Protesting in the Streets of Instagram

Instagram, much like Twitter, is a vital site of social movement documentation and activist possibility. This image-sharing social media platform functions as a digital neighborhood populated with digital “citizens” who utilize its many avenues of photo presentation for a variety of purposes: selfies and feminist-self love, memes, marketing, and the sharing and preservation of one’s travels, one’s food, one’s life. But like physical streets, the digital “streets” of Instagram are also occasionally filled with protest. Protesters use Instagram to geotag photos of protest with the real world address where the protest occurred, thus indexing protest images alongside more mundane photos that are geotagged with the same location. Geotag archives for popular protest sites such as the Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles simultaneously visualize daily activities, weapons and police officers, and protest (protest against the police, state-violence, and racism, but also rallies in support of the police, the state, and the current presidential administration). This essay explores how Instagram geotags allow us to construct a “digitally networked public sphere” and how we might use those geotag archives as extensions of our physical presence when protesting police violence.

There are many detailed histories and case studies on the use of Twitter in protests, social movements, and activism, but little attention has been paid to Instagram as a site of social movement documentation and activist possibility.
Just as real world locations have been swarmed by hundreds, sometimes thousands of bodies during protests, so too has Instagram been inundated with images of these protest swarms.In addition photos appearing in Instagram user timelines, the geotag archives associated with popular protest locations are filling up with images of protest as well.Geotag information on Instagram appears sandwiched between a user's photo and their username when the user opts to tag their photo with geographically identifying information (figure 1).Those geotagged photos are then indexed by location and can be relocated via the search bar (figure 2) or via clicking on a geotag as it appears on a user's Instagram post.If you search for the geotag of a popular protest site, you will find a variety of images of that location, many of which will be protest related.
(https://adanewmedia.org/wp- This IRL (in real life)/online distinction also applies to Instagram geotag archives, which, rooted in a particular geographically locatable address, can accommodate any image captured at that address, as well as any other image (be it an image captured elsewhere, a screen shot, a digital flier, etc), as long as that image is geotagged and therefore indexed as belonging to the physical address associated with the geotag.In both instances-Twitter hashtags and Instagram geotags-there is a decided difference between the physical space (Ferguson in their example and LAPD HQ in mine) and the digital space (#Ferguson and LAPD HQ geotag) constructed using an indexing mechanism such as a hashtag or geotag, wherein the digital space is vastly more expansive because it can contain that which is outside of its physical boundaries.modeling or posing for the camera, in addition to images of police officers on the job (figure 3).The LAPD HQ geotag is small enough, however, that it does not require much scrolling before users can find many more protest photos, some related to the August 12th  Along with past protest photos, activists also sometimes include photos that are current calls to action for the community, using the geotag to announce protests at the geotagged location in advance of the action so that anyone checking the geotag can see in the recently posted photos that a protest will take place (figure 5).Additionally, not all bodies can take to the streets for reasons related to accessibility and disability, but This hijacking strategy in the world of lifestyle bloggers revolves around establishing and maintaining a social media following via hashtags, but activist users can achieve similar patronage to their accounts by hijacking geotags.Activists desiring to draw attention to their messages can post their content under highly trafficked geotags (such as the geotag for Los Angeles or any major city or popular location), and users who navigate to that geotag for any reason can then see and potentially follow the content and activist accounts they discover in that geotag archive.The geotags for IRL protest sites do not have to serve as the only geotags populated with protest imagery.Activists can tag protest photos with any number of geotags, which would cause protest imagery to appear in a variety of digital locations, regardless of whether that image was captured at the corresponding IRL address.
Hijacking geotag archives, then, can be one way of shaping the conversation around certain locations, whether or not they are protest sites in the real world.Alternatively,  2. I use the term "archive" in this essay to describe collections of images that are indexed under geotag metadata, because Instagram itself uses the term "archive" to describe images collected a single organizing principle (i.e. a user's old photos that the user does not want to delete but that the user does not want displayed on their profile can be accessed by viewing one's "archive").The use of "archive" on Instagram and in this essay, then, does not adhere to professional uses or conceptions of the word, and the reader should not conflate a collection of Instagram images organized under a single hashtag or geotag with archives proper, which are "collections of records, material and immaterial, analog and digital (which, from an archival studies perspective, is just another form of the material), the institutions that steward them, the places where they are physically located, and the processes that designate them as "archival"' (Caswell).
3. Photos already include geotag information in their metadata, but Instagram does not list this information publicly unless the user opts to post it.

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Figure 3. Screenshot of Instagram mobile application, December 20, 2017 photos that document the more mundane daily occurrences at the geotagged location.
Figure 4. Screenshot of Instagram mobile application, December 20, 2017 Figure 5. Screenshot of Instagram mobile application, December 20, 2017 Streets of Instagram -Ada New Media https://adanewmedia.org/2018/11/issue14-pearl/ 10/14 protestors can continually populate the geotags of protest sites such as that of the LAPD HQ with images of protest, even if the date of capture of those images does not align with the posting date.Protestors could use this activity to ensure that the digital space of LAPD HQ is continually occupied by digital protestors (though digital photographs of protest imagery), regardless of where or when the image was created.Protestors can and do also use this geotag to post announcements notifying other users of upcoming protests at the geotag's IRL location.Anti-racist and anti-police protests are not the only images that make their way into Instagram geotag archives.In addition to anti-white supremacist messages in LAPD HQ's geotag, there are also images of a pro-Trump rally occurring in the same location but on a different day.Because the digital streets of Instagram are capable of holding many temporally disparate images, these protests images are not only in conversation with the more mundane images around them, but they are in conversation with each other (figures 6 & 7).To find the protest images of August 12, 2017 in the LAPD HQ geotag, one must first scroll past a small collection of images of Trump supporters brandishing many American flags.Bonilla and Rosa address a similar phenomenon of conflicting intentions when they detail the possible uses of the #Ferguson hashtag: hashtags have the intertextual potential to link a broad range of tweets on a given topic or disparate topics as part of an intertextual chain, regardless of whether, from a given perspective, these tweets have anything to do with one another.Thus, a tweet in support of Ferguson protestors and a tweet in support of Officer Darren Wilson could both be coded and filed under Ferguson.Moreover, a tweet about racial disparity in Missouri, such as "racism lives here," and one about a night out on the town in St. Louis could both be marked #STL… This range of uses of #Ferguson, which encompasses both prevailing and emergent scripts, demonstrates the importance of considering perspective and function in analyzing intertextual links between tweets.(5)To visualize protest at LAPD HQ is to visualize these very kinds of 'prevailing and emerging scripts' simultaneously.Accompanying the documentation of organized demonstrations against white supremacy requires we also face visualizations of support of white supremacy via the Trump demonstrators and via the everyday images and symbols of systemic injustice: the police headquarters itself.

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Images of the 1992 LA riots can be seen at the following website, along with photographs of other protests such as those centered around the Viet Nam War: http://photofriends.org/tag/lapd-headquarters/ 5. Protests moved from the Parker Center to 100 W 1st Street.6. 2015 is the most recent thorough demographic data available.7. A note about algorithms and content moderation: Geotag archives seemingly escape the algorithms of live Instagram timelines, so an algorithm does not dictate if you can see a photo in a geotag archive or not (as far as I know), but content moderation does.Per the Electronic Frontier Foundation, 'What people can say on the Internet is The real world LAPD HQ is informed by its context in the urban space of downtown Los Angeles, whereas the digital LAPD HQ is actively constructed by Instagram users who assign images to its geotag archive.But, as Bonilla and Rosa point out, 'recognizing that hashtags [or geotags] can only ever offer a limited, partial, and filtered view of a social world does not require abandoning them as sites of analysis.Rather, we must approach them as what they are: entry points into larger and more complex worlds' (7).It is these complex worlds, constructed simultaneously as online and offline, that interest me in regards to my particular case study.In order to most effectively highlight the functions of protest imagery in these archives, I will use the example of a 2017 protest that occurred at the real world LAPD HQ and that continues to survive in the digital construction of that space via its Instagram geotag archive.When you visit the geotag for LAPD Headquarters on Instagram, the image at the top of the page is a map with a pin dropped in the geotagged location.Underneath the map is a series of nine photos that represent the 'Top Posts' for that geotag.It is unclear howInstagram determines these Top Posts.Sometimes the top nine are photos with a high number of likes, but other times the likes seem disproportionately low compared to other photos in the geotag archive.As of December 21, 2017, one of the photos in the not about the general public, many of whom do not use the Instagram platform.This means that the digital construction of LAPD HQ as a space is dictated by the digital publics (i.e.Instagram users) who use that geotag, while the real world LAPD HQ is a space potentially inhabited by any number of civilians, whether or not they use Instagram.Though, because my case study is examining images more so than it is examining Instagram's user base, I am still interested in the visualization of bodies during protest, even if not all of those bodies are Instagram users.So while the digital [6] 2/27/2021 Protesting in the Streets of Instagram -Ada New Media https://adanewmedia.org/2018/11/issue14-pearl/ 5/14 public of Instagram geotag archives is mediated by Instagram users, the images themselves contain both users of the platform as well as non-users.On August 11th and 12th, white supremacists gathered in Charlottesville as part of a Unite the Right rally.Counter-protesters were present and eventually a man drove his car into the crowd of people protesting the white supremacists.One woman died and 19 other people were injured.On August 12, 2017, a little over one hundred protesters marched in a continuous circle in front of LAPD HQ in denouncement of the violence that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia that day and the day prior.On the night of the 12th, the hundred or so protesters at the LAPD HQ in Los Angeles carried signs that read 'White Silence = Violence' and 'Call it what it is: Terrorism.'There was a large Black Lives Matter contingent, as well as a small Antifa presence, and the rally lasted several hours outside LAPD HQ before protesters marched through the streets of downtown LA.LAPD Headquarters 'Top Posts' is an image from the August 12th protest wherein four women each hold a protest sign, the largest of which reads 'Fuck Fascism' in pink and black letters on a white background.Behind the women are the non-descript walls of the police headquarters.The other 'Top Posts' photos include images of women 2/27/2021 Protesting in the Streets of Instagram -Ada New Media https://adanewmedia.org/2018/11/issue14-pearl/ 6/14