‘Make them famous’

This chapter explores the socio-moral complexities of digital vigilantism through an interpretive sociological case-study of a social media campaign aimed at publicly identifying participants who were filmed and photographed during the widely publicised and violent white supremacist rally that transpired in the streets of Charlottesville, USA in August 2017. It highlights the constellation of circumstances that empowered this high-profile and controversial social media campaign to identify and expose rally participants, far and wide. It formulates the creative, rhetorical, and moral dimensions of this campaign through textual and visual analysis of the digital call-to-action and responses to it. It emphasizes the simultaneously emboldening and dis-empowering possibilities of visual documentation in a digital media-infused public culture, where expressive conduct undertaken in one setting and time may come back to haunt actors later, elsewhere, and before unanticipated audiences. To understand the social significance of digital vigilantism within today’s digital media-infused landscape as revealed through this case, the reader is asked to consider what would have been different about Charlottesville 2017 without the social media campaign aimed at identifying and outing participants before a broader public? I argue that this coordinated digital media campaign helped to crystallise a broadly felt and united refusal of the terrain that was being sought by organisers, participants, and supporters of the Charlottesville rallies, namely, to legitimate the articulation of violent white supremacy in contemporary American public life as but one kind of “expression” amongst others. Utilizing the tools of digital media, it worked to deny the possibility for participants – present and future – to attend a rally associated with such legitimation anonymously, and thus without risk or consequence to their future selves. In doing so it helped to constitute opposition to what the rally represented on deeply socio-moral grounds, irreducible to legalistic definitions of protected forms of speech and assembly.