The American comedian Stephen Colbert set off a flood of outraged moralizing in the twitterverse last week after his show tweeted an out-of-context punchline about racial insensitivity. With his Swiftian instinct for hypocrisy, Colbert had just lampooned the decision of the Dan Snyder, owner of the Washington Redskins’ football team, to deflect decades-long criticism of the team’s name by establishing a “Washington Redskins Original Americans Foundation.” Colbert concocted a similarly tin-eared ethical facelift for one of his show’s stock racist alter egos and tweeted: “I am willing to show #Asian community I care by introducing the Ching-Chong Ding-Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or Whatever.”
What followed was a textbook illustration of the power and the limitations of online activism. A 23-year-old Asian-American activist named Suey Park – who understood the joke – decided to use the tweet to make a point about the casual manner in which progressive Americans too often make fun of minorities, even when the humour is meant to satirize “worse racists” like those who appear on conservative talk radio and television. Park was savvy enough to get the hashtag #CancelColbert trending on twitter and a few hours later the ensuing uproar had provoked a hostile backlash from tens of thousands of people who had no idea of the original context, and equally heated counter-responses from fans of the show who resented the distortion of Colbert’s joke.
The intensity of social media is bewildering for those who still live in an analogue world. In 2010 Facebook sampled the activity of its more than one billion users (third only to the populations of India and China in terms of absolute numbers) for a 20-minute period. During this time the users shared more than a million links, tagged 1.3 million photographs, posted more than 1.5 million messages to their friends’ walls, uploaded 2.7 million photographs and sent almost 15 million messages or comments. Since a large majority of these exchanges were no longer than a 140-character tweet, it is not hard to see how often nuances get lost in transmission.
In a thoughtful commentary on the Colbert controversy, the Wall Street Journal’s Jeff Yang suggests that the Colbert affair is another indication that we have entered “the era of the weaponized hashtag — where loosely organized and barely controlled social mobs swarm institutions [and] the hashtag itself becomes news, often overwhelming discussion of the topic that originally spawned it.” Although the Internet has also allowed a resurgence of longform journalism, its disruptive power has been most evident in microblogging platforms like Twitter. Although weaponized hashtags have, unquestionably, helped to expose corruption and to focus public attention on political abuse topics in many countries they can also be hijacked and used for misleading purposes, as was the case with Parks’ co-option of Colbert.
Undaunted by the angry feedback, Colbert opened a subsequent episode of his show with a dream sequence in which the calls for cancellation had succeeded. He recapped a timeline of the controversy, called for an end of the hostility towards Park, and explained that he would donate money raised by his fake charity towards the real Redskins organization that had provoked the original joke. It was a gracious response to the situation, but also a quiet admission that the humour had missed its mark. Or, as Jacqueline Keeler, a Yankton Sioux/Navajo writer who supports Eradicating Offensive Native Mascotry tweeted: “Issue is not critique of skit but disproportional outrage vis a vis Actual racist foundation – Snyder wins.”
