[Music] i never called myself an influencer but that could be because the word hadn't been invented at the time but let's say i had a strong online reputation for a little while it started off small i was a waiter in london drawing cartoons of the people that i was attracted to handsome sexy butches i called it a comic strip 100 butches and i sent it to a lesbian uk magazine and that moment changed everything the magazine loved the concept and so did their readers including radio hosts and bloggers who promoted me on myspace because this
was the 2000s that comic strip led to book deals and writing tours and keynote addresses and a wikipedia entry i was even honored with a title of the trans parade marshal of salt lake city inside of the tiny world of cutie by pop comics i'd become an influencer the story starts well but it gets twisted i started introducing myself by saying my name is alicia lim and i'm a queer person of color this intimate information about my race and my sexuality became the first thing that i would say to strangers to establish my authority and
my brand and gradually this made me cynical because my identity was shorthand for my griefs and my struggles and my triumphs but i became an expert at manipulating it for shares and likes i started thinking about ways that it could help me win arguments and gain positive attention and shore up my brand gradually my cutie by pack identity became my capital asset and it even reached the stage that i only wanted to take instagram selfies with other queer people of color unfortunately this type of sordid strategizing probably isn't totally unfamiliar to you when you apply
to a school or a grant or a new job there's for a lot of us that moment where you think about how you check off the boxes of the diversity mandate and that used to be something we just think about a couple of times a year but now on social media it's something that you can think about every day as a quick shortcut to instant first-hand expertise and if that gains you shares and likes then for some of us that means that we are soon limiting our selfies to other people who also check off the
boxes and then calling out people who we think shouldn't be checking off the boxes at all which is what i started to do there was a petition that i wrote that successfully managed to get gay canadian media to adopt the pronoun they but at the time there was a trans art duo who publicly refused to join me and so i called them out i wrote a passive-aggressive post about activists who just exploit their cis-passing privilege and bail on trans community whenever it serves them to avoid bad press this was a popular post that gave me
followers and i probably heard that duo but i didn't care i wasn't trying to connect with them i was trying to establish my queer and trans expertise and authority this self-branding drive came to distort everything how i saw myself how i saw my community how i aspired to friendships and even lovers and i wish i could say it was my choice to quit but the truth is i just became so paranoid and self-conscious and depressed that i burnt out my story is just an example of a new norm that on social media marginalized issues have
earned this special reverence that is tempting to exploit at the time of writing this ted talk i googled instantly three recent scandals number one a highly influential white instagramer named queer appalachia fundraise hundreds of thousands of dollars on behalf of queer and trans people of color but a washington post expose revealed that they kept most of it number two the next day a new york times story revealed that a neuroscientist named bethan mclaughlin had invented a fake twitter account at silencing bi was allegedly a queer indigenous scientist who conveniently came to her aid and defended
her in high profile twitter disputes and then when that account gained too many followers it died of covid number three a month later jessica krug a professor of african diaspora studies at george washington university publicly confessed that she was white and pretending to be black this might have been to increase her credibility in academia or on social media where she bullied racialized scholars for not being radical enough and if you had any remaining doubt about opportunism around marginalized issues online the final nail in the coffin probably came in june after police murdered george floyd an
unarmed black man and that sparked a viral online movement and on cue notoriously anti-black corporations like the nfl and amazon tried to exploit that virality by broadcasting their own solidarity statements with black lives matter these are shameless examples of a new norm that treats marginalized identities as promotional opportunities and while i am disturbed by fraudulent and hypocritical white people using our issues i'm also concerned about us using our issues because it's generating dehumanizing contests and lateral violence inside of our communities it takes names like call out culture or public shaming i've watched members of my
cutie by pop community get called out and excommunicated and so many times i've thought they deserve it what is happening to me what is happening to us social media incentivizes us to be cutthroat and of all people we need each other this concern drives my phd and over time i've come to understand that this is not us this is the side effect of a business model and today i'm going to explain how it works i could talk about any social media platform this happens on twitter and on tiktok but i'm gonna focus on facebook because
of its size if you're on instagram you're on facebook if you're on whatsapp you're on facebook if you're on a third-party app with a facebook sign-in you're basically on facebook at this point facebook is more than a platform it's a ubiquitous infrastructure that increasingly determines how we treat each other so every day facebook makes us more receptive to identity politicking through two tools it's ad manager and its algorithms this is ad manager it is the keys to the kingdom advertisers flocked ad manager because it's cheap and easy to target customers according to razor sharp specifics
about their identity as an example i've made an ad targeting myself and people like me from ad manager i chose from drop down menus and checked off the following boxes north american a strange category called friends of people who have engaged with ramadan people who use a mac osx operating system have previously lived in singapore are likely to engage liberal political content work as teaching assistants at the university of toronto are friends with women with birthdays in zero to seven days have recently moved are interested in barbecue discount stores asian american culture and free software
i could keep going but i stopped here and amazingly i'm told that my selection is still fairly broad with a potential reach of 240 million so after i've released my ad i toggle over to data analytics to see how asian liberal grad students with muslim friends react to my ad how much organic buzz they generate if they encourage their friends to click on my ad how do i know this because of culprit number two algorithms so facebook algorithms promote our posts according to signal which is who we tend to interact with prediction which is the
likely interest in our posts and relevance this is important we think that the popularity of our posts is based on their likability but these are advertising algorithms the popularity of our posts is based on their likelihood to generate word-of-mouth marketing and brand awareness even the term influencer doesn't actually mean popular and glamorous it comes from the market research concept of influentials people labeled as the best marketing tools around that's right when i called myself an influencer i was calling myself a tool so add manager classifies us into groups using the ultimate game of checking off
boxes and then algorithms rank those groups in terms of most receptive to buying clicking and word-of-mouth marketing we think of social media platforms as these social spaces where we connect with people but there are commercial spaces that are finally calibrated to create the ultimate advertising atmosphere in fact if you've ever wanted to upload a post to get a lot of visibility like to talk about your new job or your new degree or to come out as trans you probably found yourself using the words of a sales pitch because algorithms reward us when we act like
commercials and commercials don't thrive on mutual respect they thrive on maximum buzz so like when i wrote that post about the trans art duo because it generated maximum buzz algorithms spread it far and wide and made it seem like the right way to act as this becomes common sense i don't blame anyone who leverages their identity for influence and power i blame corporate advertising models and algorithms that are taking advantage of our desperation because we live in a nightmare of job precarity massive personal debt and the breakdown of our social security systems and so yes
we take the base we calculate the asset value of our identities and then allow ad driven algorithms to dictate the right and wrong ways to perform them i call this a transition from identity politics to identity economics and i don't blame anyone who pays their rent this way i blame the neoliberal drive to privatize our social lives for this reason i'm tired of mainstream concerns about facebook gripping netflix documentaries anxious headlines and whistleblowers warn us about privacy infractions and about surveillance about misinformation and the breakdown of democracy my take is different because unlike these voices
i'm not a rich white silicon valley executive i'm glad they stepped forward but there are side effects that they are not seeing most of you are seeing them because like me we are the majority people who are poor or racialized or queer or sick who turn to social media as a lifeline of career advancement and authority that we never previously had we have come to feel morbidly worried about our reputations we have come to feel worried about saying the wrong thing we have come to feel socially anxious in the circles we used to feel welcome
in this is the painful crush of the social media machine and we are the experts of his infrastructure i'm not concerned about villainous corporations invading privacy because for many of us privacy was a privilege we didn't have to begin with i'm not concerned about the breakdown of democracy because for many of us that democracy was already broken as the middle class shrinks and the working clause balloons we are the majority and my goal is to launch a different issue into a mainstream narrative dominated by the problems of a minority i'm talking about the breakdown of
our social ties at the grassroots level these ties are dissolving into brooding social anxiety and lateral violence and we need these ties we inherited them from 1960 civil rights movements from black power movements from trans activism from third world feminists who taught us to reclaim our social difference in the name of collective empowerment and the redistribution of our resources today social media overwrites those lessons and trains us to reclaim our social differences in the name of self-promotion and personal branding we need to teach each other radical algorithmic literacy to harness algorithms not to fight each
other but to fight our common enemies our rent premiums our precarious labor contracts are huge personal debts the privatization of our social security systems in this regard the north star model is the hashtag defund the police black lives matter seized the moment of emotion around the murder of george floyd to make concrete economic demands in just three months their hashtag had reallocated billions of dollars in police funding in the states to the basic needs of black community like food access mental health support abortion access and violence prevention programs it was strange and amazing to see
trending topics include municipal budgets even if you just shared the hashtag you were thinking about economic matters and class issues blm harnessed algorithms not for self-promotion but to unite around the common needs of black community this is radical algorithmic literacy using algorithms to help each other and not to help adverseness this is my bottom line facebook has been associated with the problem of data privacy it needs to be associated instead with a problem of data privatization i'm talking about the trend of classifying our identity so much that we have come to think of our identities
as brand properties that we need to protect this is what i call identity economics and it is not unlike an abusive lover it flatters and promotes our most narcissistic calculating paranoid behaviors while isolating us from the people who could save us this is the facebook problem that needs the attention of curriculum and policy and newspaper headlines this is the battle we know and we need to fight you
