Tech and social media corporations have come out practically unanimously in support of the fight against racial inequality and police brutality, even though many of them allow content that directly goes against the justice for which people are protesting.
As the nation mourns the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others at the hands of corrupt police officers, one thing people can't help but do is go online and inquire about how other people perceive these events. For some, how companies and celebrities respond to police brutality helps people determine where they'll spend their money. This phenomenon has created a strange environment in which seeing a major corporation post about how it supports the Black Lives Matter movement instantly triggers both elation that a large, visible platform is willing to speak out about a cause, and a cynical feeling that companies have to speak in support of these endeavors for fear of being taken to task by the masses on social media.
When it comes to YouTube, Twitter, and Google, it's even harder to take their pro-BLM comments to heart. The latter is a massive company with its hands literally in the pockets of most of the world, in the form of the Android smartphone OS. If the internet is "the information superhighway", Google is the road on which that information travels. Many see the company changing a portion of its homepage to reflect support for Black Lives Matter for one day as literally the least it could do. In fact, Google could have done so at any point in the last decade of viral videos showing police killing unarmed suspects. It could also facilitate support of the many organizations fighting these battles, or help directly in any of the dozens of societal issues across the globe.
Twitter and YouTube Are Accused of Hypocrisy
One issue with Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and other social media services speaking out about supporting #BLM is that they're all platforms that allow racist content. Direct hate speech goes against the terms of most platforms, but these sites are still breeding grounds for racism. People use YouTube to promote the alt-right's views on a consistent basis. Everyone has seen Facebook posts supporting the idea that black men are thugs. When Mark Zuckerberg, perhaps the most prominent figure in tech today, says he doesn't think social media platform owners have a responsibility to keep misinformation from spreading on their own pages, that indirectly helps anyone who wants to leverage anti-equality sentiments to sell a product or win an election.
Twitter has finally started to show signs that it cares about the people using it, as the website labeled an inaccurate statement from President Trump as such last week. However, even this is another case of a company doing the very least. Donald Trump and other politicians post things that go against Twitter's terms on an almost weekly basis, and will likely never be banned or suspended as "normal" people would because Twitter thrives off being the megaphone for a world leader. Even as Twitter changes its profile image to reflect support of Black Lives Matter, Trump is using the platform to condemn protesting and support more aggression from law enforcement.
These gestures from corporations are positive, and they go a longer way toward normalizing human decency than people give them credit for. However, with this much power, companies could take more than just small, symbolic gestures. Until that happens, they shouldn't be surprised when the internet bashes them in the comments.
Source: Google, Twitter