Don’t share? It doesn’t mean you don’t care

‘God,’’ said a white friend of mine at a party on the weekend, ‘‘if I have any friends who haven’t posted about Black Lives Matter for the last few weeks then I’m unfollowing. Your silence is part of the problem!’’

I stared silently out the window at that point, wondering if I should bring up that I hadn’t posted about it at all. I’ve written about it, as I tend to do with all complicated and important issues I’m mulling over. I’ve written letters to the police, to MPs, I’ve donated and started reading a lot of history on our own race relations. But I was one of those people my friend was raging against, whose Instagram feeds remained conspicuously empty of BLM posts.

Now, to anyone in Gen X and older, they’d probably listen to that and think, ‘‘What’s the big deal?’’ You can believe in something and not plaster it wall to wall on your feeds, right?

Besides, as I argued the other week, actions speak louder than words. And certainly louder than a few Instagram stories or misused black squares.

But to anyone who is a millennial or younger, the act of not posting about something holds far more significance. It’s why brands with younger customers have been posting about BLM, with patchy success, because they know we see silence as a statement. And not a good one.

From our generation’s perspective, we post about everything. It’s an act of daily life as normal as using a Hop card or sending a voice note on WhatsApp. We post our latte, our laser hair removal, and last week I had someone post her anal bleaching. (I’m serious. Although, after some heavily debated discussion between friends, we decided that was our line of decency. Brazilians? A-OK to talk about online. Buttholes? Not so much.)

And in this context, where posting is so ubiquitous and continuous, the act of not posting about something is so strange. In fact, silence becomes suspicious. Why aren’t you saying anything?

Hence how you end up with viewpoints like my friend at the party, who is far from alone in seeing all social media silence as apathy. It’s incredibly common right now to assume that if you’re not posting your support for BLM, then you’re either indifferent or actually against it.

This is the part of social media culture that I hate the most: the incessant assumption that if you’re not overtly displaying your support for a cause then you’re against it.

Now, obviously there are a lot of people who say nothing online because they don’t care. But conversely, that doesn’t mean that everyone who says nothing online is apathetic. (Nor does it mean that those who do say something are genuine – again, look at all those brands trying to sell to young people.)

In fact, there are a lot of people who don’t post for reasons that have nothing to do with indifference. And if we’re openly disdainful of these genuine, albeit quiet, supporters, then we miss out on galvanising a huge swath of people who do want change.

There are many reasons you might not be posting. Maybe you’re trying not to take up the space of black and POC’s voices. Maybe you don’t see social media posting as being as important as donating. Perhaps you’re part of that subset of humans (more common among Boomers and X, but still present in Millennials and Z) who are silent supporters.

These are people who believe firmly in an issue but won’t talk about it openly because they don’t ever talk about their internal emotional landscape. (But are assiduous letter writers, donors and readers.)

Maybe you’re confused about how to talk about it without being seen as virtue signalling/saying the wrong thing, so you just say nothing. Or maybe you’re just like me, who’s inherently very cautious about posting anything important on Instagram because there’s so little space for deep discussion.

So there are a whole lot of people out here who want change, yet don’t post. And we shouldn’t be shaming them and implying they don’t care. That’s probably just going to turn people from potential supporters to grumpy and resentful.

What we need is to find a way to bring together the deeply powerful, vocal, social media-savvy change-makers with the quieter supporters who’re happy to do non-public, equally powerful acts of change too.

Otherwise, we won’t get anywhere.

We post about everything. It’s an act of daily life as normal as using a Hop card or sending a voice note on WhatsApp.

DIYAH PERA/THE CW Kiwi actor KJ Apa has been slated for being too silent online and not posting about Black Lives Matter. But we shouldn’t assume that means he’s indifferent to the cause, argues Verity Johnson.