I received some excellent reader feedback from last week’s post “Lower Your Risk & Strengthen Your Community,” where I encouraged everyone to disengage from major social media platforms and focus on making more intimate, private connections with smaller groups. Here are some of the responses you sent my way, and my thoughts in response.
“I have mixed feelings about withdrawing from *all* social media platforms. I’m concerned that too many people doing that will lead to widespread pluralistic ignorance (if all that people see is pro-regime thinking, we’ll start believing that is the majority opinion). […] I’m hesitant to self-censor / comply in advance.” – C
I understand and I partly agree. I think we need to find places and spaces to speak our truths, whether it’s in private online secure chats, in-person activist groups, or truly non-corporate social media (Mastodon and the rest of the “Fediverse” is by far the best candidate for that right now). However, I think it’s extremely important to stop feeding the digital authoritarianism regime. Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and Twitter/X once might have served as some form of “commons”, meeting houses, town squares, or some other social metaphor. However, those sites are all now compliant tools of an increasingly authoritarian regime. The more we contribute to their content the more we expose ourselves to persecution. And I believe that we’re not getting any tangible benefit from that risk exposure, because generally our content is only used by these sites’ algorithms to either “preach to the choir” of our close connections or to inflame the sentiments of those most opposed to our world view. We need to prioritize breaking the ragebait cycle which only serves to make the technocrats richer.
“I heard a good discussion […] about the contradiction of how sites like Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, etc, are still unbeatable places to hear directly from independent journalists, how so many important facts and news items are found there meanwhile it feed dollars directly into fascism, leaves people vulnerable to actual fake news, unhealthy doom scrolling and ineffective rage bait cycles, etc. If you do indulge as a spectator, don’t do it for too many hours.” – J
I think there are a couple of important points here. One is that BIG influencers, journalists, politicians, and other public voices do still have some ability to have their voices heard on the large corporate social media sites. This is a great example of how so little is clear-cut with this issue. How can we support those voices if we’re no longer on the major social media sites? How can we balance our need for information while trying to reduce the money which our mere presence funnels into Meta’s and X’s coffers?
I don’t believe that there are any perfect answers here, but I think that we can all strive to improve our efforts a little bit every day. Make your accounts private (follow my instructions in last week’s post) but still follow good creators and like their posts. Contact your favorite creators and encourage them to expand their presence onto sites like Mastodon. If, on the other hand, you’re trying to BE one of those influencers, journalists, or politicians, then your risk model is different than “normal” folks. There are all sorts of reasons and opportunities to take different kinds of risks while fighting authoritarianism, but we don’t all have to take the SAME risks.
And most importantly, as the last sentence says: try to regularly look away from the train wreck. That’s another way that taking your conversations and “content creation” to smaller, more intimate group chats will help: talk to people you know instead of scrolling past a lot of people you don’t. Build human connections!
Via Executive Order, the American authoritarian regime has declared that the political philosophy and highly decentralized array of autonomous groups known as “antifa” to be a “Domestic Terrorist Organization.” This happened after the Department of Justice deleted their own 2024 study showing that that white supremacist and far-right violence “continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” (404 Media paywalled). This also happened despite the fact that there is no federal process to list a domestic group as a “terrorist organization” the way the State Department lists foreign groups. And it’s always worthwhile to note: “antifa” is short for “anti-fascist”. To be anti-antifa is to be… pro… I’ll let you fill in the blank at the end there.
What this means from an activist’s security perspective is a bit blurry at the moment, but I predict that we will soon see reflections of this Executive Order in law enforcement actions at the federal, state, and local levels. Police and prosecutors have already used domestic terrorist statutes against protestors against “Cop City” in Atlanta , and the administration’s rhetoric around pro-Palestinian human rights protestors inevitably makes claims like “the vast majority support Hamas and/or the October 7 terrorist attacks” (I won’t link the right-wing think-tank Capital Research Center’s “Marching Towards Violence” article here). By taking a firm anti-“antifa” stance, the American authoritarian regime is creating a sham legal structure to persecute and prosecute anyone opposing their actions.
Meanwhile DHS is preparing to spy on US citizens, and has activated a dormant contract option with the leading cyber-espionage firm Paragon Solutions to use their Graphite spyware to remotely access targeted mobile devices. Graphite and tools like it (remember Pegasus?) can install themselves on your phone sometimes completely automatically, and then extract data, activate your microphone and camera, or any number of other privacy-shattering capabilities. DHS is also actively contracting with the US company PenLink for their Tangles platform, which “creates a sort-of daily life profile of the people it surveils by mining social media for their posts, contacts, locations and events they attended, combining it with any information leaked about them online. It can also search a subject’s face across other data the tool has collected to see where else they’ve been spotted.” (Forbes) These two tools raise DHS/ICE domestic surveillance capabilities quite substantially.
As citizens we can still put significant hurdles in front of this regime’s invasive espionage capabilities! I urge everyone to take this moment double-down on the security and intentionality of your conversations. Let’s make it difficult for the regime to use their tools against us. Encourage everyone you know to switch to a known-secure end-to-end-encrypted chat app: Signal currently is at the head of the pack with widespread adoption and independently verified security. Reboot your devices at least once every single day. Use a long random PIN number on your phones. Update your software and operating systems as soon as updates are available. Lock down your social media accounts, find alternative sites where you can engage and scroll without feeding the techbro oligarchy, and most importantly get out into your community to collaborate with people in person!
As always, thanks for subscribing and please send me your questions and comments! We’re all in this together.
We take care of us, we keep our community safe, we look out for each other. Go do good work!
