Trust in the System for Indigenous Social Media Users?

It’s finally here – the 2019 Association of Internet Researchers conference has begun on my home turf at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre in Brisbane. We begin with a keynote by Professor Bronwyn Carlson, who opens by highlighting the continuing digital divides experienced by Indigenous Australians – while social media platforms are increasingly popular with these communities, access is largely via mobile technologies, and unevenly distributed across regions and age groups.

Bronwyn’s work has long focussed on the uses of social media by Indigenous Australians, and increasingly also on help-seeking activities on social media platforms. This year’s conference theme is Trust in the System, and this is especially relevant also to Indigenous users of digital and social media platforms. How might Indigenous users understand ‘trust in the system’? Trust is a contentious term that embodies and disembodies Indigenous experience in the last 250 years; trust in data, online archives, and information on Indigenous peoples is not guaranteed, and many such technologies, online as well as offline, have been used historically to harm Indigenous peoples.

At the same time, there has also been a growth in Indigenous online activism, since at least the rise of the Zapatista movement in Mexico in the 1990s. More recently, almost every aspect of everyday life has been shaped in some form by digital and social media technologies, at least for communities who have had access to them. Remaining digitally connected with each other and the world is now normal, and this is now true also for Indigenous peoples, for whom connecting with community and seeking support may be especially important.

Trust in the system then occurs when we seize technology for our own ends, and use it to seek justice. This means infiltrating systems and forcing them to incorporate the perspectives of Indigenous peoples – as the Sioux people of North America did with their #NoDAPL campaign against an oil pipeline through their lands, for example. State violence against these people was documented widely through social media – yet law enforcement organisations also used this material to identify protesters, and online supporters in turn disrupted these efforts by mass check-ins to the movement’s Facebook pages.

In Australia, the #SOSBlakAustralia hashtag generated a similar visibility for Indigenous issues, galvanised by the Western Australian government’s aim to forcibly close remote Indigenous communities. This generated a strong online protest movement, including Australian and international celebrity support – and it eventually stopped the closure plans. Subsequent activities organised major rallies in the largest Australian cities to highlight injustice against Indigenous peoples, and this again generated and sustained a global audience even in the face of indifference or attacks from mainstream Australian media outlets.

Such efforts seek to renegotiate colonial and colonising power as it continues to be embedded also in digital platforms. Online as much as offline there continue to be demands for Indigenous activists to ‘prove’ their Indigeneity, while other prominent Indigenous people are regularly exposed to racist abuse on social media platforms. While there are provisions in place to report and remove such content, in order to give users the impression that such platforms care and can be trusted, the experience of Indigenous people is that this rarely if ever happens, that ‘community standards’ are enforced very unevenly, and that in spite of constant lip-service to diversity in the workplace few of such platforms have any Indigenous staff in their moderation teams. Such content generates significant mental trauma for Indigenous social media users, of course. This, as well as the unpoliced transmission of Indigenous knowledge online, can be understood as a form of neo-colonialism.

Indigenous women are especially at the forefront of social media activism, but this also exposes them especially strongly to online abuse and even physical violence. Indigenous activists therefore live on the edge, online and in social media platforms. The idea of trust as a techno-emotion does not speak to them in was that are congruent with their histories. Trust in any system is historically unrealistic and dangerous and requires scrutiny and supervision. But they are not simply passive subjects of power, but their own agents. They find trust in the development of their own online identities and techniques – one such site is IndigenousX, which is perhaps Australia’s most successful online initiative with presences on Twitter and elsewhere. Others include The Yarning Circle, a closed group on Facebook for Indigenous people.

What is trust, then? The western philosophical and historical perspective only gets us so far, and largely relies on white male thinkers. It needs to be juxtaposed with precolonial Indigenous knowledge and philosophy, where trust is understood in similar yet different ways. In colonial situations, trust is rarely established in the first contact; even if it is manifest in the first point of contact, it is regularly destroyed through the uneven power relations of colonisation. It continues to be undermined by the rise of populist and partisan regimes that continue to enshrine inequality, sometimes informed by white supremacist ideologies.

Indigenous people using social media technologies, then, must seize the means of production and remake them to suit their own needs. This conflicts with hostile demands to ‘get over’ past injustices and self-censor their online activities, especially in relation to their Indigeneity – to hide their Indigenous identity and blend into colonial culture in order to avoid the potential for abuse.

Indigenous trust, by contrast means trust in elders, in kinship relations, in traditional law, in capacity for pleasure, fun, enjoyment, and humour, in traditional trading economies, in stewardship for the land, in science and knowledge, and in a gendered system of social relations that acknowledges the strengths of women, men, and gender-diverse individuals. Trust in this knowledge system is not based on competition but collaboration; this does not imply an absence of conflict, but trust has proven to be a survival mechanism for Indigenous cultures. This has been disrupted and thrown into turmoil by 250 years of colonisation, and digital and social media technologies also afford an opportunity for healing and reconnection. Racism, online and offline, has dire consequences for Indigenous people – but there are also substantial benefits from online help-seeking between Indigenous social media users.

Social media activities of this form seek to sidestep mistrust or distrust, and establish or regain trust amongst participants. This means creating a system of trust – a form of separatism online where trust in the system is heavily weighted to Indigenous participants and their allies: a space of safety where Indigenous peoples can live, love, and heal.