The Milk Tea Alliance
The formation of the online protest movement the Milk Tea Alliance in 2020 was enabled by the algorithmic platform affordances of international social networks. Twitter’s hashtag search function and its trending topics allowed for the visibility and connection of activists across jurisdictions. When Chinese trolls jumped the Great Firewall and began attacking two Thai celebrities in 2020, the usual techniques of the ‘wumao’ (fifty-cent army) and ‘little pinks’ (female netizens), were employed. These groups proceeded to ‘flood the zone’ with antagonistic comments, creating a volatile and hostile environment for the celebrities and anyone posting on the same issue. Thai netizens saw the spike in traffic on their social media and joined the battle. When it inevitably descended into name-calling and nationalistic taunts, the Chinese troll army began to target what they thought was a weakness - insulting the Thai Government and the King. The young and savvy Thai netizens neutered these textual attacks with self-deprecating humour by agreeing with them about how corrupt their leaders were. The spread of this flame war to Taiwan and Hong Kong created solidarities across borders and was enabled due to Twitter’s international reach.
Algorithmic Cultures
In the early days of the development of the internet, there was a sense of collaboration and camaraderie. The open-source nature of the precursor to the internet – ARPANET, generated a culture where sharing and problem-solving were the key ethos. (Lemonaki, 2020) This early conceptualisation of the internet – decentralised (in the way that packeted information is transferred), collaborative (across distances and jurisdictions) and leaderless (teams working on discrete units of problems) presents a solid model for communication and activation of social movements.
As the internet has slowly colonised our way of life, capitalism has, in turn, colonised the internet. Automating such a vast data network has been delegated to complex computational algorithms that control what we see and influence how we interact. (Striphas, 2015) Algorithmic culture thrives on speed, engagement and clicks, which should in theory be beneficial for social movement momentum. However, the goal of these algorithms is to continue to drive interaction as a means to an end. As Mike Watson suggests “Internet corporations don’t care what you do, so long as you give them data” (Watson, 2022, p. 13) and data capitalism only profits the large tech companies and their shareholders (Fisher, 2009). In this sort of environment, social media campaigns can burn bright and then dissipate as new trending stories enter people’s feeds.
In the case of this inciting incident for the Milk Tea Alliance most of the People’s Republic of China’s public saw none of the internet battle, due to internal control of their own network. The PRC’s internet is automatically filtered by blocking words, images or people, whilst trending topics that gain too much traction are shut down manually by technicians (An Mina & Wang, 2021). For some algorithmic cultures, state power is as important a controlling factor as the market.
How to enable decentralised, collaborative and leaderless movements through the online space remains a challenge for social movements, especially when this level of speed, distraction and control is built into the system algorithmically.
An Mina, X., & Wang, X. (2021). The Great Shopping Mall: The market nationalist logic of Chinese social media. Retrieved from https://knightcolumbia.org/blog/the-great-shopping-mall-the-market-nationalist-logic-of-chinese-social-media
Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Hampshire, UK: John Hunt Publishing.
Lemonaki, D. (2020). A Brief History of the Internet – Who Invented It, How it Works, and How it Became the Web We Use Today. Retrieved from https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/brief-history-of-the-internet/
Striphas, T. (2015). Algorithmic Culture. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 18(4-5), 395-412. doi:10.1177/1367549415577392
Watson, M. (2022). The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School Foresaw Capitalist Realism and What To Do About It. Hampshire, UK: John Hunt Publishing.