“You Belong to Gutters, Not Facebook or Twitter”: Recovering Dalit Histories From the Shadows of Social Media

Abstract

Social media platforms are powerful tools for empowering marginalized communities. How such platforms shape the way societies construct, interpret, and document the histories of marginalized communities is attracting more scholarly attention as abuse against marginalized communities proliferates online. Through the lens of mélange history—the selective combination of digitized records to construct historical accounts—this paper examines the experiences of “lower caste” Dalit social media users in constructing their histories online. Through a narrative analysis, derived from interviews with social media users, focus groups, participant observation, and document analysis, our findings present three exclusionary narratives of structural invisibility (“unseen”), procedural exclusion (“unheard”), and participatory withdrawal (“unspoken”). While these narratives reveal “context concealment” of Dalit histories by social media algorithms, policies, and other users, we also find evidence of “context recovery” as Dalits reclaim their truths through alternative archiving, counter-public formation, and digital activism. Our findings identify the limits and possibilities of mélange history for marginalized communities, particularly those experiencing caste-based abuse, and contribute to a growing body of research on caste and inequality in organizational contexts.