#some of the shit i’ve seen…
I think some folks here need to be reminded why non-scholarly sources and anecdotal evidence aren’t acceptable secondary sources
“Here’s a twitter thread about the situation in-” no. Try again.
“My friend said-” stop. Give it another go.
Open-source evidence like twitter threads and facebook posts and tiktoks aren’t secondary sources. SOME can be used as supplemental to a legitimate secondary source, like if you want to provide commentary on that source from someone experiencing what you’re talking about, but you can’t make the commentary your evidence and you have to be REALLY careful when you do that because anyone could say anything on the internet. Which is why non-scholarly evidence isn’t acceptable in academia in the first place.
You’re actually discrediting your own argument if you fall back on “this twitter thread proves my point about systemic inequality” because it makes you look like you couldn’t find any real evidence outside of what some rando twitter user had to say about it. And anecdotal evidence can’t be empirically proven so any possible hole someone could poke in your story to explain what happened some other way is gonna make it fall apart, which will discredit your own argument again.
Yes, we all like to joke about that one relative who puts Qanon shit on our facebook feeds and how they’ll fall for anything, but you’re doing the same thing by accepting social media posts as legitimate evidence. Just because you agree with it doesn’t make it a fact
Literally just saw a post with 1,500 notes where the OP used a Fox News screenshot as a source for a supposedly leftist point. I didn’t even have to reverse image search it, the Fox News logo was so poorly cropped out that I could recognize it from what was still visible of it in the corner. Didn’t see anyone in the notes calling them out on that. Jesus fucking christ, people.
I understand what this is trying to say, but as a black person and an academic I think it doesn’t account for the fact that academic standards of validity are often inherently racist.
I will never forget trying to write my senior thesis on an aspect of whiteness and racism In west Africa and my thesis topic was denied specifically because I could not provide the committee with enough primary scholarly sources on the topic. Why couldn’t I do that? Well there aren’t enough white people in academia who have written about it and there aren’t enough black people allowed in the room to do so and when people like myself try, the barrier to entry is impossible.
Please understand that when speaking of systemic equality, the system resists critique. There are so many areas in which marginalized people are not going to be able to provide you with the type of evidence needed to write an academic paper. Not because the issue lacks validity, but because academia and the institutions that carry out this research are not unbiased.
I can show you over a century of writings from black peoples on topics you won’t find a single scholarly article on. So please be careful when you start saying things like “you couldn’t find any real evidence outside of Twitter.” You’re putting too much faith in the system to critique itself.
So what you need is discernment, not scholarly articles. And that’s not me saying that those types of things aren’t important, they are. But before we start just outright dismissing “anecdotal evidence” please remember the system that verifies information is racist and the barrier to entry is high. Remember that the lived in experiences of people living under systemic oppression are valid before some white man does research on it, yes even when the mode of expressing that oppression is done so on Twitter.
