# Bridging Action Frames: Instagram Infographics in U.S. Ethnic Movements

Darya Kaviani<EMAIL_ADDRESS>UC Berkeley EECS & Ethnic
StudiesBerkeleyCAUnited States94720 and  Niloufar Salehi<EMAIL_ADDRESS>UC Berkeley School of InformationBerkeleyCAUnited States94720

(2021)

###### Abstract.

Instagram infographics are a digital activism tool that have redefined action
frames for technology-facilitated social movements. From the 1960s through the
1980s, United States ethnic movements practiced collective action:
ideologically unified, resource-intensive traditional activism. Today,
technologically enabled movements have been categorized as practicing
connective action: individualized, low-resource online activism. Yet, we argue
that Instagram infographics are both connective and collective. This paper
juxtaposes the insights of past and present U.S. ethnic movement activists and
analyzes Black Lives Matter Instagram data over the course of 7 years
(2014-2020). We find that Instagram infographic activism bridges connective
and collective action in three ways: (1) Scope for Education: Visually
enticing and digestible infographics reduce the friction of information
dissemination, facilitating collective movement education while preserving
customizability. (2) Reconciliation for Credibility: Activists use connective
features to combat infographic misinformation and resolve internal
differences, creating a trusted collective movement front. (3) High-Resource
Efforts for Transformative Change: Instagram infographic activism has been
paired with boots on the ground and action-oriented content, curating a
connective-to-collective pipeline that expends movement resources. Our work
unveils the vitality of evaluating digital activism action frames at the
movement integration level, exemplifies the powerful coexistence of connective
and collective action, and offers meaningful design implications for activists
seeking to leverage this novel tool.

ethnic movements, infographics, activism, Instagram, data-scraping

††copyright: acmcopyright††journalyear: 2022††doi: [DOI]††conference: CSCW
’22: ; November 12–16, 2022; Taipei, Taiwan††booktitle: Kaviani and Salehi
’21: Proceedings of the ACM on Human Computer Interaction, November 12—16,
2022, Taipei, Taiwan††price: 15.00††isbn:
978-1-4503-XXXX-X/21/XX††submissionid: XXX-XXX-XXX††ccs: Human-centered
computing Collaborative and social computing Figure 1. Black Lives Matter
Instagram Infographics (blklivesmatter) 222Image content descriptions and
citations are in A.1.

##  1\. Introduction

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, American activist Carmen Perez
organized and trained 35,000 New York City-based Black Lives Matter protesters
within just four days, all while located in California herself. Despite the
protest’s immediacy, scale, and location, Perez’s team succeeded by leveraging
virtual tools, most notably Instagram infographics. This was far from an
isolated event: In the summer of 2020, spearheaded by the Black Lives Matter
Movement333See 2.2., the social media platform Instagram erupted in
infographics fighting for the protection of Black life through anti-racism
resources and action items such as petitions, financial contribution routes,
and protest information. While only 0.75% of images posted on the Black Lives
Matter Instagram account (@blklivesmatter) were infographics in 2014, this
value soared and peaked at 62.25% in 2020 (Table 3, Figure 4).

Historically, social movements have centered collective action: individuals
unifying to contribute to a common cause, typically on the basis of a joint
ideology and facilitated by organizational resources. Such ideologies manifest
as action frames: the “beliefs and meanings that inspire and legitimate”
action, or the guiding principles that frame movement processes and activities
(Benford and Snow, 2000). Facets of collective action include organization-
wide coordination, social network oversight, unified movement action frames,
inter-personal relationships, the reconciliation of internal differences, and
high resource expenditure (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). A prime historical
manifestation of collective action is ethnic movements: social movements that
are organized by groups made distinct by their origin, culture, language,
religion, territory, or phenotype (Okamoto, 2013). Their objective is self-
determination and a transformation of society’s viewpoint on cultural,
political, and social issues. Often regarded as the Second Revolution
following the Civil Rights Movement, the era from the 1960s through the 1980s
was a breeding ground for U.S. ethnic movements such as the American Indian
Movement, Black Power Movement, Asian American Movement, and Chicano American
Movement (Sec, 2016). Second Revolution ethnic movements epitomize collective
action by relying on organizational resources and presenting a unified front.

In 2012, however, Bennett and Segerberg defined an alternate action formation
known as connective action: sharing personalized content across social media
networks and digital connections (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). Facets of
connective action include a lack of coordination, personalized content and
expression, individual action frames in movement communication, and minimal
organizational operations. Connective and collective action were established
as fundamentally different types of action formations (Bennett and Segerberg,
2012). While collective action relies on group ties, organizational resources,
common action frames, and a resolution of internal differences, connective
action renders social good contributions as acts of personal expression. This
framework suggests that connective action uses technological processes to
yield action without the need for collective identity framing or
organizational resources.

Many modern-day ethnic movement activists have begun heavily utilizing digital
media in their activism. In 2020, activists from across the world supported
the Black Lives Matter movement by sharing Instagram posts in the form of an
infographic: a “visual presentation of information in the form of a chart,
graph, or other image accompanied by minimal text, intended to give an easily
understood overview, often of a complex subject” (Dictionary.com, [n.d.]).
Figure 1 depicts several infographics that were posted by the Black Lives
Matter Instagram account (@blklivesmatter). Propelled by the Black Lives
Matter movement’s posts, ethnic movement activists across the platform began
to centralize infographics in their virtual organizing (Ables, 2020; Daz,
2020), resulting in the dispersion of an unprecedented number of viral
activism-oriented infographics.

Action formations—specifically connective and collective action—reveal the
purpose, usage, needs, and motivation behind activism technology. As such, the
explosion of Instagram infographics begs the question: Are Instagram
infographics collective or connective action? On the surface level, the answer
is connective action—Instagram infographics digitally distribute
individualized sociopolitical content through Instagram, a personal
communication technology. In this paper, however, we argue that Instagram
infographics in ethnic movements are a medium of deeply intertwined connective
and collective action, exemplifying that movement technologies can encompass
the benefits and barriers of both. Infographics embody connective action by
being distributed digitally, expediting fluid movement updates, and
facilitating the curation of personalized content. Yet, infographics also
embody collective action by cultivating shared movement identities, while
carrying the same costs as traditional collective movement operations. In
particular, Instagram infographic activism amplifies information dissemination
for largescale education, necessitates the resolution of internal disputes for
movement credibility, and leverages on-the-ground resourced efforts that drive
forth transformative change.

Our study consists of a two-pronged mixed methods approach: (1) We conducted
comparative interviews of Second Revolution ethnic movement activists and
modern-day New Age ethnic movement activists to compare their experiences,
perspectives, and organizing mechanisms. (2) We performed a data-mining case
study on the Black Lives Matter Instagram page, revealing how infographics
affect engagement and action-oriented community responses.

Our results indicate that the combination of connective and collective action
is vital to modern-day ethnic movement infographic activism:

(1) Instagram infographics increase the scope of participation, educating
movement participants to form a unified front. In particular, they supercharge
information dissemination by circumventing physical, financial, and
geographical constraints; they provide customizable key features and visual
grabbers that draw in viewers; they serve as bite-sized entry points for new
ethnic movement participants; they increase accessibility for those without
formal education when movements integrate inclusive offline strategies. The
expansive reach of infographics is exhibited by their communal traction on
Instagram. While only 36.99% of Black Lives Matter’s posted images from
2014-2020 were infographics, 50.44% of likes and 54.19% of comments were
concentrated in infographics, suggesting that infographics increase engagement
and therefore the scope of viewership. While an Instagram infographic’s
content is initially personalized, the wide-scale distribution, expansive
reach, and virality of the infographic establishes a unified movement front by
broadening access to movement ideologies, education, and involvement.

(2) Instagram infographics necessitate the reconciliation of movement
disputes. While Instagram infographics force activists to cut corners to fit
complex issues into confining slide-limits, activists have adopted connective
methods to mitigate misinformation and establish movement legitimacy. The
prioritization of reconciliation in pursuit of credibility exemplifies the
need and desire to resolve movement differences in pursuit of a collective
movement framing.

(3) Instagram infographics must be paired with high-resource efforts to yield
transformative change. While infographics can cause passive, deceptive, and
complacent movement involvement, they create tangible changes when paired with
concrete non-virtual action. Indeed, infographics which call for action are
more effective in creating action-based discourse. Only 23.85% of total
comments on the Black Lives Matter Instagram were action-oriented for non-
action-oriented infographic posts, but 28.25% of comments were action-oriented
for action-oriented infographic posts, revealing that action-based
infographics have sparked more action-based communal dialogue on the Black
Lives Matter Instagram, a stepping stone to concrete action. The need to pair
infographics with protests, financial contributions, and political work
necessitates community resources, another feature of collective action.

In addition to its connective flexibility, personalization, and digital
nature, infographic activism embodies aspects of collective action. Our work
provides an example of an online activism tool that centralizes connective and
collective action, showcasing that information technologies are not restricted
to a single action formation. In theory, Instagram infographics are
connective; however, in practice, the ways in which they have been woven into
movements yield collective output. Beyond introducing a rich research area at
the intersection of connective and collective action, our insights can be used
to help activists who must select movement tools to maximize movement benefits
and minimize opportunity cost. By providing recommendations on how to expand
scope and accessibility, mitigate misinformation, and optimize for legislative
and societal transformation, we give ethnic movement activists a design
framework to configure their infographics in a way that bridges connective and
collective action.

When designing technology in the social computing space, we must aim to meet
the needs of both individuals and the collectives they form. To do so,
researchers, designers, and scholars will have to consider and accept the
marriage of connective and collective action when optimizing, implementing,
and utilizing even the most personalizable digital media tools.

##  2\. Background: Yesterday and Today

In this section, we outline the historical Second Revolution ethnic movements
of the era between the 1960s and the 1980s and the outburst of infographics in
the summer of 2020 in order to contextualize how ethnic movements originated,
evolved, and relate to Instagram infographics.

Figure 2. Sample of Black Lives Matter Instagram Infographics Following the
Murder of George Floyd (from @millenialblack @umaaraiynaas @dwardslife)
555Image content descriptions and citations are in A.2.

Figure 3. A Sample of Infographics from asianawarenessproject on Instagram
777Image content descriptions and citations are in A.3.

###  2.1. Ethnic Movements of the Second Revolution

The Civil Rights Movement (1954-1964), often deemed the “greatest mass
movement in modern American history,” fought for desegregating schools and
national constitutional equality for Black Americans (Civ, 2016). In spite of
the Civil Rights Movement’s strides towards equity and justice, the ensuing
era still left many communities disenfranchised, marginalized, and
impoverished. Ethnicity-based social movements began to congregate in order to
advocate for change, forming what we describe as the Second Revolution (Sec,
2016). In this section, we outline a handful of these movements to
contextualize the experiences of the Second Revolution activists we
interviewed.

####  2.1.1. American Indian Movement

The American Indian Movement (AIM) was founded in Minneapolis, Minnesota in
1968 with the objective of attaining sovereignty over illegally seized Native
lands as well as economic and legal rights that the United States government
has stripped from Indigenous communities for centuries (Bri, 1998). Notable
events include the occupation of San Francisco’s Alcatraz Island to demand
sovereignty in 1969 and the 1973 Occupation of Wounded Knee in which 250 Sioux
Indigenous Americans launched a 71-day occupation on the South Dakota Pine
Ridge Reservation, calling global attention to the generational atrocities and
unsafe living conditions inflicted upon the Indigenous American community
(Cooper, 2015).

####  2.1.2. Black Power Movement

The Black Power Movement was spearheaded by the Black Panther Party, a
revolutionary organization founded in October of 1966 in Oakland, California
that strayed from the integrationist ideals of the Civil Rights Movement in an
effort to procure Black self-determination through armed self-defense and
socialist ideologies (Arc, 2016). In addition to informing the public through
a widely popular newspaper and political education classes, the Black Panther
Party hosted several social services such as the Breakfast Program that served
20,000 school children daily, drug and alcohol awareness courses, early
childhood education programs, and clothing and medical assistance programs
(Collier, 2015).

####  2.1.3. Asian American Movement

After the Asian American Political Alliance was founded by UC Berkeley
graduate student Yuji Ichioka who coined the term “Asian American” (David K.
Yoo, 2016), Chinese, Filipino, Korean, and Japanese Americans began to
recognize the power in forming a communal consciousness to “bring together
previously isolated and ineffective struggles against the oppression of the
Asian communities into a coherent pan-Asian movement for social change” (Wei,
1993). The Asian American Movement’s organizing included public protests
against the Vietnam War, the fight for reparations for formerly interned
Japanese Americans, and the movement for ethnic studies at San Francisco State
and UC Berkeley (Nittle, 2019).

####  2.1.4. Chicano American Movement

In poet Alurista’s 1969 Chicano manifesto, “El Plan Espiritual de Aztlán,” the
land that ranges from what we now know as California and Texas were declared
the Chicano homeland, giving Chicanos ”something they could claim as their
own” (Rudolfo Anaya, 2017). By displacing Anglo-Americans from the
perspectival center of North America, the concept of Aztlán was able to combat
American xenophobia, while critiquing U.S. violations of land treaties like
the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. In addition to protesting for
jurisdiction over land, the Chicano American Movement fought for creating
bilingual and bicultural programs and Chicano representation in educational
and political roles as well as improvements in migrant farmworker
socioeconomic conditions (led by César Chávez and Dolores Huerta who co-
founded the National Farm Workers Association) (Carrillo, 2020).

####  2.1.5. West Asian American Movement

After Israel’s occupations of Palestine in 1967 and 1973, organizations fought
to counter the Western narrative of the occupation. The Association of Arab
American University Graduates (AAUG) sought to counter anti-Arab
representation in scholarship and society at large. Years later, the Arab
Community Center for Economic and Social Services (ACCESS) emphasized
radical888The term ”radical” (although carrying negative connotations in other
contexts) was commonly used in Second Revolution ethnic movements to describe
the pursuit of fundamental ”radical” change in a sociocultural system (Rad,
[n.d.]; for Institutional Diversity, 2019); in this paper we utilize this
meaning for ”radical,” ”radicalization,” and other similar terms. anti-
imperialist thought and provided social services for Arab immigrants who fled
war in Lebanon, Palestine, and Yemen (Pennock, 2017).

###  2.2. Summer 2020: Activist Infographics Take Off

We define New Age ethnic movements to be ethnic movements that are ongoing and
prominent today. Perhaps the most well-known and rapidly growing of these
movements is Black Lives Matter (BLM), an organization founded in 2013 in
response to the acquittal of the murderer of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old
unarmed Black boy whose fatal, unsolicited murder sparked global outrage. BLM
aims to “eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in
violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes” (BLM,
2014). The movement first spread globally when founders Patrisse Cullors,
Alicia Garza, and Opal Tometi posted #BlackLivesMatter on Twitter on July 13,
2013. The high-profile murders of several Black individuals then skyrocketed
the usage of the phrase, as it developed into a mantra for the protection of
Black life and an end to state-sanctioned violence (Tillery, 2019; Freelon et
al., 2016; Garza, 2014; Hockin and Brunson, 2018).

In the summer of 2020, the racially rooted murders of George Floyd, Breonna
Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and others at the hands of police officers and white
supremacists created waves in the Black Lives Matter movement. Infographics
supporting BLM went viral on the social media platform Instagram, with the
hashtag #blacklivesmatter (Figure 2) accruing over 26 million posts and
infographics on the Black Lives Matter Instagram page (Figure 1) rippling
throughout the platform. These carefully-crafted infographics fought for the
protection of Black life through anti-racism resources and action-items such
as petitions and financial contribution routes (Ables, 2020; Daz, 2020).

Other ethnic movements and activist groups began to utilize infographics as
well, as exemplified in Figure 3. Indigenous Americans have been sharing their
culture through infographics that celebrate Indigenous People’s Day and Native
Heritage Month, with #indigenouspeoplesday home to over 217,000 posts.
@dearasianyouth is an Instagram account that consists of over 100 Asian youth
that share educational infographics about the Asian American community. Today,
the Latinx community is focused on immigration rights and anti-deportation,
with #AbolishICE possessing over 193,000 posts, #endfamilyseparation with over
28,000 posts, and #closethecamps with over 63,000 posts. Palestinians and
Palestinian Americans are fighting for the right to return to their homeland,
with the hashtag #freepalestine acquiring over 1.3 million posts as of
2020999Not all of these hashtags are accrued from U.S.-based activists or
posts; we simply utilize these numbers in order to emphasize the online
presence of the modern ethnic movements which have prominent U.S. roots and
branches (although these movements also have prominent roots and branches
elsewhere)..

This paper not only verifies the unprecedented takeoff in ethnic movement
infographics, but also investigates the significance of this phenomenon to
digitally-mediated social movements.

##  3\. Related Work

###  3.1. Social Media Activism

Technology and social media have long been utilized by social movements to
meet community needs—often braided seamlessly (and sometimes ruggedly) into
movement practices and strategies (Tufekci, 2017). Bødker et al. found that
volunteer-based communities curate functioning collectives through a close
combination of circumstance, largescale communal strategies, and granular
tactics involving technology (Bødker et al., 2016) and Liu discovered that
activists strategically select and reject technologies on the basis of
affordances (Liu, 2021). In this section, we examine the preexisting research
exploring the impact of digital activism modes on movement communication,
credibility, and integration.

####  3.1.1. Facilitating a Unified Movement Front

Technology—particularly social media—can help establish a borderless, unified
movement front by documenting and fluidly disseminating central movement
ideologies.

Sharing Core Movement Ideologies. Ince et al. analyzed thousands of tweets
with the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter, discovering several core themes including
movement solidarity, police violence, and movement tactics (Ince et al.,
2017). Twyman et al. discovered that Wikipedia allows us to virtually track
the evolution of movement thought through the documentation and reappraisal of
historical and contemporary events (Twyman et al., 2017). Stanley studied an
online community of fat, queer, and women hikers which united a diverse array
of non-conforming bodies under a core ideology of queer mobility (Stanley,
2020). Siddarth and Pal found that social media not only aided short-term
movement goals, but also reframed bystander ideologies, values, and behaviors
in the longterm, representing the gradual development of a unified ideological
body (Siddarth and Pal, 2020). Tillery discovered that Black Lives Matter
organizations used Twitter to frame movement ideologies; in this case, by
centering individual rights over broader identity framing (Tillery, 2019).

Expanding the Movement Front. Laer and Aelst discussed that social media has
globalized movements by expanding them to the international scale (Laer and
Aelst, 2010) and Selander and Jarvenpaa found that social media broadens the
engagement and interactions of social movement supporters (Selander and
Jarvenpaa, 2016). Likewise, Enjolras et al. found that social media can expand
reach by accessing different segments and demographics of movement populations
(Enjolras et al., 2013).

Accessibility of Information. Crucially, disseminating unified movement
information necessitates inclusion and accessibility. Ghoshal et al. found
that the use of technology in grassroots movements can unfairly empower
technically savvy leaders, resulting in inequitable participation (Ghoshal et
al., 2020). Siddarth and Pal labeled social media itself as a class-segregated
entity (Siddarth and Pal, 2020). Class struggle is a rift in social movement
information dissemination that technolologically enabled movements must
consider, as we explore when discussing the role of infographics in mass
education.

Overall, past work indicates that activists have leveraged social media to
widely disseminate movement frameworks. In our work, we assess the educational
information dissemination capability of digital activism tools, particularly
when connective and collective action are at play.

####  3.1.2. Challenging Credibility

Movements must not only spread information, but do so in a way that cultivates
movement trust and resultant solidarity. As a result, Starbird et al.
emphasized that disinformation is of critical concern to CSCW researchers
since it threatens the integrity of the information space which it targets
(Starbird et al., 2019). This concern has expanded into the realm of social
media, whose fluidity is incredibly susceptible to rapid-spreading rumors and
misinformation (Alrubaian and AL-Qurishi, 2019; Maddock et al., 2015; Arif et
al., 2016; Liao and Shi, 2013). As a result, many researchers have studied
information credibility on social media platforms (Castillo et al., 2011;
Gupta et al., 2014; Vaidya et al., 2019). Mitra et al. found that transient
spurts of collective attention on social media platforms are susceptible to a
lack of credibility in the public eye (Mitra et al., 2017). While social media
can challenge credibility, Starbird and Palen determined that the use of
Twitter in the 2011 Egyptian uprising succeeded in promoting crowd solidarity,
increasing credibility and heightening situational awareness during events
(Starbird and Palen, 2012). Our work centralizes the activists in
conversations around credibility—while social media activism challenges
movement legitimacy, activists prioritize collective trust online.

####  3.1.3. Supplementing Offline Movement Strategies

Past work echoes that virtual engagement platforms complement physical action
to enhance social movements. Donovan demonstrated that Networked Social
Movements via the InterOccupy Movement provided crucial communication media
when on-the-ground interaction did not suffice (Donovan, 2018). Similarly,
Massung et al. explained how virtual crowdsourcing for pro-environmental
community activists increases the scalability of campaigns (Massung et al.,
2013).

However, there are disagreements as to whether technology can reduce the need
for offline tactics or whether overreliance can breed complacent movement
involvement (Rotman et al., 2011). Indeed, Earl and Kimport showed that
virtual organizing sharply reduces the cost of protest and the need for
physical engagements (Earl and Kimport, 2013), yet Gerbaudo concluded that
while social media serves as a supplementary activist tool for organizing,
physical space is irreplaceable in social movements (Gerbaudo, 2012). Indeed,
Theocharis et al. studied several online activism campaigns, concluding that
Twitter rarely facilitated coordination and protest organization (Theocharis
et al., 2015). Our work adds a layer of nuance; while we confirm that
transformative change necessitates offline, action-oriented, and high-resource
collective movement components, digital tools such as infographics can serve
as a crucial pipeline.

####  3.1.4. Instagram Activism

In the past decade, Instagram’s centralization of visuals has captivated users
(Blystone, 2020) and benefited activists. Alexander and Hahner found that the
visual intimacy of the image-sharing platform allowed activists to revisualize
and reframe, encouraging followers to adopt new understandings of Down
syndrome (Alexander and Hahner, 2017). Parmelee and Roman found that Instagram
has become a hub for political information and guidance (Parmelee and Roman,
2019). Mendonça and Caetano found that Instagram’s deployment of images can
frame public understandings of political leaders (Mendonça and Caetano, 2021).
Instagram centers imagery instead of text, which results in significant
opportunity for creative and newfound modes of information dispersal such as
Instagram infographics.

###  3.2. Infographics and Activism

####  3.2.1. Infographics

HCI and visualization researchers have been increasingly exploring the use and
effect of infographics. On a broad level, Lu et al. analyzed the use of Visual
Information Flows to better understand how infographics relay information (Lu
et al., 2020). More specifically, several works underline the benefits of
infographics in information delivery. Wang et al. found that graphical and
textual annotations improve readability and accessibility (Wang et al., 2020).
Bateman et al. (Bateman et al., 2010) and Borgo et al. (Borgo et al., 2012)
demonstrated that visual embellishments improve retention while Borkin et al.
uncovered design strategies that create memorable infographics (Borkin et al.,
2013). Holistically, Haroz et al. revealed that simple pictographic
representations improve memorability, speed of information discovery, and
engagement (Haroz et al., 2015). Our work builds on this literature by testing
the theoretical benefits of infographics when integrated into social
movements.

####  3.2.2. Infographics and Activism

Limited research has unveiled key instances of virtual infographic use in
activism. Broadly, Amit-Danhi and Shifman stated that “digital political
infographics” introduce a novel way of discussing, understanding, and relaying
socio-political information (Amit-Danhi and Shifman, 2018). For instance,
quick-spreading digital media infographics expanded the initiative against
land reclamation into the longest movement in Bali’s history (Suwana, 2020).
Likewise, Chicago climate activists used accessible infographics to reach
community members that would be otherwise excluded from environmental planning
discussions (Bates, 2020). Similarly, Facebook infographics were a vital
contributor to Ukraine’s EuroMaidan mobilization process by rapidly
disseminating information (Onuch, 2015).

While researchers have begun to uncover the rich area of intersection between
activism and infographics, this realm is heavily untapped both in HCI and
academia at large. Previous works have investigated either (a) the use of
infographics as a medium of information dissemination or (b) the use of social
media tools and platforms as they relate to activism. However, these topics
have been analyzed in isolation. A space that has not been explored is the
intersection of the two: the usage of social media infographics in advancing
activist objectives. Analyzing the groundbreaking trend of ethnic movement
infographics on Instagram provides insight into the potential of this untapped
realm of information dissemination and its impact on technologically enabled
activism.

###  3.3. Connective and Collective Action

Collective action is primarily offline, expends organizational resources, and
involves movement-wide ideological framing. Connective action is
individualized, technologically facilitated, and lacks the need for
organizational resources or internal dispute resolution (Bennett and
Segerberg, 2012). While Bennett and Segerberg acknowledge that connective and
collective action may co-occur, researchers have outlined tensions between
connective and collective action and debated the efficacy and value of the
action formations.

Chu and Yeo discovered that inauthenticity of connective action movement
participation incentivized young Hong Kong activists to pivot to embodied
collective action participation (Chu and Yeo, 2020). Shahin and Ng claimed
that connective action fails to lead to lasting change due to excess
individualization, flexibility, and emotionless participation (Shahin and Ng,
2021). Laer and Aelst argued that social media is unable to create inter-
activist ties that yield sustained action (Laer and Aelst, 2010). Others
dispute the value of connective action tools, claiming that digital
technologies do not inherently transform movement dynamics (González-Bailón
and Wang, 2016; Earl, 2010). Indeed, Pavan wrote that digital communication
technologies are in fact components of collective action networks (Pavan,
2014).

In contrast, Pond and Lewis found that connective action discourses may lack
influence on the surface-level, but are able to create and propagated
resultant action frames with broader impact (Pond and Lewis, 2019). Bang and
Halupka similarly established connective action as a potential for self-
governing and a departure from neoliberal reliance on unified political
authorities (Bang and Halupka, 2019), while Castells similarly highlighted
that connective action’s self-configurability breeds decentralization
(Castells, 2016).

We problematize both approaches—connective and collective action each maintain
their own faults and groundbreaking features. Analyzing the application-level
of activism technologies reveals rich information about the roles of
technology in collective action (Segerberg and Bennett, 2011). For instance,
Lee et al. outlined social media pipelines into both personalized and
collective action outcomes in Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement (Lee et al.,
2017). Ethnic movement activists’ use of Instagram infographics evidences that
digital media activism is not confined to just one action formation; the
integration of digital media tools into social movements demands consideration
of the affordances of both connective and collective action. CSCW considers
and designs for collectives; recognizing the careful coexistence of connective
and collective action is critical to effectively designing and evaluating
technologies for movement collectives.

##  4\. Method

Our granular research question is: How do Instagram infographics impact ethnic
movements? Our broader research question is: Are Instagram infographics
collective or connective action? To answer these questions, we used a two-
pronged mixed methods approach consisting of an interview process and a data-
scraping case study.

###  4.1. Comparative Activist Interviews

Our study spotlights ethnic movement activists by comparing the insights of
Second Revolution activists and modern-day Instagram activists. We focus on
U.S.-based activists and primarily U.S.-based ethnic movements in order to
draw sound parallels with Second Revolution movements. Introducing ethnic
movement activist perspectives into academia is vital as activists are the
most knowledgeable about movement intentions and core values. By going
directly to the source, we can more accurately contextualize quantitative
results. In contrast with a one-dimensional interview procedure, comparative
interviews of two disjoint groups can reveal otherwise inaccessible
conclusions about the unique changes that Instagram infographics have
introduced. We effectively establish a ”collective action baseline” by
revealing the practices, challenges, and strategies of the offline Second
Revolution ethnic movements. In turn, this allows us to distinguish collective
action continuities and connective action mediums when turning our attention
to New Age activists’ use of Instagram infographics.

To compare and contrast ethnic movements of modern day with their
predecessors, we sought ethnic movement activists from our two eras of
interest: Second Revolution (1960s-1980s) and New Age (modern-day). We used
Instagram Direct Messaging and email to connect with activists and asked
advisors and professors within the Ethnic Studies department at UC Berkeley
for referrals to Second Revolution ethnic movement activists. We interviewed
three Second Revolution activists and five New Age activists. Table 1 includes
each activist’s name, movement involvement, and bio.

Table 1. Interviewee Profiles Name |  Movement(s) |  Era |  Description
---|---|---|---
Harvey Dong |  Asian American Movement |  Second Revolution |  Professor of Ethnic Studies focusing on Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley. In the 60s, was involved in the movement to establish UC Berkeley Ethnic Studies department, the Anti-War Movement, and the Asian American Political Alliance. Current research focuses on ”Asian American and Third World social movement activism” 101010https://womensmarch.com/.
Billy X. Jennings |  Black Power Movement |  Second Revolution |  Former Black Panther with over 50 years of participation in the Black liberation struggle. Member of the Black Panther Party from 1968 to 1974. Founder of It’s About Time, a Black Panther Alumni committee which hosts events about the Black Panther Party’s legacy 111111https://www.gatheringforjustice.org/.
Pablo Gonzalez |  Chicano American Movement |  Second Revolution |  Professor of Chicano Studies at UC Berkeley. Facets of Chicano-American Movement ingrained in upbringing. Current research focuses on the housing crisis’ implications on Black and Latinx communities. Manuscript discusses intersections of Chicano American Movement and Zapatista Indigenous Movement of Mexico 121212https://www.cair.com/.
Carmen Perez |  Latinx community, Black Lives Matter |  New Age |  Co-founder of the Women’s March on Washington 131313https://sanjose-strong.github.io/home/. President and CEO of The Gathering For Justice, a movement to combat racial inequities in the justice system 1414footnotemark: 14. Focuses on advocating for individuals impacted by police brutality, particularly Black and Brown communities.
Zoha Raza |  Muslim American Movement |  New Age |  Communications Coordinator at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the largest Muslim American civil rights organization 1515footnotemark: 15. Runs CAIR’s social media accounts and routinely utilizes Instagram infographics to mobilize Muslim Americans and break stereotypes about the Muslim American community.
Mary Celestin |  Black Lives Matter |  New Age |  Founder of San Jose Strong, a grassroots organization to reinvent San Jose through local, community-level organizing 1616footnotemark: 16. Creates projects and resources to mobilize individuals for the Black Lives Matter Movement.
Hesham Jarmakani |  Palestinian and Muslim American Movements |  New Age |  Political Director for Bears for Palestine, a UC Berkeley organization rooted in advocacy for Palestinian human rights. Has raised funds for Black-affiliated organizations and crises in Southwest Asia such as in Syria and Lebanon.
Keys of Palestine (Founder) |  Palestinian American Movement |  New Age |  Organization which aims to shed light upon the silenced stories of elders in the Palestinian community through video submissions, photographs, and artwork in thematic infographics. Note: The founder of Keys of Palestine requested anonymity.
77footnotetext: https://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/people/harvey-
dong/88footnotetext:
http://www.itsabouttimebpp.com/home/home.html99footnotetext:
https://ethnicstudies.berkeley.edu/people/pablo-gonzalez-1/

Each interview lasted between 30 minutes and 1 hour. All activists were asked
to outline their experiences in their respective movement(s). Questions for
Second Revolution activists were focused on the benefits and drawbacks of
information dissemination mechanisms of the past and how the introduction of
activism infographics has implicated the authenticity, togetherness, and
effectiveness of ethnic movements. Questions for New Age activists were
focused on strategies for Instagram infographic success, combating
misinformation, and yielding tangible change.

Interviews were conducted via Zoom or telephone and recorded. We then executed
an iterative procedure for our coding analysis:

  1. (1)

We first mapped out all striking quotes and sought to find patterns and
connections.

  2. (2)

We compartmentalized the quotes into their respective categories; these
categories make up the skeleton of the subsections within each of our main
findings.

  3. (3)

Next, we performed a second iteration to map these sub-themes into the three
overarching themes that we will discuss in our findings.

  4. (4)

Finally, we performed a last iteration to examine how the three themes
interacted with one another and what they revealed about digitally-facilitated
social movements, leading us to draw our conclusions about the inseparability
of connective and collective action.

###  4.2. Instagram Data Scraping Case Study of Black Lives Matter

We performed a case study on Black Lives Matter in order to explore the
prominence and usage of Instagram infographics in one of the most pertinent
movements of modern day. We chose Black Lives Matter because of its large
following and consistent online presence since 2014, which makes it a reliable
dataset. We sought to quantitatively determine (a) whether infographics have
been increasingly used by the Black Lives Matter Instagram account (b) whether
infographics affect movement scope or transformative impact.

####  4.2.1. Scraping Account Photos

We utilized Instaloader, a tool that allows users to scrape pictures, videos,
captions, comments, and other metadata from
Instagram171717https://instaloader.github.io/. We extracted all images posted
by the Black Lives Matter Instagram account (@blklivesmatter) as well as a
JSON file of metadata associated with each image.

####  4.2.2. Classifying Infographics

To classify images as infographics or non-infographics, we identified the
criteria of an infographic and determined whether or not images were
infographics by hand. We drew upon the following definition:

> a visual presentation of information in the form of a chart, graph, or other
> image accompanied by minimal text, intended to give an easily understood
> overview, often of a complex subject. (Dictionary.com, [n.d.])

Images which we manually classified as infographics met all three of the
following criteria:

  1. (1)

The image is a visual presentation of information in the form of a chart,
graph, or other image.

  2. (2)

The visual presentation is accompanied by minimal text.

  3. (3)

The image breaks down a complex subject, concept, or message into an easily
understood overview.

While we explored computer vision classifiers to bucket images as infographics
and non-infographics, we decided against this as no classifiers were specific
enough to make decisions that we deemed accurate in subsequent hand samples.

####  4.2.3. Defining Action Words

We define Action Words to be terms indicative of calls to action beyond the
infographic, particularly in the context of ethnic movements and Black Lives
Matter. Our Action Keyword Bank was defined by browsing the action-oriented
infographic images on Instagram, including all images we extracted from the
Black Lives Matter Instagram page. Examining a post’s Action Words is an
objective way of gauging action-oriented language, messaging, and discourse
both in the infographic and the comments. Action Words signal and inspire
beyond-infographic action—reading, donating, protesting, etc. In this sense,
Action Words serve as an identifier of the bridge between virtual organizing
and physical, in-person interaction.

####  4.2.4. Analyzing Engagement and Action Words

We wrote Python scripts181818The scripts for this case study can be found at
https://github.com/infographics-cscw/scripts. in order to extract and analyze
the following data:

  1. (1)

Engagement:  From each post’s Instaloader JSON file, we extracted the number
of likes and comments in order to determine whether posts with infographics
reached or resonated with a broader audience.

  2. (2)

Action Words:  To extract image text, we used OpenCV, a library providing
real-time computer vision functionality191919https://opencv.org/. In
conjunction, we also used Python-tesseract, a wrapper for Google’s Tesseract-
OCR Engine that can recognize text from
images202020https://pypi.org/project/pytesseract/. The script iterates through
each image filepath pulled from Instaloader, at which point OpenCV’s imread
function reads each image, the cvtColor function converts each image’s colors
to a more readable color combination, and pytesseract transforms the detected
image text to a string. We then utilized this script to determine whether a
post’s images contained Action Words. We also downloaded a JSON file of the
comments section of each Black Lives Matter post from 2014 through 2020 in
order to determine whether Action Infographics (infographics with Action
Words) drew a more action-oriented communal response than Non-Action
Infographics (infographics without Action Words).

Table 2. Action Keyword Bank 222222Action Words are listed in no particular order. Petition | Call | Vote | March | Rise | Text | Action | Act | Demand
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---
Fight | Protest | Share | Come | Support | Help | Urge | Sign | Prosecute
Donate | Defend | Change | Command | Shout | Cry | React | Now | Justice
Resist | Read | Stop | Manifest | Join | Give | Lift | Assert | Protect
Stand | Take | Say | Liberate | Return | Heal | Raise | End | Register
Contact | Bring | Hear | Listen | Watch | Release | Strike | Preach | Abolish
Free | Defund | Duty | Email | Post |  |  |  |

###  4.3. Method Limitations

A few limitations exist: First, the selected interviewees depended on the
ethnic movement activists we were familiar with or were referred to, meaning
the sample of ethnic movement activists was largely localized. However, our
activists were from a variety of movements and backgrounds and therefore
shared vastly different experiences. Second, our hand-classification of
infographics—despite strict adherence to the three-pronged definition—was
subjective in some borderline images. However, the number “unclear” or
“borderline” images was largely outnumbered, reducing the implications of such
bias. Third, it is possible that a post is calling for action without
including a word in our Action Keyword Bank or that a post includes a word in
our Action Keyword Bank without calling for action. However, our method
provides a key balance between objectivity and accuracy by defining a clearcut
set of action-identifiers, removing subjectivity from the classification
process.

##  5\. Findings

Our core discovery is that Instagram infographic activism stems beyond
connective action by epitomizing central facets of collective action. Perhaps
the most convincing example of Instagram infographics’ ability to leverage
collective action is the Black Lives Matter movement’s Instagram page. By any
measure, the Black Lives Matter movement embodies collective action: they have
a unified ideology of Black liberation and have utilized organizational
resources in physical events including protests since their genesis in 2013.
Crucially, infographics are more prominent on the Black Lives Matter Instagram
page now than ever before. Figure 4 and Table 3 detail two trends in the Black
Lives Matter Instagram account from 2014 through 2020: the absolute number of
infographic images and the percentage of all images that were infographics.

Table 3. Infographics in Black Lives Matter Instagram Posts Over Time Year | Number of Infographics | Percentage of Images That Were Infographics
---|---|---
2014 | 1 | 0.75%
2015 | 13 | 12.75%
2016 | 27 | 40.91%
2017 | 41 | 35.04%
2018 | 62 | 44.29%
2019 | 50 | 44.25%
2020 | 155 | 62.25%
Figure 4. Infographics in Black Lives Matter Instagram Posts Over Time Figure
5. Juxtaposing Black Lives Matter (@blklivesmatter) Posts from 2014 (left)
with 2020 (right) 242424Image content descriptions and citations are in A.4.

As anecdotally depicted in Figure 5, while Black Lives Matter has been
actively fighting against the loss of Black life and white supremacy for
years, 2020 showcases a significant surge in infographics, with 155 posted
infographics and 62.25% of posted images being infographics. The increased
usage of infographics demonstrates that a movement empirically rooted in
collective action can leverage a personalizable digital media device
traditionally categorized as a connective action tool. This complicates our
understanding of connective and collective action: How can Instagram
infographics just be another connective action device if a collective movement
is utilizing them at the organizational level? Now, we will explore three
manifestations of Instagram infographic activism as a bridge between
connective and collective action: information dissemination for movement
education, internal reconciliation for credibility, and high-resource efforts
for transformative change.

###  5.1. Increasing Scope for Collective Education

Collective action requires that people unify about a common cause, the
precursor to which is educating movement participants about the cause itself.
Indeed, Second Revolution movements necessitated education of the masses.
Today, infographics serve as powerful education tools by heightening ethnic
movement information dissemination, allowing personalizable posts to attract
numerous movement contributors who share a common objective, and curating a
collective movement ideology.

####  5.1.1. Information Sharing Methodologies of the Past

In this section, we outline Second Revolution methods of obtaining and
spreading ethnic movement information to establish a baseline for collective
movement education methods. While television and radio were common-use
technologies from the 1960s through the 1980s, activists predominantly relied
on person-to-person contact because mainstream media outlets catered to a
white audience. Primary mobilizing strategies included print (alternative
movement newspapers, handbills, postcards), telephone, artwork (murals, print-
art, graphics), and face-to-face events (festivals, protests, conferences).

Physical Mobilization.  Pablo Gonzalez drew attention to the vitality of
human-to-human contact:

> “Some of the initial ways that the Chicano Movement built its critical mass
> of folks to mobilize… [was] through a grassroots initiative that had to take
> place face-to-face. You had to be able to experience and meet across
> regions, across different communities, in order for you to really feel the
> power of the Chicano Movement.”

A prominent example of these physical interactions was the Black Panther
Party’s 10 10 10 Program, in which a Panther organizes ten people within a
ten-block square, each of which agree to mobilize ten more people, producing a
ripple effect that broadcasts movement information. Door-to-door operations
like the 10 10 10 Program stemmed from the belief that direct contact—arriving
at someone’s doorstep with a message and a flyer—was the best way to spread
knowledge.

Alternative Movement Print.  Movement newspapers were, as Billy X. Jennings
called them, “the lifeblood” of ethnic movements. The Black Panther Party
extracted information from internal political education classes and dispersed
this radical thought through 350,000 weekly newspapers, many of which are
showcased in Figure 6.

Figure 6. Art in the Black Panther Party Newspaper 262626Image content
descriptions and citations are in A.5.

By portraying a reality that the state and the mainstream media omitted,
Second Revolution ethnic movements were able to maximize their reach through
print, door-to-door operations, and physical events. The prominence of
information-sharing mediums in Second Revolution movements certifies that
information and education have historically been essential components of
collective action.

####  5.1.2. Overcoming Physical, Financial, and Geographical Obstacles

> “Information is the raw material for new ideas. Once we give people the
> information, they can come up with new ideas.” — Billy X. Jennings

In this section, we examine how Instagram infographics expedite and expand
information dissemination by reducing physical, financial, and geographical
restrictions. As a result, the use of Instagram infographics can increase the
reach of movement education in pursuit of establishing and spreading a
collective movement ideology.

Physical Labor Barrier.  Second Revolution activists depended on intricate and
time-intensive tools and methods. Billy X. Jennings pressed the importance of
knowing how to operate a memorigram machine as a Panther. Similarly, Harvey
Dong articulated the great measures that a San Francisco Asian American
Movement community center took to spread their newsletter using a sister
movement’s Gestetner (Figure 7) machine:

> “We knew that the Black Panther office in Oakland had a machine that could
> make a Gestetener sheet and that machine was expensive. So I remember
> driving over with our layout copy… and paying them 50 cents to have the
> master copy made and then taking it back and putting that into our Gestetner
> machine… and then you paste them up on lamposts.”

Figure 7. Gestetener Printing Machine (Vic, [n.d.])

Harvey Dong juxtaposed another onerous experience with the relative ease of
posting an Instagram infographic today:

> “I brought a stack of political newspapers [to Vancouver]. I would get
> stopped at the border and they’d ask, ‘Why are you bringing 50 copies of one
> newspaper?’… Today, it’s relatively easy. You type something, you research
> something, you proofread it, and you click a button and it goes out there.”

Instagram infographics enable ethnic movement activists to replace physically
exhausting operations with efficient tasks. A graphic through an online
template can be crafted in minutes, while drafting a master copy of a
newsletter takes hours and printing copies takes even longer. Likewise, the
distribution of an Instagram infographic takes seconds, while passing out
newsletters requires significant time and labor from multiple movement
participants.

Financial Limitations.  Second Revolution activists needed to practice
resourcefulness to overcome government and institutional movement suppression,
which added friction to the information-spreading process. Harvey Dong
continued that while many Bay Area ethnic movement groups had access to the
Waller press to print newspapers for 500 dollars per issue, “you had to come
up with the money.” News outlets were reluctant to promote ethnic movement
messages, forcing activists to pay substantial production costs for personal
newsletters. In stark contrast, free Instagram infographic templates are
widely available today on platforms such as
Canva272727https://www.canva.com/instagram-posts/templates/, eliminating the
financial restrictions that once established an upper bound on the
information-sharing capabilities of activist groups.

Geographical Constraints.  All three Second Revolution activists noted that
their movement entrance was largely attributable to luck: being in the right
place at the right time. For example, UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement of
the 1960s—which involved sit-ins and mass protests against the Vietnam War—is
credited with the first revolt of the era to bring ”mass civil disobedience
tactics in the civil rights movement” to college campuses (FSM, [n.d.]).
Harvey Dong believes that a significant reason behind their radicalization was
attending UC Berkeley since the work of UC Berkeley’s Free Speech Movement
helped curate ”a tremendous amount of information” in an atmosphere that was
conducive to socio-political dialogue.

Likewise, Billy X. Jennings emphasized the significance of attending college
in the same city as the Black Panther headquarters:

> “Prior to 1968 in America, there was no Black history, no Black education
> course on a public basis… Fortunately, for us, the national headquarters was
> in Oakland, so we had the benefit of leadership knowledge as well as…
> political education classes.”

Likewise, Pablo Gonzalez highlighted that being raised in Berkeley meant being
the “product of movements.” Thus, Second Revolution radicalization
environments were largely reliant on the location of activists’ upbringings
and college campuses.

Bypassing Borders.  In contrast, modern-day technological advancements
circumvent traditional geographical constraints. Mary Celestin articulated:

> “Technology has an immense amount of power to actually bring [together] a
> lot of movements that would be otherwise fragmented.”

While physical tools such as newspapers can effectively disperse information
to generate a movement ideology in a local community, infographics generate a
unified front by curating fluid global educational channels. Indeed, posting
an infographic has the ability to bridge people on opposite ends of a country.
During a pandemic, Carmen Perez utilized virtual methods including Instagram
infographics to assemble and prepare 35,000 New York City-based Black Lives
Matter protesters. Not only was the timespan of training only four days, but
Perez was also located remotely in California. Perez added:

> “It allows us to stretch our work beyond our immediate physical space.”

Zoha Raza confirmed that while in-person events are confined to local
residents, virtual events are reached by all Instagram followers and Harvey
Dong explained that the Black Lives Matter movement has used virtual tools to
spread into suburbs and isolated communities.

Billy X. Jennings claimed that if the Black Panthers had Instagram
infographics, they would ”cross all racial and class lines”:

> “The Black Panther Party would not be just confined to a college campus or a
> Black community. It would be read by the masses of America.”

The Black Panther Party hosted several social services such as the Breakfast
Program that served 20,000 school children daily (Collier, 2015). While the
Breakfast Program was incredibly expansive and impactful, perhaps if the Black
Panthers had Instagram infographics, Black folks living nowhere near Oakland
could have engaged in radical thought and created branches of Panther social
service programs to feed the hungry and care for the ill. This alternative
reality could have affected thousands by operating at a much larger scale. By
expanding access to movement-wide ideologies and information, Instagram
infographics are able to reach, educate, and galvanize otherwise unreachable
community members. As a result, Instagram infographics can play a role in mass
education, establishing collective movement underpinnings that were less
widespread and unified in the past.

Echo Chambers as a Counterargument.  Instagram infographics do not permeate
all location restrictions due to information bubbles which are created either
by online echo chambers or the exclusion of offline communities. Hesham
Jarmakani explained:

> “So while we may be able to get some of the voters from industrialized
> metropolitan cities… where a lot of younger people use social media, we also
> have to factor in the opportunity cost of focusing on social media alone
> resulting in us not being able to focus on other demographics, especially
> older people, which, whether we like it or not, tend to show up consistently
> to the [election] polls.”

Instagram infographics cater to urban areas and younger audiences, an
unfortunate similarity with Second Revolution activism. People tend to
”follow” accounts with similar belief systems, so information is likely to
remain within concentrated bubbles. While Instagram infographics chip away at
many physical, financial, and geographical obstacles, they are limited by echo
chambers, an age-old continuity.

####  5.1.3. A Unique Combination of Features

Instagram infographics are able to uniquely maximize ethnic movement scope by
allowing activists to leverage features that alternative social media
platforms lack.

Room For Creativity.  Carmen Perez suggested that while Facebook limits
private users to 5,000 friends and Twitter limits characters per post,
Instagram allows movement leaders to include more content with increased
flexibility, allowing these customizable posts to reach a broader audience.
Personalizability and flexibility are components of connective action, yet in
the case of Instagram infographics, they facilitate collective education.

“Story” Feature.  Mary Celestin spotlighted a scope-enhancing Instagram
feature:

> “They have a really cool approach to permanency and impermanence. Their work
> with the stories was really, really smart… When it comes to digestible,
> bite-sized information that can be consumed and then shared and then
> commented on, Instagram does a really good job.”

By allowing activists to create permanent posts on their feed, while giving
movement participants the opportunity to share these permanent posts to their
stories temporarily and in seconds, Instagram’s “Story” feature facilitates
the fluid spread of infographics.

A Visual Gallery.  Instagram was, from its birth in 2010, designed to be a
photo-sharing application (Blystone, 2020). This is precisely why Hesham
Jarmakani accredits Instagram with being ideal for infographic activism:

> “Instagram is very accessible because it is a platform solely devoted for
> imagery… We’ve been in the age of visual appeal. I mean, when we look at
> musicians, all of our musicians have to be attractive, even though we care
> more about their music than how they look because we want to have something
> that’s visually enticing as shallow as that is… that’s the way the world
> operates right now… I feel like Instagram is the most ideal platform because
> it is a platform solely dedicated to that. When you click on Instagram, you
> know what you’re going to see—just picture after picture after picture.”

Visuals provide a “hook” into a post’s content; a post without an infographic
may never draw in a movement participant, but placing that same thought within
a visual representation might entice viewers to engage. Zoha Raza agreed,
emphasizing that infographics have eye-catching depictions that draw audiences
in:

> “It’s all about pictures. The pictures capture the person and then they look
> at the caption.”

Thus, Instagram infographics attract participants and facilitate rapid
information spread through eye-catching visual appeal and features that are
versatile for both the activist and the information spreader. As a result,
Instagram infographic activism has become repost-oriented rather than solely
individualistic—most participants post movement infographics to their Stories
more than they create infographics. So while an infographic is purely
connective when originally designed and posted, viral infographics that ripple
through Instagram accounts document collective movement ideologies and values
shared by posters.

####  5.1.4. A Bite-Sized Entry Point

By trimming down hefty issues into digestible entry points, Instagram
infographics are able to introduce a wider audience into movements. Carmen
Perez defined an infographic entry point as ”an opportunity for learning and
online dialogue” which eventually develops into offline discourse and movement
education beyond the scope of the infographic. Infographics are ideal for
individuals who lack time, training, and knowledge of where to start. Zoha
Raza provided a key example:

> “It’s possible that people don’t have time to read through ‘Who is a Muslim,
> what does a Muslim stand for.’ [With Instagram infographics], someone is
> scrolling through Instagram and they see ‘Swipe to learn more about the
> American Muslim Movement’ and they find new information that they didn’t
> know before and it’s right there, it’s in their face.”

The founder of Keys of Palestine noted that Instagram functions as their
organization’s entry point by drawing attention to their primary content and
enabling users to travel to their website or podcast for more concentrated
information. In this way, a movement participant’s educational experience is
not limited to the content they see on Instagram; rather, it extends to the
plethora of resources which the infographics introduce. Instagram infographics
provide digestible introductions to movement issues and avenues for
subsequently pursuing one’s own research, increasing the scope of movement
participation to encompass otherwise busy or initially uninterested
individuals.

####  5.1.5. Strategies and Metrics for Success

Beyond the virality of the infographic itself, New Age activists have curated
several strategies and metrics to optimize their infographic impact and
maximize their audiences.

Strategies

  * •

Themes: Both Keys of Palestine and Zoha Raza utilize color schemes for their
posts in order to garner attention. Keys of Palestine uses keys to represent
the right of return to one’s homeland, as well as tea and seeds to culturally
connect to Palestinians. Unified symbols, themes, and colors allow movement
participants to gain familiarity with the visual structure of a movement’s
posts, allowing recognizable movement posts to stand out in a viewer’s feed.

  * •

Infographics as a Highlighter: Since Keys of Palestine is focused on posting
videos of Palestinain elders’ stories, they utilize infographics to draw
attention to lines or quotes of significance from the videos. Highlighters
draw in movement participants by providing eye-catching hooks and
understandable takeaways.

  * •

Partners: Raza, Perez, and Jarmakani all emphasized the significance of
tagging partners in their posts and having their partners repost their content
in their feeds to break into their social media bubbles. Jarmakani highlighted
the importance of partner engagement:

> “One thing that definitely helps is having people shoutout whatever posts we
> make, but something even more important is having people within different
> solidarity groups also share… We do have 1,000 followers, but 800 to 900 of
> them probably know each other or are within the same area or the same
> demographic. So it’s important to have more solidarity orgs share these so
> they can reach different individuals, different communities, different
> demographics.”

Social media echo chambers can hinder information dissemination by siloing
radical thought into bubbles that are inaccessible to other groups. When
partners re-post infographics, activists break into their partners’
information bubbles, exceeding the limitations of their Instagram following.
In doing so, movements are able to share a collective ideology across distinct
information bubbles and communities.

Metrics.  Some activists analyze specific metrics to optimize their
viewership. Zoha Raza looks to likes, new followers, and shares to gauge
success, while Hesham Jarmakani evaluates story shoutouts and event
attendance. Carmen Perez explained the value of tracking metrics:

> “I did a post people were really invested in, so that made me want to post
> more examples of the way in which Latinos have shown up for the African
> American community… That has me have an internal conversation about what it
> looks like to actually post more of that versus maybe something that did not
> do so well.”

On the contrary, Mary Celestin noted that posts that are more broad and
aesthetically pleasing do best, but that San Jose Strong does not seek to
adapt their strategies based upon which infographics do better:

> “I think the approach of building community online on an Instagram platform
> is very different from being an influencer trying to get as many likes… as
> possible… They’re a different marketing style.”

While there are commonalities between the strategies and metrics of ethnic
movement activists who utilize Instagram, some take into account those metrics
in decision-making for future posts, while others maintain that ethnic
movement activism should be less about what the public would find more
“likeable” or “sharable” and instead simply about the content that should be
broadcasted. This represents a unique tension between educational content and
educational reach—when infographics hold the weight of collective thought,
activists must prioritize the expansiveness of their message or the message
itself. In this sense, activists can opt for connective customizability, but
also have the option to prioritize broader collective messaging.

####  5.1.6. Accessibility of Education

Instagram infographics pose both accessibility improvements and concerns when
it comes to dispersing movement information.

Decreasing Educational Barriers.  Carmen Perez highlighted that infographics
improve accessibility for those without a college education:

> “Information in the past that did not use infographics was only accessible
> to those that had more resources versus [today, you can get involved] if you
> have a phone or a computer… If you went to college, then you understood what
> the Chicano Movement was about. Now, if you are online, you can be informed
> of the origin of the Chicano Movement.”

Indeed, perhaps if Billy X. Jennings or Harvey Dong had been raised in the age
of the infographic, they would have been able to access radical thought prior
to their college educations. Hesham Jarmakani noted that the digestible format
of infographics can make information more accessible for those without
familiarity with dense academic texts:

> “As a person who grew up speaking Arabic and English and never fully
> developing or fully grasping one language as other people do, I tend to find
> a lot of progressive texts very inaccessible where most of the time, it
> tends to be a lot of French philosophers trying very, very hard to out-
> jargon one another. I have a copy of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish that
> I’ve never been able to get through because it’s just very dense. I feel
> like Instagram infographics are able to break down very complex ideas into
> very bite-size materials.”

Reducing the necessity of formal education is crucial, as school funding and
resources remain segregated based on race and socioeconomic status: In the
United States, white students out-graduate students of color by a 10 point
margin (Rat, 2020). Instagram infographics ameliorate the flaws of an unfair
schooling system; a college education is no longer a precursor to movement
engagement, improving the accessibility of movement introductions.

Offline Movement Components for Accessibility.  Instagram infographic activism
necessitates supplementary offline educational means to include individuals
who lack access to technology; otherwise, the use of Instagram infographics in
isolation poses an accessibility concern. Pablo Gonzalez explained:

> “Our communities don’t always have access to social media… When we’re
> talking about making policy that will impact communities of color, but also
> poor communities, in social media, we reproduce the very notion of a middle
> class family but never do I see conversation about poor working class
> families, so that already tells you that it over-reproduces a discourse that
> already happens in society that has no consideration about a growing
> population in the United States that’s poor, under the poverty wage,
> [increasingly] houseless that don’t have resources.”

Indeed, people who make infographics likely have a phone and internet, but an
unhoused person could learn about, partake in, or even lead an on-the-ground
protest, as evidenced by the houseless movement spearheaded by Black women in
Oakland (Paulas, 2020). This concept is summarized by Hesham Jarmakani:

> “It takes privilege having to use Instagram, let alone having a phone and I
> feel like that’s the kind of social capital that we don’t really discuss in
> a lot of organizing where some people might not have access to these
> things.”

In a world where people of color are often constrained to the bottom of the
economic pyramid (Association, 2017), it is crucial that ethnic movements are
inclusive of those who cannot access technology, something that a movement
entirely reliant on Instagram infographics does not offer. Ethnic movements
often seek justice for individuals who are suppressed by oppressive
institutions; therefore, online movements can fall short of meeting movement
objectives by keeping vital information from those most impacted by movement
topics.

A Continuity: Art as a Method of Increased Accessibility.  Instagram
infographics and ethnic movements of the past both use visuals as a mechanism
of increased accessibility. Just as Jarmakani noted that those with language
barriers are able to process infographics more clearly, Billy X. Jennings
explained that art in the Black Panther newspaper was vital to accessibility:

> “The Black community is not a reading community during the 60s and 70s. We
> had a lot of illiteracy… so the artwork in the Panther paper was very
> important because people looked at those images… People could relate to that
> artwork. They might not read the article… but that artwork would give them
> the basis of what the article is about.”

Long before the age of the Instagram infographic, ethnic movement activists
leveraged visuals to empower their communities and foster change. The Black
Panther Party newspaper depicted criticisms of institutionalized racism,
police brutality, poverty, and imperialism through thought-provoking imagery
(Figure 6) that was able to ”cut through the high illiteracy rates in poor
communities,” heightening movement accessibility and scope (Sudbanthad, 2008).

Likewise, the Chicano Movement is reputed for their printmaking, graphics, and
murals; in the Los Angeles area alone, more than a thousand Chicano murals
have been created since 1965, like those in Figure 8. Chicanx activists
”rooted their muralism in support for the struggles of the poorest, most
exploited members of their communities,” centralizing themes such as Aztlàn
and labor exploitation (Reed, 2005; Mejorado, 2020).

Figure 8. Chicano Murals 292929Image content descriptions and citations are in
A.6.

Ethnic movement art catalyzed change by circumventing educational obstacles,
curating movement culture, and evoking thought and emotions that image-less
words could not encompass. Illiteracy should not be a roadblock to movement
participation. By presenting content through visuals, infographics (just like
their newspaper-art predecessors) convey messages to those with lower levels
of literacy, reflecting an evolved movement strategy whose roots have existed
for decades.

Overall, while Instagram infographics increase the accessibility of
information through visual representations and a lack of a necessity for
higher education, they are limited in accessibility when it comes to bringing
offline communities to the table. When offline educational means exist,
Instagram infographic activism can disperse movement education to otherwise
excluded movement participants, further expanding the movement unified front.

####  5.1.7. Examining Scope Through Black Lives Matter Engagement

Since more traction on a post indicates that the post either reached or
resonated with more people, increased engagement suggests increased scope of
movement participation. As such, we sought to explore whether infographics
cultivate more engagement (measured by likes and comments) on the Black Lives
Matter Instagram page.

Figure 9 and Table 4 denote the percentages of likes and comments belonging to
infographic images aggregated across 2014-2020 juxtaposed with the percentage
of posted images which were infographics.

Table 4. Comments and Likes in Comparison to Infographics Infographic Percentage | Likes From Infographics | Comments From Infographics
---|---|---
36.99% | 50.44% | 54.19%
Figure 9. Overall Comments and Likes in Comparison to Infographics

Overall, while only 36.99% of posted images were infographics, 50.44% of likes
and 54.19% of comments belonged to infographics from 2014 through 2020. This
suggests that the Black Lives Matter Instagram’s engagement is concentrated
within their infographic posts. We further analyzed the distribution of likes
and comments to confirm the correspondence between more engagement and more
infographics. Figure 10 and Table 5 describe the infographic post percentage
in the 0th-20th, 20th-40th, 40th-60th, 60th-80th, and 80th-100th percentile
ranges for both post like count and comment count. The dotted lines in Figure
10 mark 36.99%, the overall infographic post percentage.

Table 5. Black Lives Matter Instagram Infographic Post Percentage By Like and Comment Percentiles Percentile Range |  Raw Like Count Range |  Likes Percentile Infographic Percentage |  Raw Comment Count Range |  Comments Percentile Infographic Percentage
---|---|---|---|---
0th-20th | 65-113 | 1.86% | 0-2 | 2.04%
20th-40th | 113-1,335 | 34.36% | 2-38 | 27.43%
40th-60th | 1,335-5,792 | 49.38% | 38-129 | 51.22%
60th-80th | 5,792-28,844 | 43.21% | 129-312 | 44.10%
80th-100th | 28,844-598,222 | 56.17% | 312-3,465 | 57.67%
Figure 10. Black Lives Matter Instagram Infographic Post Percentage By Like
and Comment Percentile

For both likes and comments, the 40th-60th, 60th-80th, and 80th-100th
percentile ranges all exceed the overall infographic post percentage of
36.99%, showing that posts on the upper half of the like and comment
distributions are more likely to be infographics than posts with less
traction. Furthermore, the 80th-100th like and comment percentile ranges are
comprised of 56.17% and 57.67% infographic posts, respectively; the top 20%
most liked and 20% most commented posts contain the highest portion of
infographics. Our examination of engagement percentiles supports our
aggregated statistic by indicating that more engaged posts disproportionately
contain infographics.

When posts receive significantly more engagement, it is likely that they have
reached or resonated with more people to accumulate those likes and comments.
Therefore, our case study supports our qualitative finding that Instagram
infographics increase the scope of information dissemination. While the
efficacy of the infographic may depend on the content of the comments or the
action participants take after engaging with the post, our findings show that
infographics are widely distributed and viewed. This scope facilitates the
education of the masses, an invaluable prerequisite to collective action.

####  5.1.8. Scope: Connective and Collective Action

Collective action necessitates that a movement educates and informs its
participants with movement-wide ideologies, values, and objectives. Despite
the fact that Instagram infographics are subject to information echo chambers
and urban information bubbles, this is outweighed by New Age activists’
careful crafting of their infographic strategies, the visual appeal and quick-
spreading features of Instagram, as well as infographics’ ability to
significantly reduce geographical, physical, financial, and schooling
constraints. However, Instagram infographics do necessitate offline
educational means to ensure economic accessibility.

When it comes to heightening the scope of information dissemination,
infographic activism is connective in that infographics are digitally
mediated, information begins as personalized content, and dispersed
information is not always managed by one centralized organization. Infographic
activism has also become collective by establishing movement-wide priorities
and ideologies at an unprecedented scale. Pure connective action is
individualized and focuses on personalized expression; however, while
infographics may be personalized at the point of creation, their rapid and
largescale circulation makes content more communal than individual, developing
collective action frames. What was once newspapers and flyers is now
infographics—values and action-items are documented and spread across
geographical and socioeconomic lines to generate movement-wide ideologies.

###  5.2. Practicing Reconciliation for Collective Credibility

Collective action involves the curation of a unified movement front. As such,
movement organizers must forge strategies to reconcile disagreements to
preserve movement-wide resilience (Bennett and Segerberg, 2012). Connective
action lacks this need: since content is digitally mediated and personalized,
two distinct actors discussing one topic can share diametrically opposed
ideologies with little movement-wide side-effects. This is far from the case
in Instagram infographic activism, where movement participants across the
platform use seemingly connective features to reframe ideologies and resolve
differences in order to sustain consistent movement messaging.

####  5.2.1. Cutting Corners

Instagram infographics are particularly susceptible to misinformation. By
over-summarizing and omitting critical context, Instagram infographics can
serve as a form of movement erasure. A post’s credibility is compromised when
complex issues are underexplained due to Instagram’s 10-slide limit. Hesham
Jarmakani explained why some issues are better saved for more “roomy”
information dissemination mechanisms:

> “It’s very, very hard to try and fit a very, very complex issue into just
> six or seven slides and I personally find it very demoralizing [when
> infographics say things like] ‘here’s everything that’s happened in Syria in
> six or seven slides.’ I feel like it takes away from the severity of the
> situation… It’s very easy, if not necessary, to have to cut corners to try
> and fit it into that infographic.”

When reducing largescale issues that organizers have fought for for years,
infographics can be a disservice to the movements themselves. Zoha Raza
confirmed:

> “You are trying to fit all of the information about a whole subject on a
> small square… Two sentences cannot sum up an entire movement…”

Therefore, infographics that leave out crucial information in an attempt to
compartmentalize rigorous topics can spread misinformation and undermine
communal trust. This is a counterpoint to the bite-sized entry point feature
of Instagram infographics; some exceedingly complex topics are impossible to
pack into simple, bite-sized formats. The affinity for cutting corners with
Instagram infographics creates possibilities for misinformation, compromising
movement credibility and creating internal rifts and ideological disconnects.

####  5.2.2. Preserving Credibility

To combat the aforementioned misinformation concerns, activists use several
strategies to build collective trust and legitimacy, bridging differences to
preserve unified, consistent movement messaging. And yet, they use
personalizable, online features to do so.

Resources.  Carmen Perez mentioned adhering to a specific infographic
structure: a title slide, a definitions slide, arguments slide(s), and always
a sources slide. Mary Celestin similarly put a particular emphasis on sharing
resources, especially with those who question one’s credibility. In response
to people criticizing an effort to remove police from schools, Celestin
explained:

> “We responded by saying, ‘Hey, everyone, we saw some comments of folks
> concerned about school shooters via our demands to remove cops from schools.
> Fear of a school shooting is a valid concern. It is important to understand
> the full scope of this petition. This is not a call for lawlessness in our
> community. This is a call to create new safety measures formed by all
> members of our community. For those who are genuinely curious to learn more
> about police in schools, please check out the following resources.’ And then
> we linked six different sources.”

By including resources, activists ensure that critics cannot undermine their
credibility, prompting participants to trust, follow, and help promote the
ethnic movement. Crucially, this reconciliation tactic relies on the
connective nature of infographics—activists are able to include resources and
establish collective trust due to the connective customizability of the
infographic.

Taking Updates.  Celestin revealed another crucial facet of building
legitimacy:

> “In terms of building trust, it comes from engaging and also being willing
> to take updates… One of my first [Instagram infographic] guides involved
> defunding the [police] budget in San Jose and that involves a lot of fact
> checking and a lot of touching base with people. People would have comments…
> Sometimes we’ve taken it and been like ‘Oh, that was right, that was a mess-
> up on our end.’”

The ability to update an infographic yet again relies on its connective
personalizability and flexibility—no organization or largescale entity must be
consulted by an activist before updating a post. By being willing to improve
one’s stance when presented with new information, ethnic movement leaders are
able to showcase their advocacy is not only based in passion for radical
change, but also a genuine effort to spread truth. In this way, the adaptation
of movement messaging in response to communal pushback exemplifies infographic
activists’ desire to build collective trust using a connective feature.

The Power in the Comments Section.  Zoha Raza emphasized that the Instagram
comments section acts as an inherent fact-checker. With a misinformed
newspaper article, prospective ethnic movement participants cannot critically
analyze or respond to the information presented. The comments section of an
Instagram infographic, however, is likely to contain backlash and critical
commentary in the case of misinformation, provoking viewers not to take the
the faulty graphic at face value. Movement messaging thereby remains
consistent since misinformed infographics are more likely to generate
responses articulating the faults of an infographic, informing viewers that
the graphic disrupts a collective value, ideology, or objective. Individual
commenters rely on individualized decision-making, but the impact of their
aggregated discourse is profoundly collective.

Infographic Inception.  Hesham Jarmakani highlighted a phenomenon which we
label as infographic inception: When ethnic movement activists view a
misinformed infographic, they will often make their own infographics to fact-
check and clarify the original post. Activists often incorporate images of the
original graphic within their own, using fonts, colors, and shapes to
highlight the points they are responding to. In this way, the activists use
the personalizable nature of the infographic to hold the community accountable
and signal to movement participants when an internal dialogue is
counterproductive and disagrees with core movement values.

####  5.2.3. Credibility: Connective and Collective Action

Collective action necessitates the reconciliation of internal disputes in
pursuit of a unified movement front. Instagram infographics threaten ethnic
movement credibility by forcing activists to cut critical information out of
their narrative, undercutting communal trust. However, many New Age ethnic
movement activists have leveraged the customizability of the Instagram
infographic to preserve credibility by taking updates, using comments as a
fact-checker, and responding to faulty infographics with their own.

If infographic activism was purely connective, individual activists would not
make an effort to establish communal trust by exhausting resources to
reconcile their differences—personalized content does not necessitate
movement-wide acknowledgement and acceptance in order to meet its objectives.
Efforts to counter faulty information, signal legitimacy, and remain
accountable suggests that Instagram infographic activism is also collective:
activists exhaust resources in order to bridge differences and preserve
unified movement ideologies. So while Instagram infographics are connective in
that no single organization is mandating the resolution of disputes and
reconciliation tactics utilize connective features, movement participants
themselves exercise collective action by prioritizing movement-wide trust.

###  5.3. Expending Organizational Resources for Collective Transformation

Collective action involves expending organizational resources and coordinating
movement-wide action. Purely connective action does not necessitate
coordination on an organizational scale and therefore lacks the intensive
expenditure of movement-wide resources. Crucially, transformative legislative
and societal change rarely stops at the infographic, but rather operates in
inseparable conjunction with high-resource on-the-ground collective efforts.

####  5.3.1. Isolated Infographic Passivity

The isolated use of Instagram infographics can yield passive movement
involvement. While the physical nature of Second Revolution movements
preserved authenticity among participants, the effortlessness of infographic
engagement can reduce virtual movement efficacy when movement-wide resources
are not expended in on-the-ground efforts.

Physical Movement as a Prerequisite to Material Change.  Billy X. Jennings
outlined the effort discrepancy between virtual and physical movements:

> “You are deliberately doing something… It’s different from just flipping a
> switch or just sharing something. It doesn’t take much consciousness to do
> that… You can be a so-called revolutionary in your house, but we need
> activists. We need people putting theory in practice in the real time… That
> stuff has to be based on struggle. It has to be based on direct activity in
> the streets…”

More specifically, Jennings emphasized that the Black Panther Party required
members to read two hours a day and attend political education classes twice a
week. In this way, the Panther became consciously involved in the movement and
thereby active in its growth:

> “You are the spark. You have to make the flyers. All that direct, hands-on
> contact was what really grew the party legacy.”

Those who invest time, energy, and effort through disobeying authority in the
streets and physically calling for change feel a sense of ownership in
movements. This sense of ownership, in turn, drives longterm commitment,
spirit, and a desire to produce concrete outcomes. In contrast, Gonzalez noted
that when it comes to Instagram infographic activism:

> “I can do this in my chair at home, but not have to leave my home, and that
> in and of itself does not lead to any particular material change.”

The lack of a physical prerequisite within pure virtual movements undercuts
efficacy by eliminating the emotional connection, consciousness, and resultant
action involved in traditional ethnic movements.

A Vehicle for Complacency.  The danger of Instagram infographics is that it
allows those who engage exclusively with the infographic to develop
complacency in their activism, reducing efficacy. Hesham Jarmakani explained:

> “It gives people the excuse to say, ‘Well, if you just read an infographic
> or you just make an infographic, that’s enough work for the day’ and I feel
> like it lowers the bar… You think the activism starts at the infographic and
> that you don’t have to vote yes on Prop 16, you don’t have to go out into
> the protest and protest, you don’t have to donate to Black Lives Matter or
> other organizations when you have the wallet.”

A like button does not indicate true movement involvement or dedication, but
it makes the liker feel as if they have made a valuable contribution,
procuring an infinite cycle of actionless likes and shares. In fact, an
Instagram infographic could be shared hundreds of times without a single real-
world implication. The establishment can only be swayed by concrete actions: A
corrupt politician will remain eternally ignorant to a post trapped within a
social sphere of complacent likers and sharers.

The Like Button as a Deceptor.  Pablo Gonzalez warned of the threat posed by
an infographic’s like button by drawing an analogy to white America in the
Second Revolution era:

> “You have white Americans in the 70s and 80s, who might have said in person,
> ‘I’m against racial violence’ but voting, organizing differently. They
> decided we needed to be jailed… they decided we needed to be bombed… they
> elected Richard Nixon and they furthered and promoted the genocides in
> Southeast Asia and in Central America. And so [white America] became a
> silent majority.”

Just as white America was complicit in the growth of violence,
deindustrialization, and dismantling of the welfare state, a white person
could very well like an infographic about putting an end to racial violence
and proceed to vote ”no” on a key Proposition that uplifts marginalized
communities. In contrast, physical activism circumvents deception by revealing
authentic intentions.

Gonzalez elaborated:

> “Social media can portray one thing and and actually be another because
> where do you find out the complexity of a person, if not through day to day
> in-person interaction when you’re faced with making decisions and having
> conversations… [That’s when we] express how we see the world.”

Overall, by introducing a sense of complacency and acting as a deceptor for
movement participation, Instagram infographics can fall victim to passive
movement involvement, undermining concrete change. Thus, while some New Age
activists identified likes as a metric of infographic success, it is possible
for disingenuous likers to artificially inflate the number of individuals who
took action after engaging with a post. This, to some degree, decreases the
validity of infographic engagement metrics in determining movement impact.
Further, it evidences that connective action in isolation can fall short of
yielding transformative movement output—when the onus is on isolated
individuals to act, they have full jurisdiction over the authenticity of their
virtual movement participation, eliminating the accountability that exists in
physical movements. As a result, infographics that lack tangible, physical
components can fail to achieve movement objectives.

####  5.3.2. The Necessity for Both Information and Action

Ethnic movement activism necessitates a close conjunction of information and
action. Information-sharing educates the community and action allows the
community to take that newfound perspective and apply it to improving society.
Billy X. Jennings best described this relationship:

> “It’s a combination of both. It’s like dissecting a human being. You got a
> lot of parts in there and if you mess with one part, the other part ain’t
> gonna work. Everything is interconnected with something else… Malcolm had
> this theory and a lot of information he was trying to get to the people.
> Okay, Instagram can illuminate some basic facts with graphics. There’s
> nothing wrong with that. But those graphics have to be backed up with
> rallying people to some action…”

If Malcolm X had infographics at his disposal, he might have frictionlessly
spread his message, but for the movement to be just as meaningful, his
participants would need to demonstrate the same initiative as an exclusively
physical setting. Pablo Gonzalez highlighted the fatal flaw of disrupting the
information-action dynamic in favor of social media:

> “Social media defines social movements as solely based on information.
> Social movements are not based on information. Social movements are based on
> an attempt to try to change social and power relations in society… I think
> [Instagram infographics and social media] has been, to some degree,
> effective to spread awareness, but movements aren’t just based on awareness.
> There has to be action.”

Indeed, Billy X. Jennings explained that the Breakfast Program (Collier, 2015)
emerged from fundamental socialist theories shared by the Black Panther Party,
a prime example of how information is only valuable when acted upon. Jennings
explained the outcome of the Panther’s information-action balance:

> “The concrete things that we learned in the party, we were able to put into
> practice and start institutions in the community that exist to this day.”

Ultimately, it is necessary to pair the information dissemination of Instagram
infographics with direct action. Reach only matters when those who are being
reached are applying shared knowledge. Otherwise, that reach serves to be
futile.

####  5.3.3. Transformative Output

There are promising examples of Instagram infographics helping ethnic movement
activists attain tangible legislative changes, suggesting that Instagram
infographics can play a role in transformative movement output when paired
with on-the-ground efforts. Carmen Perez exemplified two instances: (1) Perez
and fellow organizers were able to raise the age of criminal responsibility in
New York by creating infographics with opposing legislators’ images and
contact information, encouraging movement participants to demand change. (2)
Perez and fellow organizers helped the Monte Rosa sisters, whose brother was
killed at the hands of police in Vallejo, to demand justice by crafting
infographics that gave movement participants resources to sign petitions and
call the governor and attorney general. Perez concluded:

> ”The opportunity here is the fact that we’re able to make legislative
> changes by putting pressure on those elected officials we know are not on
> our side and bringing awareness to a broader community versus maybe just
> having a small meeting about it that isn’t available visibly to others…”

In both instances, Perez utilized Instagram infographics to spread crucial
information and mobilize a larger group of people to fight for Black and Brown
communities. Those who were unable to protest in person could still help by
signing petitions, calling legislators, or sharing the infographics
themselves. Mary Celestin similarly used Instagram infographics about how to
contact one’s city council members and join city council meetings to help
eliminate San José Mayor Liccardo’s “Strong Mayor Grab,” which would have
granted him additional powers and extended his term by two years (Wipf and
Plante, 2020).

Broadly, Zoha Raza, Carmen Perez, and Keys of Palestine all often ensure that
their infographics include an action item, such as a shortened URL or a link
to donate. Therefore, Instagram infographics can directly facilitate crucial
legislative strides by bringing more voices to the table and equipping those
voices with avenues of action.

However, each of these movement achievements necessitated that numerous
movement participants utilized the information in the infographic to take
movement-wide collective action. Traditional resource-intensive movement
efforts—bird-dogging, protesting, calling, petitioning—were consistently
utilized. Transformative Instagram infographic activism leverages the
infographic as a personalizable information spreader, but also relies on
tangible high-resource collective initiatives.

####  5.3.4. Examining Transformation Through Black Lives Matter Action-
Oriented Language

Our qualitative findings suggest that action-oriented posting undercuts
complacency by encouraging movement participants to make concrete, high-
resource movement contributions. We sought to determine whether action-
oriented infographics generate a more action-oriented response from movement
participants in comparison to infographics with other focuses. To do so, we
analyzed the comments posted on the Black Lives Matter Instagram page from
2014-2020. We isolated our sample to comments posted no later than 2020 to
remain consistent with our sample of posts—i.e. we are ensuring our dataset
spans 2014-2020. We also restricted our sample to posts which contained
infographics (of which there were 298 with comments sections).

We define Action Words to be words from our Action Keyword Bank and Non-Action
Words to be words which are not in our Action Keyword Bank. Action Comments
are comments containing Action Words. Similarly, Action Infographics are
infographic-containing posts which contain Action Words, while Non-Action
Infographics are infographic-containing posts which do not contain Action
Words.

Table 6. Action Words in Black Lives Matter Instagram Comments for Action vs. Non-Action Infographics | Action Infographics | Non-Action Infographics
---|---|---
Number of Commented Action Words | 5,026 | 6,828
Number of Total Commented Words | 79,921 | 144,129
Action Word Percentage | 6.29% | 4.74%
Number of Action Comments | 2,968 | 4,230
Number of Total Comments | 10,508 | 17,739
Action Comment Percentage | 28.25% | 23.85%
Figure 11. Action Words in Black Lives Matter Instagram Comments for Action
vs. Non-Action Infographics

Table 7. Action Words in Black Lives Matter Instagram Comments By Infographic Action Word Count 313131Rows with 0 posts or 0 comments are omitted. Post Action Words |  Action Comments |  Total Comments |  Action Comment Percentage |  Action Words |  Total Words |  Action Word Percentage
---|---|---|---|---|---|---
0 | 4,230 | 17,739 | 23.85% | 6,828 | 144,129 | 4.74%
1 | 1,018 | 4,007 | 25.41% | 1,660 | 29,956 | 5.54%
2 | 251 | 857 | 29.29% | 399 | 7,135 | 5.59%
3 | 1,054 | 3,528 | 29.88% | 1,870 | 25,420 | 7.36%
4 | 195 | 655 | 29.77% | 310 | 5,558 | 5.58%
5 | 176 | 509 | 34.58% | 335 | 4,660 | 7.19%
6 | 43 | 142 | 30.28% | 66 | 1,262 | 5.23%
7 | 33 | 114 | 28.95% | 71 | 1,198 | 5.93%
9 | 15 | 60 | 25.00% | 22 | 499 | 4.41%
10 | 47 | 136 | 34.56% | 91 | 1,145 | 7.95%
11 | 51 | 172 | 29.65% | 80 | 1,451 | 5.51%
14 | 9 | 32 | 28.13% | 13 | 188 | 6.91%
19 | 55 | 239 | 23.01% | 83 | 994 | 8.35%
Figure 12. Action Words in Black Lives Matter Instagram Comments By
Infographic Action Word Count

Table 6 and Figure 11 showcase the total number of comments and commented
words as well as the number of Action Comments and commented Action Words for
Action Infographics vs. Non-Action Infographics. While only 23.85% of total
comments were Action Comments for Non-Action Infographics, 28.25% of comments
were Action Comments for Action Infographics. In order to account for the fact
that some Action Comments may contain a higher concentration of Action Words
than others, we also calculated these statistics for commented words. While
only 4.74% of total commented words were Action Words for Non-Action
Infographics, 6.29% of commented words were Action Words for Action
Infographics. Action Word percentages aligned with Action Comment percentages
throughout the case study. Overall, our aggregated statistics reveal that
Action Infographics accrue a greater portion of Action Words in the comments
in comparison to Non-Action Infographics.

Additionally, we examined the distribution of these values across the varying
number of Action Words in a post. Table 7 and Figure 12 denote the total
number of comments and commented words as well as the the total number of
Action Comments and commented Action Words, broken up by number of Action
Words present in the infographics of the post. Both Action Words and Action
Comments gradually climbed from lower percentages to higher percentages until
about three to five infographic Action Words, at which point the Action
Comment Percentage and Action Word Percentage fluctuate mildly. We speculate
that a potential reason for the three-to-five word cutoff is that calls to
action exhibit diminishing additional value per word: Surpassing a certain
threshold of Action Words could potentially confuse the infographic’s message,
intent, and next steps, trading off with the added value of more action-
oriented language. When dealing with a small number of infographic Action
Words, however, value is added per word. Notably, our distribution analysis
revealed no significant high-magnitude outliers in percentage for words or
comments, validating the soundness of our aggregated Action vs. Non-Action
statistic.

When infographics contain action-oriented language, they spark a more action-
oriented verbal response from the community. Infographics that call for
transformative change by centering focused action items provoke the community
to act upon, consider, or at the very least discuss playing a role in said
change. So while an individually designed and posted Black Lives Matter Action
Infographic may not necessitate movement-wide resources, the action-oriented
language of such posts elicits high-resource verbal responses to a greater
degree than non-action-oriented posts. Be it discussing petitions, protests,
or donations, community members engage in dialogue that has the potential to
emit output. This output, in turn, expends collective resources and yields
concrete grassroots change. In this way, Action Infographics play a role in
the pipeline from information to action—they inform with the intent of
cultivating transformative conversations and initiatives.

####  5.3.5. Transformation: Connective and Collective Action

If infographics (a) are not paired with physical movements and (b) do not
inform with the intention of explicit material changes in shifting societal
power structures or meeting short-term legislative objectives, they produce
complacency and deception. However, there have been significant instances of
tangible change through Instagram infographics when avenues of direct action
are centralized. As evidenced by Black Lives Matter, action-oriented
infographics can catalyze action-oriented communal responses.

Instagram infographic activism can be futile through a purely connective lens:
individualized action eliminates the authenticity, robustness, and unity of
physical movements. The consistent use of traditional Second Revolution
movement strategies in infographic activism suggests that transformative
Instagram infographic activism relies upon adjacent movement-wide operations
and boots on the ground which definitionally expend organizational resources.
By depending on traditional physical tactics and consuming movement resources,
transformative Instagram infographic activism shares the costs of collective
action. In this way, the connective aspects of Instagram infographic activism
are means to an end—serving as features and perks that bridge information and
action.

##  6\. Discussion and Future Work

Our investigation of Instagram infographics in ethnic movements can bridge
movement technology action frames, serve as a framework for ethnic movement
activists, and cultivate rich future work.

###  6.1. Bridging Action Frames

Our examination of Instagram infographics in ethnic movements showcases that
the integration of digital activism tools into a movement adds complexity and
nuance to action formation dynamics. To perceive and evaluate the action
formations encompassing a tool, features cannot be observed and analyzed in
isolation—they must instead be considered at the application level. In this
paper, we have examined three such application-level Instagram infographic
phenomena: scope for education, reconciliation for credibility, and resource
expenditure for transformative change. Each of these areas reveal important
considerations for technology design.

####  6.1.1. Scope: Maximizing Educational Reach

While Instagram infographics have finite scope due to echo chambers and
internet access constraints, activists have optimized their virtual organizing
using Instagram’s features, borderless nature, and reduction in physical,
schooling, and financial limitations. Therefore, Black Lives Matter’s
infographics have more engagement, traction, and scope. Years ago, Second
Revolution activists centered political education to establish and share core
movement ideologies, objectives, and values. Today, digital movement tools
have facilitated the dispersal of collective movement information (Ince et
al., 2017; Twyman et al., 2017; Stanley, 2020; Siddarth and Pal, 2020;
Tillery, 2019) at an unprecedented scale (Laer and Aelst, 2010; Selander and
Jarvenpaa, 2016; Enjolras et al., 2013). Instagram infographics have taken
this further by becoming a New Age documentation of movement education,
rippling throughout wider communities with a fraction of the Second Revolution
friction. By patching together otherwise fragmented communities for under a
unified message, Instagram infographic activism uses connective
customizability to breed collective action.

While digital activism tools with educational objectives for activism can be
connective in their personalizability—an individual ultimately has the
jurisdiction over the design, content, and post—they can also become
collective as Instagram infographics have when integrated into a movement. The
subsequent responsibility to deliver core movement messages amplifies the
significance of addressing the tensions between coexisting facets of
connective and collective action. For example, it is vital to reach and
educate all community members by creating accessible information dissemination
mediums. In the case of Instagram infographics, the collective uses of the
tool exacerbate the need to combat the exclusion of offline communities and
continue designing for lower literacy levels. Another area that challenges
infographics is including those with visual impairments whose screen-readers
cannot pick up text from images, particularly when the personalizability of
infographics prioritizes aesthetics over readability (Arum, 2017). When
impressed with the responsibility of educating community members and
delivering political education, digital activism tools cannot be designed
merely to optimize for individualized, low-barrier information dispersal. They
must be designed for the need at the movement integration level: educating
community members.

####  6.1.2. Credibility: Reconciling for Trust

Because they reduce the barrier to entry of content creation and distribution,
Instagram infographics allow overconsolidated content and misinformation to
detract from movement trust. In response, New Age ethnic movement activists
have curated mechanisms to preserve credibility and maximize the scope-level
benefits of infographics while instilling trust in movement participants,
including sharing resources, taking community updates, engaging in the
comments section, and creating response infographics. Connective action
centers the individual—its beauty is in its personalizability. Individuals
post what they believe, advocate for what they need to, and do not rely on
movement-wide compatibility with their belief systems. The resultant
misinformation (Alrubaian and AL-Qurishi, 2019; Maddock et al., 2015; Arif et
al., 2016; Liao and Shi, 2013) and desire for information credibility
(Castillo et al., 2011; Gupta et al., 2014; Vaidya et al., 2019; Mitra et al.,
2017; Starbird and Palen, 2012) has been of keen interest. When tools are
integrated into movements, however, we see a need for the reconciliation of
clashing movement information. New Age activists utilizing Instagram
infographics have demonstrated a movement-wide need to resolve internal
differences and build trust, a far from individualistic phenomenon. In
establishing an implicit system of checks and balances using connective
features, activists using Instagram infographics prioritize the development
and preservation of a consistent, trusted collective message.

The prioritization of credibility invites us to consider activist-level and
community-level reconciliation in digital activism design. In the case of
Instagram infographics, ethnic movement activists presented a need to engage
with one another and their communities in order to establish movement-wide
legitimacy. This discussion inspires the exploration of ways in which virtual
activists can congregate, discuss, debate, and collaborate effortlessly. In
addition, it raises the importance of creating features for community members
to not only respond to activist content, but for their concerns to reach
activists in a way that serves community interests without overwhelming
recipients. The use of connective features such as comments and post-update
flexibility urge us to preserve customizability and low-barrier information
sharing when creating reconciliation tools. Finally, it invites us to deeply
consider ways in which activists can garner communal trust and build
credibility with community members. Instagram infographic activists have
presented a desire to reconcile activist differences to establish unity,
warranting exploration of technology design that leverages personalizability
to brew collective movement messaging and a trusted unified front.

####  6.1.3. Transformation: Facilitating High-Resource Change

Infographics that spread information without the underlying objective of
action can yield performative activism, complacency, and disingenuous
participation, undermining movement efficacy. Fortunately, when activists pack
their infographics with action-items, they elicit a more action-based
response, as showcased by the Black Lives Matter Instagram account. Ethnic
movement activists that centralize tangible action items are able to undercut
complacency by arming their audience with the tools they need to spark change
beyond the infographic. Indeed, transformative output is garnered by the close
combination of information and action and researches have evaluated and
debated the role of technology in physical movement efforts (Donovan, 2018;
Rotman et al., 2011; Massung et al., 2013; Earl and Kimport, 2013; Gerbaudo,
2012; Theocharis et al., 2015). Activists can inform and inspire community
members via Instagram infographics, but tangible output is the result of
beyond-the-graphic organizing, protesting, and mobilization—all exhausting
movement-wide resources. While connective action does not expend
organizational resources, transformative Instagram infographic activism has
been paired with definitionally collective resource-intensive efforts.

While Instagram infographics and other digital activism tools can
theoretically remain fully virtual and resourceless, the necessity of acting
beyond the infographic is introduced when considering how infographics
integrate into preexisting movements. This invites us to design tools that
bridge the gap between connective information-sharing capabilities of social
media activism and the ensuing high-resource efforts that happen on the
ground. We must explore how we can fortify the pipeline between receiving
information about a movement on social media and taking high-resource
transformative action. How can we ensure that users do not stop at the action-
oriented commenting and follow through beyond the infographic? Further, we
should explore whether technology can directly facilitate the high-resource,
transformative aspects of movements. Information dissemination and discourse
have been facilitated by social media tools, but can (and should) technology
play a role in output-level engagements such as physical events and protests?
This collective need for resource-intensive efforts in social movements
encourages us to explore innovative methods of reducing movement cost in the
best interest of activists and served communities without compromising
activist values. The collective nature of high-resource efforts in Instagram
infographic activism urges us to consider the bounds, limits, and non-
information-based roles that technology can play in movements to benefit high-
resource efforts.

Overall, virtual activism tools must be evaluated at the integration level. In
the case of Instagram infographic activism, the marriage of connective and
collective action raises rich design implications for activism-focused
technology design.

###  6.2. Design Implications for Ethnic Movement Activists

There are also infographic-level initiatives that activists can pursue to
account for the connective and collective nature of transformative infographic
activism. In this section, we discuss our findings to derive design
implications for ethnic movement activists who seek to balance connective
customizability and collective momentum.

####  6.2.1. Designing for Scope

We provide the following scope-enhancing design recommendations: (1) Activists
can include visual attention-grabbers such as color schemes across posts,
cartoon graphics, and vibrant palettes. (2) Activists can tag partner
organizations, influencers, and fellow activists and should consider sending
them the infographic to post to their own feeds. Building partnerships
facilitates breaking into alternate social media bubbles to establish
collective thought. (3) Activists should determine whether they prioritize
objective success metrics and reach, or strict adherence to values and
personal messaging. Only then should the activist adapt content based upon
likes, comments, event attendance, or story reposts. (4) Activists should use
infographics as an entry point to the core topics of their movement and
provide valuable introductions with avenues to learn more and increase
involvement. (5) Activists should formulate supplementary non-infographic
strategies to counteract the echo chamber phenomenon and overcome
accessibility issues, such as outreach to older age groups and houseless
communities that lack internet access.

####  6.2.2. Designing for Credibility

We provide the following credibility-enhancing design recommendations: (1)
Activists should be cautious when summarizing movement information so as to
avoid cutting corners and excluding valuable information. Specific topics are
better for infographics, while more hefty topics are better to introduce in
the infographic, but guide movement participants to further resources, rather
than oversummarizing. (2) Activists should clearly include resources in the
infographic and caption. (3) Activists should monitor the comments section and
be willing to take updates from the community should there be an infographic
error and clarify these updates in the caption. (4) Activists can optionally
engage in infographic inception when another infographic is spreading
egregious misinformation about the movement.

####  6.2.3. Designing for Transformation

We provide the following transformation-enhancing design recommendations: (1)
Activists should include action-oriented elements such as petitions, phone
numbers, protest information, etc. Links (preferably with shortened URLs)
should be included whenever possible to make taking action seem accessible and
efficient, yet impactful. (2) Activists should strive for a balance between
informative infographics and action-oriented infographics to maintain the
information-action equilibrium. (3) Activists should centralize offline
strategies, such as protests, bird-dogging, and social work to counteract
complacency and deception, and further curate tangible changes.

###  6.3. Future Work

In addition to the technology design implications in 6.1, there are several
avenues that can allow us to more deeply explore the impact of Instagram
infographics on ethnic movements. Text analysis of the comments section can be
used to gauge whether infographics are more prone to misinformation-indicative
responses, revealing the objective indicators of whether an infographic is
likely to be faulty. Our case study could be expanded to a larger group of
ethnic movement Instagram accounts as accessing a broader dataset would allow
us to extract quantitative results that apply to ethnic movement activism as a
whole. Computer vision platforms that can identify shapes, images, color
schemes, text, or graphics would increase the objectivity of infographic
detection. A related design-oriented study expanding our design implications
could more intricately examine specific infographic strategies and their
success levels through user interviews and engagement experiments, providing a
succinct, instruction-oriented guide for infographic production. A study of
content-level engagement could delve into the ”slides” feature of
Instagram—determining whether participants explore content all slides or
depart after a catchy header or title. In order to evaluate the efficacy of
action-oriented posts, strategies to track and measure action taken by
movement participants beyond the comments section via petitions, phone calls,
protest attendance, etc. could be explored. Finally, while infographics have
most definitely been used by ethnic movement activists, they are also
accessible to ethnic movement oppressors. Future work could explore
infographic content moderation by considering how we can avoid malicious uses
of Instagram infographics.

##  7\. Conclusion

Our comparative interviews of ethnic movement activists and data analysis of
the Black Lives Matter Instagram underscore three ways in which Instagram
infographics embody a union of connective and collective action: increased
scope for education, reconciliation for credibility, and high-resource efforts
for transformative change. While personalizable and low-resource in isolation,
the connective features of Instagram infographics have been leveraged to
establish a movement-wide front: Yesterday’s newspaper education and
discourse-rich conferences are today’s Instagram infographics. As such,
activism technologies need not embody singular action formations: by
evaluating Instagram infographics at the movement integration level, our work
inspires the design of infographics and activism technology that centralize
the marriage of connective and collective action. When connective digital
activism tools are used collectively, they must be designed as such: to serve
collectives.

###### Acknowledgements.

Thank you to the ethnic movement activists who gave us invaluable insights and
made this work possible. Special thanks to Emily Pedersen, Wesley Deng, and
Ishan Balakrishnan for their continued mentorship, advice, and encouragement.

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