People who use the AllLivesMatter hashtag have always reminded me of the "I'm an egalitarian, not a feminist" crowd, and I'm sure there's a lot of overlap between the two groups. They're misguided at best, and more often hiding behind claims of egalitarianism in order to rail against what they see as "special treatment" for minority groups.
The way that hashtags change the public discourse by adding layer of political-linguistic abstraction to everyday social interactions by people at all levels of stratification across race, class, gender, etc, is... still incredibly astounding. I didn't think mass adoption of the internet would ever have looked like this, but here it is. Something weirder and yet more amazing than any of us internet early-adopters would have imagined.
i think there's a difference between slacktivism hashtags (#Kony2012) vs ones that actually drive forward the public discourse (#BlackLivesMatter). The "things" which hashtags refer to have always existed in pop culture, but now we have a social means of labeling them explicitly.
It's more than that. It's the expectation that you have to expend a certain amount of effort, money, time, or other resource to be allowed to consider yourself an activist, or your opinion valid. Your working poor individual with two minimum wage jobs still consumes media and has valid opinions, but none of these resources to spare. All they can afford to do is "slacktivism" and it's not because they're slack. Dismissing hashtags movements, even ones like #Kony2012, as slack or lazy is literally dismissing the voices who cannot meet a certain arbitrary investment criteria. Fuck that noise.
I really like this analogy. Usually when I make analogies to "signal-noise ratio", I'm thinking of comprehensibility (or lack thereof). But that usually only applies to one speaker/author/whatever. Your analogy is referring to something that's abstracted over individuals, something that's closer to how political ideas spread.
Wait... who is the #alllivesmatter crowd? It seems like the blacklivesmatter crowd is at least talking about it, and upset about it. I can see why Fox News wouldn't want to talk about it, but if anything this only strengthens the argument for police reform, and for those who have generally been demanding it. I'm still not sure who the #alllivesmatter crowd refers to, though. Edit: Nevermind. The #alllivesmatter crowd is pretty much Fox News, so it makes sense. I was thinking this was going after Martin O'Malley et al., which didn't make sense to me at first.
The #AllLivesMatter crowd came out in force on twitter trying to silence the #BlackLivesMatter trend. It's popped up outside of twitter too, and no it wasn't just Fox. Various left-of-Fox presidential candidates have used it as a response too, but some did at least apologize. Also I'm not sure right now if you are understanding the significance of the retort, so if you are (and for anyone else reading this who is scratching their head) I'm going to point to this comment on reddit which explains it well.