Abstract
Scholars have grown concerned around the increasing carceral logics embedded in social media practices. In this essay, we explore the process of getting “zucked” as a trend within digital platforms that disproportionately punishes minoritized digital users. Specifically, Black women report that with the advent of increased safety measures and policies to secure users on digital platforms, they become subject to harms of the institutional practices. By extending the conversation on carcerality beyond the confines of prisons, jails, and other forms of criminal justice supervision, we argue that structures and institutions expand the lines of surveillance and that those traditionally subject to such harm continue to be affected. Although the concept of getting “zucked” might seem like an innocent response to individuals who violate terms of service, Black women suggest that this practice disparately targets them for speaking about racist and sexist incidents on- and offline. Such surveillance is misogynoir in public spaces, as Black women are punished for organizing on social media.
Scholars of race and intersectional media are growing increasingly concerned around the incorporation of carceral logics infiltrating social media practices (Benjamin 2019; Brown and Schept 2017; Gurusami 2019). The trend to adopt policies and procedures to keep users safe appears to be unfairly targeting the most vulnerable in these spaces. To better understand how racialized, carceral logics operate in online spaces, we explore the concept of getting “zucked” as a trend in digital platforms that disproportionately punishes Black women online. After a #SayHerName rally, many people remarked about the low attendance and lack of focus on Black women victims of police violence (Gray 2020b). One user wrote that they worried their post might get removed for being too vocal and critical about the intersection of racism and sexism, or misogynoir. This punitive practice of getting banned or having a post, content, or meme removed by Facebook is known as getting “zucked.” Getting “zucked” is neither an objective nor a race-neutral policy but instead centers whiteness as the normal operating system in digital spaces. Digital platforms have become places that reify institutional practices that police, surveil, and criminalize Black women’s practices, especially around online organizing.
The carceral state, which surveils and criminalizes Black women, is embedded within everyday life via systems of social control and surveillance, produced by capital, race, gender, and state power (Gilmore 2007). As the Facebook example shows, carceral systems extend far beyond the physical spaces of jails and prisons as other institutions incorporate the same carceral logics that punish women of color. The practice of banning, removing, and purging accounts of Black women underscores how carcerality is embedded within, and sustained through, a range of processes and dynamics including “finance, electoral politics, land use, racial ordering, labor deregulation, citizenship, gender governance, and urban restructuring, among other processes” (Story 2019, 5). Digital platforms devalue Black women’s engagements as incongruent with white, capitalist practices based on carceral logics. Critical carceral studies highlight how carcerality is situated within the systems of oppression, social control, and surveillance that stabilize white supremacy within a capitalist, neoliberal framework.
“Getting Zucked”: From Platform Practices to Popular Culture
According to Urban Dictionary user Saikh (posted 2018), getting zucked occurs when your expression is sucked out of you by Zuckerberg’s mysterious Facebook community standards, paralleling getting “fucked” by Zuckerberg. While this rhetoric certainly has gendered and homophobic undertones, it also reflects rape culture in terms of the unwanted intrusion by an outside entity. Urban Dictionary user Raiayyyyyy (posted 2019) defines it as “we got fucked by zuck.” The way that popular culture has made sense of getting zucked through a sexual lens ignores the racialized dimension around whose content is removed. Examining the phenomenon of “zucked” through an intersectional lens reveals that the hypervisibility of Black women renders them subject to additional harms in public spaces—digital ones included.
The USA Today article “Facebook While Black: Users Call It Getting ‘Zucked,’ Say Talking About Racism Is Censored as Hate Speech” highlights Carolyn Wysinger’s story of getting zucked (Guynn 2020). Wysinger is a podcaster who provides popular culture commentary from a Black queer perspective (Guynn 2020). She said Black people, especially Black women, risk being sent to “Facebook jail” when they discuss racism on the platform. Facebook jail locks users’ accounts as a form of punishment. This carceral logic reflects the punitive formations and extensions of criminal justice interventions in the lives of the most marginalized. Using the phrase “jail” to describe this punishment in social media adds these online spaces as disparate sites of carceral logics; “Facebook jail” reflects how certain populations are subject to suppression, and the intersection of being Black and Woman makes one at risk. Wysinger saw a post from poet Shawn William that read “On the day that Trayvon would’ve turned 24, Liam Neeson is going on national talk shows trying to convince the world that he is not a racist.” She shared William’s post with her friends on Facebook, writing “White men are so fragile, and the mere presence of a Black person challenges every single thing in them” (Guynn 2020). She experienced getting zucked as this post was classified as hate speech and a violation of community standards. It was deleted within 15 minutes, and she received a warning that her profile would be banned for 72 hours if she posted again (Guynn 2020). While some may overlook the seriousness of these practices, Black women often reflect on the swift certainty of these carceral interventions and have become savvy in identifying what content might get flagged.
While the concept of getting “zucked” might seem like an innocent response to violation of terms of service, Black women suggest that this practice disparately targets them for speaking to racist and sexist incidents on- and offline. Getting zucked highlights the existence of misogynoir in public spaces and demonstrates their punishment for organizing on social media (Aziz and Beydoun 2020; Bailey and Trudy 2018). There is a connection between getting “zucked” and Black women’s increased focus on police violence and the intersection of compounding harms (Brown et al. 2017; Erigha and Crooks-Allen 2020). The correlation in increased content around #SayHerName and the disciplining of Black women by Facebook cannot go unnoticed. This illustrates trends associated with rendering Black women invisible in other social arenas, such as corporations, media, politics, and higher education. Settles, Buchanan, and Dotson conducted a study in 2018 examining the experiences of college faculty of color. They organized and carried out “118 interviews and identified six themes related to how Black, Hispanic/Latinx, Asian, and American Indian faculty members at a single, predominantly White, research-intensive university, describe issues of (in)visibility at work” (Burton 2019; Settles, Buchanan, and Dotson 2019). They found that “nearly one-fifth—18%—of women of color reported feelings of invisibility and exclusion, more than 40% of Black and Latina women reported being interrupted and spoken over in a work setting, and a third of women of color surveyed reported that others had taken credit for their ideas” (Settles, Buchanan, and Dotson 2019, 62).
These trends to render women of color invisible and silent are rooted in carceral logics of controlling the bodies, minds, and actions of minoritized folks. These practices replicate imprisonment even without physically displacing others. The extension of these banning and expulsion practices to social media reenact the physical rendering and isolation of confinement.
From Getting Zucked to #Sayhername
The carceral logic that has allowed women’s punishment in digital spaces has faced resistance from Black women. Here, we provide the context around the development of the #SayHerName hashtag, especially the digital lineage of its emergence from the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag. After George Zimmerman received a verdict of not guilty and was acquitted in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin on July 14, 2013, a national outrage was ignited and the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter went viral on social media. Since then, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has gained tremendous visibility and popularity. However, many proponents and supporters of BLM tend to focus on Black men’s lives, completely ignoring women and trans people within Black communities. This overlooking of Black women and trans people became a rallying cry, especially in relation to police overuse and abuse of power. In response to this, the #SayHerName movement developed in 2015, bringing visibility to the narratives of Black women who experience anti-Black violence and police brutality and adding their voices to the conversation (Reed 2020). Crenshaw (2012) pointed out that excluding the voices of Black women and girls resulted in inattention to the sexual assault, rape, and violence that police inflict on Black women and girls. Saying the names of Black women at the macro (media) and micro (individual) levels pushes people to learn their actual stories.
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s African American Policy Forum (AAPF) and the Center for Intersectionality and Social Policy Studies (CISPS) at Columbia Law School created and coined the hashtag #SayHerName to gain a presence in digital spaces (#SAYHERNA ME, 2021). Combining protests, social media activism, and political education, #SayHerName is utilized to highlight both activist events and the stories of Black women’s encounters with police brutality and state violence (Brown et al. 2017; Jackson, Bailey, and Welles 2020). Utilizing digital activism, the #SayHerName hashtag has generated an online community and coalition of reporters, activists, scholars, and everyday social media users who draw attention to and engage with racial injustice and police brutality (Tassie and Givens 2015).
Twitter allows Black women to connect with one another virtually and voice their concerns and demands for justice in a safe space (Reed 2020; Shaw 2018). The discourse generated through using the hashtag opens a space for issues to be acknowledged and discussed without judgment, creating a new conversation about Black womanhood. It also allows for those in the margins, the invisible victims of state and personal violence, such as Black women, to be unveiled and heard (Jackson 2017). The possibilities within Twitter, such as tweeting, retweeting, replying, mentioning, and liking, enabled the hashtag to go viral internationally, thus expanding discourse and activism (Tassie and Givens 2015). The hashtag does what mainstream media should be doing: it forces people to learn about Black women and the routine state and individual violence inflicted upon them in the United States (Williams 2016). The effectiveness of this activism, however, also makes Black women hyper visible and subject to different forms of digital and physical violence. To this day, women’s, femme-centric, and Black women’s organizations mobilize via the #SayHerName hashtag on Twitter (Reed 2020). This demonstrates that Black women are amazing architects of digital spaces, curating experiences within an ethic of care for their communities. Black women have created intersectional hybrid spaces that illustrate the fluidness of their movements—from the digital to the physical and back to the digital. The intersectional, transmediated, hybrid practices in which Black women engage in digital communities reflects the ways they create meaning out of different texts, cultures, practices, and spaces—bridging multiple modalities to create a hybrid summation of experiences. Black women have mobilized to draw connections between digital and physical realities.
Later we return to how Black women are punished within digital platforms as the latest iteration of carceral logics that continue the subjugation of Black women online and offline.
Black Women Calling Out Carceral Logics
A core feature of the hegemonic ideology that permeates digital spaces is carceral logics. Such carceral logics justify, normalize, and naturalize punishments, expulsion, and violence. We have shown in this essay how this logic underscores Black women’s relationships to physical and digital institutions alike. As Gilmore (2007, 242) writes, “Prison is not a building ‘over there’ but a set of relationships that undermine rather than stabilize everyday lives everywhere.”
Black women on social media mobilize their practices in strategic ways, validating each other’s feelings even as society deems them destructive and inappropriate (Gray 2020a). By using the example of getting “zucked,” we highlight the visible forces of discursive practices that racialize and gender everyday realities within (dis)orderly social hierarchies to punish Black women and render them invisible. Black women’s responses to surveillance and silencing highlight the histories of exclusion and legacies of racist practices that underlie virtual and physical spaces. Black women center Blackness in their digital practices and reflect their refusal to be erased and ignored. We rely on the concept of digital space to help explain how Black women use social media platforms to address the power imbalance reflected in the rates at which they are banned from and punished on social media. Space does not simply exist as a given but is constructed and affects (and is affected by) those with the most power. Space is not just a passive backdrop to human behavior and social action but is constantly produced and remade within complex relations of culture, power, and difference. Black women on social media attempt to contest this erasure and exclusion. Their work inside digital spaces attempts to heal the intersectional wounds and collective traumas that stem from White supremacy, Black patriarchy, White feminism, and other oppressions. Black women are working to ensure these spaces validate the range of Black women’s digital praxis.
Footnotes
Kishonna L. Gray is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. She previously served as an MLK Scholar and Visiting Professor in Women and Gender Studies and Comparative Media Studies at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She is an interdisciplinary, intersectional, digital media scholar whose areas of research include identity, performance and online environments, embodied deviance, cultural production, video games, and Black Cyberfeminism.
Krysten Stein is a first-generation, interdisciplinary Ph.D. student studying Communication and Media Studies with concentrations in Gender and Women’s Studies and Black Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She investigates how television, digital media, and popular culture are intertwined with systems of power and systematically excluded populations. Rooted in critical/cultural studies, utilizing an intersectional feminist lens, her writing and research focuses on cultural production, representation, media industries, and political economy.