Checking in on black square-posting brands, from Starbucks to Glossier.

On May 25, 2020, footage of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis set the internet ablaze, igniting a fervor for justice among the attentive and then-quarantined online masses. In the now widely circulated video, George Floyd can be heard pleading, “I can’t breathe” — the same three words Eric Garner had yelled not six years prior — 28 times before he became unconscious and later died. What followed was nothing short of a wildfire.

Compounded by the killings of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery — and, later, the killing of activist Oluwatoyin Salau and the shooting of Jacob Blake — Floyd’s murder prompted an international wave of protests and a global dialogue surrounding anti-Blackness and racial injustice in the months following his death. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, by far the largest of its kind, would receive more than $90 million in donations while organizing over 7,750 demonstrations in the US alone between May and August 2020. Online, social media users were quick to take advantage of their digital platforms, informing followers about racial injustice through the sharing of infographics and what artist and educator Mandy Harris Williams aptly titled “critical caption essays.”

Evidently, the posts were impactful, with 23 percent of adult social media users in the US saying they changed their views about a political or social issue in 2020 due to something they saw on those platforms, up from 15 percent in 2018. Corporate commitment to racial advocacy became a necessity rather than a consideration once social media users began to take aim at specific instances of racism and unfair treatment at many companies. Hundreds of businesses rushed to release pledges committing to upholding racial justice within their organization. But did any of these companies do more than commodify a movement? A year later, have any of these companies transformed themselves for the better?

Beginning on June 2, 2020, Blackout Tuesday would merge these growing trends in online activism and calls for corporate accountability on social media. The online protest involved posting a single image of a black square to Instagram feeds, intended to quite literally black out users’ feeds and interrupt regular posting as a show of solidarity to Black victims of police violence. By the end of the day, the number of Instagram posts tagged with #BlackoutTuesday was in the tens of millions — and more than 950 brands, including ViacomCBS and Apple, had participated in some way. However, the social media protest quickly proved to do more harm than good.