In the last 48 hours, I’ve seen several people turn to one social network, Twitter, to vent their frustrations about another one: Facebook.
In the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which data from over 50 million Facebook profiles were secretly mined for voter insights, it sparked what some have called a #DeleteFacebook movement.
But not in Indian Country.
Deleting Facebook would be like pulling the plug at the party, rendering total darkness and, what’s more, deafening silence (where there’s already plenty of that).
And it’s not just Indian Country that would feel the extreme disconnect in a Facebook-less scenario. The entire Indigenous world would reel from its absence. To be sure, the social network has done more for bolstering the modern Indigenous rights agenda than perhaps any other platform of our time.
My ancestors, during the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, performed what my colleague Mark Trahant describes as one of the earliest demonstrations of social media: a foot race of sorts. Delivering coded messages literally delivered in strands of yucca rope tied in knots, runners crossed the desert alerting other tribal communities of the coming of brutal Spanish colonizers. Each knot effectively communicated to a coalition of Pueblo defenders. They organized and carried out a successful army defeat.
Today, tribal communities rally around the same cause: to protect Indigenous life and land.
Facebook is the yucca rope.
For instance, the Navajo Nation has recently turned to the social network to monitor those who have gone missing from the reservation. Despite other databases designed to track the disappeared, such as the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, it’s Facebook that tribal officials believe is a more effective way of broadcasting information about those who have vanished, often under urgent circumstances.
In fact, community by tribal community, Facebook delivers in times of today’s most galvanizing needs. From extreme rates of violence against Indigenous women to environmental battles like Bear’s Ears, Indian Country has used Facebook to help close gaps of injustice one post at a time.
Nowhere was this more true than at Standing Rock.
On April 1, 2016, Joye Braun, a tribal citizen of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe, pitched the first teepee on the borderlands of the Standing Rock reservation. Five days later, Facebook live was unveiled to the world. The rest is history.
Standing Rock is what ultimately led me to end more than a decade of resisting Facebook — a true holdout based largely from concerns of an anticipated security breach like the one we’re confronting now. But I no longer care. Because Facebook, for better or worse, is where Indian Country thrives, delivering rough draft to the authentic Indigenous narrative in a way that so few other platforms do.
“When we don’t have political might, then it is really dark for every community and nation coz [sic] no power to tell the truth,” said Arjun Chakma, in a Facebook Messenger conversation with me last night.
His day was just getting started as mine was winding down. A young Indigenous mango farmer living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh — easily one of the most militarized regions of all of Southeast Asia — Chakma had called me using Facebook, of course, his only means of digital communication. Our messaging was carried over from all that we still had left to say after we both hung up.
It was the first time we had communicated since we last saw each other on the banks of his jungle village in Hajachara, 2014.
#DeleteFacebook? Not. Even. Close.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
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