Black women center Blackness in their digital practices to show their refusal to be erased or ignored. Through digital interactions, Black women as invisible victims of state and/or personal violence can be heard. The use of hashtags opens a space for issues to be acknowledged and discussed without judgment, which allows for voices in the margins to be heard and to type back about erasure of Black female narratives. Twitter can function as a sanctuary or safe space to engage with others outside of a traditional face-to-face interaction. Digital platforms have become places that police, surveil, and criminalize Black women’s practices around micromobilizing.īlack women connect with one another and voice their concerns and demands for justice in digital spaces. This process, as perceived by Black women, is one where the existing policies on digital spaces are not objective or race-neutral but instead continue a practice of centering whiteness as the normal operating system. Urban Dictionary user Raiayyyyyy defines it as, “we got fucked by zuck”. While this rhetoric certainly has gendered and homophobic undertones, it also reflects rape culture in terms of the unwanted intrusion by an outside entity. The play on words is to indicate the parallel of getting ‘fucked’ by Zuckerberg. According to Urban Dictionary user Saikh, getting zucked is when your expression is sucked out of you by Mark Zuckerberg’s mysterious Facebook community standards. In our essay, we explore the concept of getting “zucked” as part of larger trends within digital platforms that punish Black women online for expressing their distress at the inequalities they experience. This punitive practice of getting banned or having a post removed by Facebook is known as getting “zucked.” Later in that same Facebook post, Raniesha commented that her post might get removed for being too vocal and critical of racism and sexism. In this small statement she uttered a common refrain that Black women report about their experiences within social movements of being ignored, overworked, and undervalued. Raneisha posted this Facebook message while remarking on how few people showed up to the rally, a stark contrast to the Freddie Gray and Eric Garner rallies in the same city previously. This poignant, concise, and powerful comment was made after a Rekia Boyd rally organized by activists in New York City, late spring of 2015. But we show up and show out all the time… We’re like space invaders, until some work needs to be done.

Zucked up