” it conjures up images of widespread social popularity that does little to specify the investments and agendas of particular groups that have strategically contributed to the peer-to-peer spread of content. Communities like Black Twitter are essentially issue publics that draw upon their ranks to deliberately make a story like the Ani DiFranco concert or the PR exec’s racist tweet go viral – in other words, their viral popularity doesn’t just materialize out of thin air (i.e. from the aggregated effect of isolated, individual shares), but is rather the result of a concerted effort on the part of groups of invested citizens who wish to make an impact on the public sphere. Clearly, the agenda-setting labor of these viral pressure groups is a crucial object of study for scholars who seek to understand the emerging shape of digital activism.

Obamacare Stories: User Reviews Meets Political Marketing

Now that the Affordable Care Act has gone into effect, Republicans and Democrats have been waging an intensive marketing battle to frame its impact on the country. Quite interestingly, user-generated content has become a primary focus of both parties’ communication strategies. Using social media outreach, the parties have been collecting personal stories of Obamacare successes and (alleged) horrors to use as rhetorical ammunition in the war of public opinion. As CBS news explains, the House Republican website now has a section soliciting “Your Story” in an attempt to find people who are upset about losing their healthcare plans and are eager to speak about it. They even ask for a YouTube video link on the story submission form, signaling how they plan to use this user-generated material in their media marketing. The Democrats have responded with a similar strategy, using the Facebook page Affordable Care Act Success Stories to help build a more positive narrative about the program.

While the personal story has long been a staple of political rhetoric (think of all of those people that Bill Clinton would single out in his speeches), these latest developments indicate how political marketing is being thoroughly overhauled in the social networking age. As any marketing professional these days will tell you, peer recommendations that circulate online are far more trusted than traditional top-down persuasive communication, and political marketers appear to be adapting accordingly. The Obamacare stories in particular signal a ‘user review’-style approach to political communication that is fairly new. Instead of telling citizens about the benefits or drawbacks of the program themselves, they would rather you hear from ‘everyday people’ whose experiences are inherently more valued and trusted. Of course, social media facilitate this process to an immense degree, as anyone can now broadcast their ‘user review’ of Obamacare with a few clicks of a button.

In an editorial for the Guardian this week, Ana Marie Cox decries this sort of strategy as ‘anecdata,’ noting that statistical information is far more credible for making a case about a government program’s effects than a handful of individual stories that may not be representative of the broader population. Cox also makes the point that a lot of these social media-generated stories turn out to be false, such as a Facebook note written by Ashley Dionne (“this law has raped my future”) that went viral despite containing misleading information about the plans she is eligible for. Obviously, both parties should be wary of running with user-generated stories that haven’t been checked out, as this kind of internet hoax is becoming all too common. However, the emotional appeal of personal narratives can’t be denied, and I would expect that political marketing will continue to move towards these sorts of participatory formats that exploit the trustworthiness of ‘everyday people’ for rhetorical gain.

Creepy Uncle Sam: Republicans Try Viral Video Strategy to Fight Obamacare

With the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) going into effect on October 1st, Republicans have ramped up their attempts to undermine the legislation. In addition to Congress forcing a government shutdown, conservatives have turned to viral marketing strategies to try to shift public opinion against Obamacare. The most high-profile of these efforts involves web video ads released online by a group called Generation Opportunity, funded by the Koch brothers. As explained in this piece for Time, the ads are intended to convince young adults to opt out of Obamacare so that the program will lose out on a crucial source of funding and thus fail in the long term. However, the ads having been getting the most attention for their outrageous gross-out humor, which is, of course, the lingua franca of the YouTube generation.

The ads, featuring a masked “Creepy Uncle Sam” character who threatens unsuspecting young patients with comically horrifying gynecological and rectal exams, mark an important shift in tone for American political advertising. In an earlier post, I discussed how the 2012 Obama campaign used internet-style pop culture humor to get their message across to a new generation of voters who tend to tune out more formal types of campaign messaging. Of course, the Republicans don’t want to be left behind, and the “Creepy Uncle Sam” ads signal how they too are now trying to latch onto the zeitgeist and create digital content that is entertaining and novel enough to inspire social sharing. So far, it looks like Generation Opportunity has succeeded in ‘going viral,’ with each of its video ads topping a million views on YouTube. In a sure sign of viral success, the liberal group The Other 98% has responded with an online parody that asks viewers to “opt out of Koch propaganda, not Obamacare.”

What I find particularly interesting about all of this is how the internet has freed the agents of political communication to try things that were seemingly never possible in broadcast television or other media. To put it simply, these ads are pushing the envelope of taste. I’ll leave it to other commentators to deconstruct the potential homophobic (and even racist) undertones of ads that compare Obama to a rectal-probing rapist, but suffice it to say, this is the kind of humor that one would expect from South Park rather than from a policy-minded political group. However, as political advertising moves online more and more, we can expect that its creators will do whatever it takes to capture public attention an inspire viral shares on Facebook, Twitter, and other social platforms. The fact that these videos may be too risque for prime time TV is precisely the point – in a Wild West web environment where content is almost completely unregulated, shock is the rule rather than the exception, and audiences expect to see something that they can’t and won’t see anywhere else. I wonder, though, if there are any limits as to how far online political advertising will go in terms of skirting the lines of taste, or if these sorts of strategies could potentially engender a backlash. For now, it seems that all previous limits are off the table, and that the political classes are willing to be gross, weird, or just plain ridiculous in order to get jaded young voters to listen to their message.

#Blackout: Justice for Trayvon and Profile Picture Campaigns

As anyone paying attention to the news for the past few weeks knows, the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the high-profile Florida trial for the killing of Trayvon Martin has galvanized one of the largest protest movements in recent American history. Of course, in addition to marching in the streets, protestors have taken to social media in droves to express their outrage at the verdict and their dissatisfaction with racial profiling, gun laws, and a host of related issues. In the immediate aftermath of the verdict announcement on July 13th, social media sites were flooded with impassioned personal reactions, links to petitions, and numerous agit-prop graphics that went viral in a matter of minutes. Over two weeks later, much of the initial fervor has died down, yet one class of social media responses largely remains: the profile pictures.

Following the lead of the red equal sign for gay marriage and other similar recent campaigns, many supporters of Trayvon Martin have transformed the visual representations of their online identities into soapboxes to advance their cause. Perhaps the most popular strategy has been to use a stark black square, an idea that was promoted online with the hashtag #blackout and has since received the support of the Martin family. There have also been profile picture memes incorporating Trayvon’s portrait, a silhouette of the symbolic hoodie he wore the night of his death, and other graphics associated with this burgeoning movement.

As an observer of social media and politics, I’m struck by how these campaigns confirm the popularity of the profile picture as a primary space for political expression and engagement in the online world. Yet what I find most interesting about this latest round of politically-charged profile pictures is their sheer endurance in the rapid, blink-and-you-missed-it maelstrom of social media discourse. While links and image shares come and go very quickly, the profile picture enjoys a relatively stable digital presence, reappearing each time a person posts new content. Every time I log into Facebook and see the ominous black squares and hoodies in my news feed, I am reminded of the passion of this movement and the commitment of its supporters to anti-racism and social change.

The profile picture thus seems to have a weight that a lot of other social media strategies are lacking – in a way, its the strongest kind of link or association a person can make in the digital environment. To throw one’s entire online identity behind a cause, giving it an overarching presence in each and every activity they perform, provides politically-engaged social media users with a powerful symbolic tool unlike any other. Like the red equal sign campaign before it, the Trayvon profile pictures are blazing a trail for long-term social media activism that I imagine will be utilized by many more movements to come.

The Red Equal Sign Meme for Marriage Equality: A Look Back

With the Supreme Court decisions striking down DOMA and Prop 8 last week, the red equal sign meme supporting marriage equality has been taking a victory lap on Facebook. As I wrote in an earlier post, this campaign is a significant moment in the development of viral politics, particularly for its use of profile picture-changing as a way of displaying a collective identity around an issue. Now that the dust has settled on this historic campaign coinciding with a major triumph for gay rights, it’s time to look back at some of the most interesting coverage that has appeared online in the past few months.

Anatasia Khoo, the head of marketing for Human Rights Campaign (HRC), gives an inside look at the creation of the red equal sign meme in pieces for Huffington Post and Stanford Social Innovation Review. In the former article, Khoo recounts an intriguing anecdote about the impact of the campaign:

“For many, this act marked the first time they had come out as a straight ally, or in some cases, the first time they had come out as a member of the LGBT community. Since then, we’ve heard so many stories, but one really sticks out for me. One day, we got a message from a gay soldier who had come out to his mother and unfortunately, it wasn’t the positive experience he was hoping for. It wasn’t until he saw that his mother had also changed her profile picture to the HRC logo that he felt accepted by her. It’s incredibly powerful to know that something so simple could provide such a strong feeling of support.”

In the latter article, Khoo offers a key lesson for organizations who wish to create a similarly viral social media campaign:

“We documented close to 100 different variations on the logo, and we made an important decision: We were going to not only embrace the memes, but also promote them. Politicians, celebrities, and corporate America embraced the logo. Bonobos, Bud Light, Martha Stewart, and Beyoncé all picked up the red logo—it became synonymous with equality… Most organizations are very protective about their brands, but for this campaign, HRC put our logo out into the universe without any organizational language, making it easy for individuals to embrace. It was a bold move for the organization… We certainly could have taken a much different approach to try and control the campaign or to brand it more tightly, but success relied on allowing people to make our logo their own and feel like they were part of something bigger.”

In a blog post for Scientific American, social psychology scholar Melanie Tannenbaum outlines a compelling theory for how the red equal sign meme may work as effective political persuasion. Basically, it all comes down to modeling behavioral norms (i.e. setting ‘descriptive norms’), which parallels my own argument in “Visual Identities, Visual Rhetoric” regarding the importance of visually articulating ‘the people’ as a way of changing perceptions about social reality:

“People look at an issue like marriage equality, and the first inclination is to set prescriptive norms. We should do something, the justices should rule a certain way, you should support a given cause. But based on everything that we know about our brains and their bafflingly strong desires to fit in with the crowd, the best way to convince people that they should care about an issue and get involved in its advocacy isn’t to tell people what they should do — it’s to tell them what other people actually do. And you know what will accomplish that? That’s right. Everyone on Facebook making their opinions on the issue immediately, graphically, demonstrably obvious. That is literally all that it takes to create a descriptive norm: Publicly acknowledging your belief along with the thousands of other people who are also publicly acknowledging theirs.”

Finally, in a thought-provoking piece for the New Yorker Online, Matt Buchanan compares the red equal sign campaign with Malcolm Gladwell’s famous castigation of “Facebook activism” as so-called slacktivism in the same magazine:

“While the HRC’s profile-picture activism relies on weak ties, like those between celebrities and their followers, it’s designed to exploit the stronger personal connections that lurk among the web of weak ties in a Facebook profile. That is, you are true friends with at least a few people that you are ‘friends’ with on Facebook… The odds that the HRC’s campaign, as wildly successful as it has been, will directly influence the decision of the Justices are nil, which speaks quite loudly to the limits of online activism: twenty million avatars are not twenty million people in the street. However, as Jeffrey Toobin wrote, as people and politics change, so does the Court. And online activism has shown, most notably through its role in the defeat of the controversial Stop Online Piracy Act last year, that maybe it can change people.”

In other words, Buchanan is saying that while online activism may not have a direct effect on public policy, it may have a long-term impact on public opinion that can eventually trickle up. It’s an intriguing thought, and one that seems to be supported by Tannenbaum’s point about the power of social media to shape social norms, one Facebook friend at a time.

The NSA PRISM Leak, Edward Snowden, and the Online Response

The leak of PRISM, the NSA’s online surveillance program under the Obama administration, currently has internet users around the world in an uproar. Originally reported by the Guardian with the aid of whistle-blower Edward Snowden, the PRISM leak along with several others have mobilized internet privacy activists like never before. In fact, in Snowden’s interview published in the Guardian, he drew attention to a movement gaining traction on Reddit called Restore the Fourth Amendment, which is now planning public protests across the U.S. on July 4th. There is also a “We the People” petition to pardon Snowden up on Whitehouse.gov that has received over 27,000 signatures, along with a predictably vast array of humorous critical responses that have popped up online. Early on, a hilariously biting image morphing Obama’s face with George W. Bush’s appeared on the homepage of the Huffington Post and quickly went viral. As for the response on social media, CNN has a good roundup of the funniest tweets mocking Obama and the U.S. government regarding PRISM, while Buzzfeed has compiled some of the Snowden-related memes that have appeared in the last few days.

It is becoming clear that the PRISM leak and Snowden’s perceived heroics will reverberate online for a long time to come. This is because the story itself concerns the ability of internet users to communicate freely, in this case without fear of government intrusion. As the PIPA/SOPA movement from last year demonstrated, internet freedom-related issues are particularly amendable to viral politics, as legions of netizens are inspired to use the very technologies in question to mount a defense of their digital rights. Scholars and activists who are interested in the political uses of social media should pay close attention to the online anti-PRISM and pro-Snowden efforts in the weeks (and perhaps months) to come, since they may serve as a model for how political protest movements are orchestrated in the digital age more broadly.

That being said, I’m still unsure of what the long-term effects of this online response will be. While we may very well be at a tipping point in terms of internet privacy becoming a major global political issue, the fears about PRISM and the U.S. government’s online spying are still speculative in nature. The Obama administration continues to claim that these tools are only used to stop dangerous terrorists, while critics who worry about abuses of power are left making sometimes-hyperbolic ‘what if?’ comparisons to Orwell, Stalin, and the Stasi in order to drum up popular outrage. What we still don’t have yet is a ‘smoking gun’ that clearly shows a program like PRISM being used in an abusive manner, such as against the administration’s political opponents (i.e. along the lines of Watergate). If and when such a story emerges, we can expect movements like Reddit’s Restore the Fourth Amendment to really take off.

Protesting Zuckerberg on Facebook: The Campaign Against Fwd.Us

In the past few weeks, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has raised the ire of liberal and environmentalist groups for a series of ads released by his new political organization Fwd.Us. The ads, which advocate for the Keystone XL pipeline and other conservative-friendly measures, have convinced MoveOn.org, Sierra Club, Daily Kos and others to pull their own advertising from Facebook’s site. Furthermore, activists have taken to Facebook itself to protest the actions of Zuckerberg and Fwd.Us. A new Facebook Group called HeyZuck was launched to put pressure on the man himself on his home court, and the page has received nearly 20,000 Likes so far. On the other hand, a group called CREDO Action had its anti-Zuckerberg ads blocked by Facebook, purportedly because it violated the site’s policy of using Zuckerberg’s likeness without permission.

This story hasn’t been getting much attention lately, but it’s quite fascinating from a social media and politics perspective. The very fact that a social media platform can be used to speak out against the CEO of that very same platform says something fairly profound about the democratizing potential of Web 2.0. In terms of media history, such a development is  unprecedented – imagine activists using the pages of one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers (or the airwaves of FOX News) to protest his political donations and lobbying efforts. While Facebook may be blocking certain ads (like CREDO’s) for political reasons, they have not clamped down on the use of the site for political speech that puts its founder in a negative light.

It is important to remember, however, that Facebook can potentially take down a page like HeyZuck if they wanted to – the fact that they haven’t probably says more about their brand reputation management than anything else. As Felix Stalder reminds us in his contribution to the NYU Press Social Media Reader, the so-called ‘back-end’ of the web is becoming increasingly important in questions of digital democracy. While we may like to think that participatory platforms like Facebook and Twitter are true free-for-alls where anyone can say and do whatever they wish (for political purposes or otherwise), these platforms are in fact controlled by for-profit corporations that operate with their own political agendas. When we use these platforms for political speech, we are taking the risk of leaving our voices at the mercy of a commercial entity that may or may not like what we have to say. While it is encouraging in a sense that the HeyZuck Facebook page has been thriving on the site, I have to wonder whether such an arrangement will continue to be viable as Silicon Valley entities become more and more significant political players (which the very formation of Zuckerberg’s Fwd.Us underlines). For now, we can remain tentatively optimistic  that these platforms allow more opportunities for dissent than was previously possible in earlier media regimes.

Internet Blackouts: A Reliable Activist Strategy?

Earlier this week, internet freedom activists and privacy advocates (led the group Anonymous) launched a blackout day to raise awareness about the CISPA bill in the US Congress. Officially named the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, this bill would have allowed commercial entities and the government to share private user data for the ostensible purpose of fighting international cyber attacks, while raising Big Brother-like concerns about the expansion of internet surveillance. While the current bill has apparently died in the Senate after passing in the House, the issue will likely continue to be debated contentiously in the coming years. Meanwhile, the news media has labeled the Stop CISPA blackout a flop, failing to catch on virally in the way that the Stop SOPA and PIPA blackout did so famously last year. Despite the fact that the bill has now been shelved, the efforts of Anonymous and other internet freedom activists to make CISPA the new SOPA seem to have fallen short.

This raises the question – are internet blackouts a reliable strategy for online activists moving forward, or was the success story of Stop SOPA and PIPA a fluke? An obvious issue here is the amount of websites who agree to participate – after all, who is really going to notice if only a relatively small fraction of the internet goes dark? While the SOPA blackout effort last year inspired over 50,000 websites to shut down completely, only 917 sites participated in the CISPA blackout earlier this week. In addition, the CISPA blackout didn’t get any heavy-hitters on board, whereas the SOPA/PIPA blackout famously included Wikipedia – one of the highest-trafficked websites in the world. While this may suggest that the issue of internet privacy simply does not get people as excited as restrictions on copyrighted material, there also appears to be a degree of blackout fatigue here as well.

One of the most remarkable things about the Stop SOPA/PIPA blackout was how unprecedented and surprising it was – people were absolutely shocked to see major sites like Wikipedia and Reddit go dark as an act of political protest. In other words, the impact of the blackout appeared to have a lot to do with its novelty value. Perhaps we should not expect websites to pull the plug every time a piece of controversial internet legislation appears before Congress, as such an act may quickly shift from shocking to merely annoying. Calling for such a protest on a regular basis (as Anonymous seems to be doing) may therefore not be a successful strategy in the long run. It will be interesting to see if they try it again, and what the level of participation and public impact will look like.

In the meantime, check out TechDirt‘s infographic about the runaway success of the SOPA/PIPA blackout. It’s a hard act to follow…

Laughing Off the Threat: “The Internet” Takes on Kim Jong-un

In the past few weeks, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un has been dominating international headlines with his repeated saber-rattling, and the story has gone on to inspire a vast amount of internet parody memes. Buzzfeed recently published a big roundup of the funniest examples, while Know Your Meme has been tracking the “Hungry Kim Jong-un” set of memes for a few months now.

The title of the Buzzfeed article, “The Internet is Really Not Afraid of Kim Jong-un,” is particularly interesting from my perspective. Here, “the Internet” is framed as a singular entity – one that is characterized by the derisive humor of Reddit-style meme culture. Obviously, this sort of activity only constitutes a small fraction of the online discourse that is currently taking place around the North Korea issue (some of it “high-minded,” some of it “low-minded,” and much of it in between), and yet somehow it comes to stand in for the whole. Of course, humorous memes are the bread and butter of a site like Buzzfeed, so it’s unsurprising that they would focus on this specific facet of what the internet has to offer. It just seems to me that this sort of reductionist talk about “the internet” is becoming more and more common as of late (as in the AV Club’s “Great Job, Internet!” feature), and it would be wise to take a step back and appreciate the breadth and variety of online political discourse. After all, “television” is not just late-night comedy monologues (the obvious precursor to these sorts of memes), so why is “the internet” so often painted as merely a factory of flippancy?

That being said, I would refrain from labeling the Kim Jong-un memes as “bad” discourse, political trivialization, etc. As scholars of mediated political satire like Jeffrey P. Jones have shown, this sort of seemingly-frivolous humor can enliven the public sphere and bring new entrants (particularly young people) into the realm of civic participation and citizenship. Indeed, it is rather heartening that the meme-spreaders of “the internet” are tackling the latest developments in international politics in addition to the usual repertoire of cute cats and celebrity gossip. While it might be merely laughing in the face of serious global tensions, these memes are getting people to think and talk about issues that they may have otherwise ignored. Great job, internet, indeed.

– Joel Penney

HRC Red Equal Sign Meme Takes Facebook: Visible Identities and the Digital Body

This was a big week for viral politics, with the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) red equal sign meme taking Facebook by storm. To show support for marriage equality during the Prop 8 and DOMA Supreme Court hearings, hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of Facebook users changed their profile picture to various incarnations of the red-and-pink, love-symbolizing equal sign logo. HRC has a good roundup of the media coverage, corporate endorsements, celebrity shout-outs, and countless meme spinoffs that have proliferated in the past few days around this campaign. For more on this story, check out Facebook’s own report on the statistics behind the phenomenon, as well as Time and Slate’s compilations of the best red equal sign variations.

While there is quite a lot to talk about regarding this watershed moment in viral politics, I’m particularly interested in how it highlights the key role of profile picture-changing in politically-oriented social media campaigns. More than just a simple post, link, or status update, the profile picture has a strong connection to the identities of users, visually representing them during each of their platform-based activities (chatting, posting, commenting, Liking, etc.). If a social networking profile is now a person’s ‘digital body,’ as danah boyd has argued, then the profile picture is the virtual clothing that he or she uses to communicate identity. When this badge of identity is used to show off one’s political beliefs, its function becomes very similar to wearing a political slogan T-shirt in public, a phenomenon that I have studied in a number of research projects. In my IJOC article “Visible Identities, Visual Rhetoric: The Self-Labeled Body as a Popular Platform for Political Persuasion, I explore how people use these T-shirts to transform their physical bodies into rhetorical texts for political purposes. Here’s an excerpt:

When discussing motivations for wearing their political T-shirts, many participants emphasized not only the persuasive messages printed on the T-shirts themselves, but also the message-making potential of their bodies as they were labeled by these items. In these scenarios, the T-shirt functioned to publicize a key attribute of the wearer’s political identity that would not have been obvious or visible otherwise, in order to make a point about the presence of that identity in a particular locale… By creating visibility for their political identities via this popular culture platform, the participants here see themselves as potentially challenging public perceptions of who “the people” out there really are, a reality-redefining gesture that they conceptualize as an efficacious form of political action.

I would argue that the HRC red equal sign campaign follows precisely the same logic. In fact, in the conclusion of the article, I suggest that the ‘digital body’ of social networking profiles can be used in a very similar way as the physical body, providing further opportunities for politically-engaged citizens to make their identities visible as a way of advancing persuasive messages in the public sphere. When these practices are coordinated so that many bodies simultaneously articulate images of ‘the people’ in a collective show of force, these messages can be particularly powerful.

Indeed, the HRC used both strategies in their ‘love’ campaign this week, urging marriage equality supporters to wear the color red as well as to change their profile pictures to the red equal sign image. The organization is also selling T-shirts featuring the logo, further underlining the connection between these two sorts of identity-based viral communication strategies.

With the stunning success of the red equal sign campaign this week, I would expect that these sorts of self-labeling campaigns will become more and more widespread in the future – not only for LGBT activism, but for myriad political and social issues.

– Joel Penney