To preface: I am a white man, 21, English, and I am blessed with white priviledge. I hope this doesn’t come off as tonedeaf.

#BlackOutTuesday as spread across twitter to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement, with timelines practically flooded with black squares as people, from celebrities to childhood friends, vow to not post today and focus energies on the riots over the murder of George Floyd and police brutality currently happening in America. But, #BlackOutTuesday has quickly lost its meaning and now represents mostly white people virtue signalling, whitewashing themselves and actually harming protests. Lets see why.

#BlackOutTuesday was decided on Monday night by music executives to, as it suggests, black-out their feeds. It was a way for the music industry to stop their promotions for a day and draw attention to the Black Lives Matter movement. It was meant to be #BlackOutTuesday because these commercial instragram accounts would be posting daily content, and it would actually mean something for them to stop for a day and take stock. However, it didn’t take long to sail out of control.

It was a movement that was adopted first by the likes of celebrities, and then ordinary people. The motive is fairly straightforward – to show black people that they were supported and to post a striking image. A totally black screen is certainly eye-catching, because it isn’t eye-catching. If you scroll down Instagram, and instead of seeing dozens of pictures you see a wall of black, you know that something is happening.

But, that doesn’t take away from the fact that it is a selfish and frankly meaningless thing to do. A lot of people – some celebrities, most of non-celebrity friends – don’t actually post that much, and blacking out for a day is not necessarily unusual. So, it loses its potency in a change to the daily routine, because it is not in the daily routine to promote on instagram. And when you take into account that parts of England, especially my part south of London on the coast, doesn’t actually have that many black people and is a largely non-black area, some of the people posting these photos aren’t really broadcasting their support for black people at all. For sure they have a post they can look back and point to, but if there are few black people following them on instagram and seeing this show of support, who are they really posting it for? #BlackOutTuesday becomes a game of virtue signalling, where white people will post in support just for the fact that they are showing their support to an idea, not to real people. This might even give people satisfaction as an “ally” of some kind, seemingly excusing them from helping out in other ways such as donating, signing petitions, or actually protesting. This is not allyship, its the bare minimum, and it could take the focus away from productive ways of supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.

Furthermore, the #BlackOutTuesday hashtag is often posted alongside a #BlackLivesMatter or #BLM tag, to show support I’m sure. What this does, though, is hugely dilutes the search function for these tags, that actual protesters are using. Showing their support for the protests often leads to stifling protesters efforts as they cannot find any relevent information on how to help and where the danger is, because all they can see is a stream of meaningless black squares posted by majority white people who are in no way connected to the protests.

Fundamentally, the #BlackOutTuesday tag has been misunderstood and misused. It removes useful and productive support for the Black Lives Matter movement and the protests against police brutality, and replaces them with a stream of useless blackless, only there to make the people posting them feel good about their role in the issue. What should instead be done is, instead of loudly muting yourself, use your position to amplify the voices of black men and women who are actively protesting or supporting the protest movement. Raise awareness for issues, spread meaningful news, and if possible, actually go out and aid people on the ground, rather than just fall back on a black image and think you’re helping black people.