Within the EA community, there is a major lack of public knowledge regarding human rights crises occurring around the world. On social media platforms, activist movements have been able to spread to wider audiences than ever before. However, the movements that get shared around are the ones that we can easily relate to and better commodify and comprehend.
First off, we as a society tend to gravitate toward obsessing over crises that personally affect us or first-world countries like us. Social and even mainstream media has spent much time covering the fires in Australia and now the spread of coronavirus into western nations. While these are extremely devastating to many people and are absolutely deserving of public attention, there are other crises, especially ones in developing nations, that go unnoticed by the vast majority of people.
Myanmar, a small, southeast Asian nation is comprised of over 100 distinct ethinic groups. These ethinic cultures live amongst each other, work together, shop in markets alongside one another, and live in harmony across Myanmar. However, this is not the reality for Rohingya Muslims, a now stateless ethnic group of one million individuals.
Rohingya Muslims once peacefully resided in Myanmar, have their own language, and have their own culture, but now they are under attack. They are facing persecution from the government of Myanmar who sees them as illegal Bengladeshi immigrants. The government, a majority Buddhist, does not recognize the Rohingya as citizens or even people. To this end, thousands of Rohingya Muslims have been killed and many Rohingya women have been raped. Furthermore, hundreds of Rohingya villages have been burned to the ground. All of these factors have forced the Rohingya into a diaspora of sorts from their homeland to dozens of settlements in the region. The UN has labeled this crisis as “the world’s fastest growing refugee crisis” (BBC News). At this current juncture, many are calling on world powers to intervene in order to lend a helping hand to the Rohingya, and these powers must do so.
The genocide of the Uyghur people in Chinese camps is another example of a major human rights violation currently occuring which is overlooked or unknown to most people. According to the United Nations, approximately one million Muslim Uyghurs are being forcibly held in so called “re-education” facilities. They are being forcibly detained without trial in poor conditions, and a new data leak, according to BBC, suggests detainees are being “brainwashed” in these camps.
We latch on to movements that are defined by succinct iconography and easy-to-recognize symbols—movements that are easy to commodify. This ease in commodification can come from hashtags, like the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter movements, or from distinct spokespeople like environmentalism’s Greta Thunberg and “Little Miss Flint,” Mari Copeny. Social media has made it easy to broadcast messages that can be summed up in a short phrase or an image. This can be an incredibly beneficial tool. It facilitates the spreading of movements to larger audiences and makes activism more accessible to the public. The climate change movement has gotten a huge boost in the media thanks to Greta Thunburg’s role as a personification of the movement, with her even winning Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.
However, these benefits come at the cost of filtering out movements that are too serious and complex to fit into simplistic iconography. While it is easy to sell “I believe her” and “There is no Planet B” t-shirts, it is a bit harder to sell t-shirts advocating against government-sponsored genocide. But the grimness of the plights of people like the Rohingya and Uyghurs means that their stories are less easy to stomach—there is no inspirational merch to buy or feel-good message of the movements. While the gravity of movements like these should make them even more talked about, it actually works against them in the social media brand of activism.
Like Greta Thunberg in 2019, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, along with other journalist recipients, received Time Magazine’s Person of the Year designation in 2018 following their arrest for their coverage of the massacres against the Rohingya people in Myanmar. But despite Greta Thunberg blowing up on social media after her designation, few remember the names of Lone and Oo.
We cannot simply latch onto the shiniest and newest movement that crosses our Instagram feeds and believe we are being “woke.”