State crackdown and increased surveillance decrease the radical potential of resistance movements and dooms them to failure.

The current sociopolitical context has seen a vigorous crack down on public dissent and acts of civil disobedience. Understanding the legal and civil rights afforded by local and federal laws is an important first step for protesters challenging, through video activism and publicity, structural racism and socio-economic inequalities. Equally crucial is to recognize how racialized political rhetoric undergirds reactionary state policies for managing networked protest and digital activism. For example, in August 2017, the Trump administration announced the rolling back of an Obama administration policy from 2015, following the uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri, that limited the transfer of military equipment such as armored vehicles and grenade launchers to local law enforcement agencies (Jarrett, 2017). A few months later, in October 2017, leaked documents from the FBI counter-terrorism division revealed the agency labeled black activists “Black Identity Extremists (BIE)” who pose a significant threat to law enforcement safety (Levin, 2017). Policy revisions and racist discourses that criminalize black dissent compound the historical challenges black activists have faced in their opposition to state violence and their demands for a radical reorganization of social and political life. Analyzing the political language that criminalizes black citizens and critiquing the neoliberal law enforcement strategies that aggressively surveil black activists reveal how strained relations between law enforcement and communities of color do not stem from and will not be solved by video activism; rather, they are structural political-economic problems that require long-term organizing for change. The current social and political context demands activists make injustices and inequalities visible, but the intricate layers of surveillance that permeate online and offline communications foster a culture of fear and intimidation, particularly within the black community, which makes activists hesitant to speak out. Penney (2016) provided the first empirical evidence to support the claim that surveillance has a “chilling effect” on speech and dissent. Following the 2013 NSA revelations by Edward Snowden, Penney noted a statistically significant decrease in traffic to Wikipedia pages containing terms such as “terrorism” and “infrastructure security,” and concluded that citizens avoided associating themselves with language that may appear threatening to national security. Glenn Greenwald (2016), the investigative journalist who reported on and broke the Snowden story, reacted to Penney’s findings this way: “There is a reason governments, corporations, and multiple other entities of authority crave surveillance. It’s precisely because the possibility of being monitored radically changes individual and collective behavior. Specifically, that possibility breeds fear and fosters collective conformity” (para. 11).