Social Media for the Revolution

When Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old vegetable seller in Tunisia, self-immolated in protest of police harassment in December 2010, the gesture went viral. The aftermath, filmed by his cousin and uploaded on Facebook, began receiving international press coverage.

In the months after Bouazizi’s death, millions took to the streets in what became known as the Arab Spring. The region-wide revolutions ushered in a new kind of organizing and political education via social media, where protestors used online networks to share their struggle with the rest of the world. 

In the following months, the world watched as Hosni Mubarak was ousted in Egypt, and as violent repression of revolts in Syria turned into civil war. In the fall of 2011, #OccupyWallStreet took the internet (and the streets) by storm, solidifying a blueprint for protest—leveraging social media alongside in-person activation—that remains in use today. 

Social media was also how many people first heard about the killings of Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, and Eric Garner—and learned where they could participate in protests in their honor. During those protests, the world again watched, live on Twitter, as uniformed police officers used paramilitary equipment to unleash violence on unarmed protestors.

And in the summer of 2020, online movement-building expanded in an unprecedented way. “When the murder of George Floyd happened, people wanted to learn about abolition in accessible ways,” says K Agbebiyi, an Atlanta-based writer and organizer. “The internet provided a space for them to do that. I witnessed people give thousands of dollars to mutual aid funds for incarcerated survivors, disability justice, and survivor defense campaigns.”

But in the three years since Floyd’s murder sparked an international uprising, the internet has become increasingly inhospitable to similar kinds of mobilization. Corporate monopolies, increasing authoritarianism, and dangerous legislation have tightened control over the digital public square that once organically fostered grassroots organizing and real-time access to information.

Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now called X, has further emboldened far-right users of the platform to spread disinformation, spew hate, and harass and dox marginalized people. Fascist, racist, and alt-right accounts are permitted to post on the platform, often without content moderation or oversight, while organizers discussing COVID-19, Palestine, or police brutality regularly see their accounts shut down. Even before Musk’s takeover, Twitter’s own safety employees pointed to the platform’s lack of content moderation strategy as a contributing factor to the violent attacks on the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. 

On Instagram, which is owned by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, shadowbanning—covert algorithmic suppression that limits visibility on certain posts and of certain profiles—and account takedowns reign. Users of the platform see their stories suddenly getting minimal views after posting content advertising their OnlyFans accounts, information about the genocide in Gaza, or COVID-19 precautions; others’ handles don’t appear in searches; some have their accounts shut down without notice.

TikTok, where many young people get their news, might have potential for mobilizing users on political issues, but the newer platform is also rife with problems. Sex workers report that the platform’s uneven application of its strict terms of service makes it nearly unusable for the kind of content they post. The site has also come under fire because U.S. lawmakers fear its links to China. More recently, U.S. officials and the Israel lobby have accused the platform of pushing pro-Palestine content—a claim TikTok denies, and which is more likely a reflection of the observable shift in young Americans’ beliefs.

But in the face of this repressive shift in the online landscape, organizers are adapting. Despite challenges, people continue to find ways to translate their online connection into action. And, against all odds, the unprecedented support for Palestine—both online and in the streets—in the face of genocide has demonstrated that there may yet be a place for social media in revolution.

Risk of Engagement

For all its connective potential, the internet also carries real danger, especially for marginalized groups—a reality sex workers are deeply familiar with. The censorship of sex workers began far before the internet age, of course. Japan banned women (some of whom may have been sex workers) in kabuki performances in 1629; nearly 200 years later, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice was raiding and shuttering burlesque theaters.

This offline surveillance continues today. “It’s hard to generalize about the entire United States, but I’m most familiar with New York, where the patterns of policing communities of color mirror the patterns of policing sex work,” says Melissa Gira Grant, a staff writer at The New Republic. Gira Grant points to research in the 2010s by groups like the Red Umbrella Project and Legal Aid Society that identified trends of police arresting sex workers “based purely on surveillance of lawful conduct.” “These arrests had a clear pattern,” she says. “People were being profiled as sex workers based on what they wore, who they were talking to, what time of day it was, and what neighborhood they were in. But the biggest factors were race and gender.”

At the same time, online surveillance and criminalization of sex workers was proliferating. In 2010, Craigslist’s adult services section, Backpage, shuttered due to increasing pressure from the Department of Justice. Next, the Bay Area–based RedBook fell, the online domain seized by federal agents. The onslaught reached a boiling point in 2018 with the federal passage of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) in the House, and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA) in the Senate.

Taken together, the bills expanded the 1996 Communications Decency Act in an effort to allegedly curb human trafficking by, for the first time, holding internet service providers accountable for the content users posted on their platforms. Within months, dozens of sites that sex workers had long used to vet potential clients were shut down. But rather than provide these workers with more safety, as lawmakers claimed would happen, the closure of these sites put sex workers into far more dangerous situations.

Research by the U.S. Government Accountability Office and sex worker advocates backs this up. In a damning study, Hacking//Hustling—a collective of sex workers, survivors, and accomplices working at the intersection of tech and social justice—found that 99% of surveyed sex workers felt less safe after FOSTA-SESTA passed, and 72.45% of the 98 online workers surveyed said the dismantling of online-based environments caused increased economic instability.

Today, sex workers’ existence on the internet is still precarious. Social media, where many sex workers find clients and subscribers, censors and suppresses their posts—through both shadowbanning and outright deletion. Even sites that are nearly synonymous with sex work, like OnlyFans, have tightened their terms of service to prohibit acts that viewers want to see—even when those acts aren’t dangerous or illegal. Payment processors like Venmo, PayPal, and CashApp are also increasingly inhospitable to sex workers. Hacking//Hustling reports that 33% of online sex workers have been kicked off at least one platform in the wake of legislation that increases platform liability. The proposed EARN IT Act, for example, would require websites to remove user-generated content deemed inappropriate (a scope so broad it will certainly be misused). The act also aims to provide the site’s immunity from civil lawsuits related to these so-called inappropriate posts, but only if they comply with the levels of surveillance and ensuing punitive action required by the law.

Danielle Blunt, a dominatrix and co-founder of Hacking//Hustling, points out that these policies are often tested out on sex workers and then applied to other populations. “Laws and platform policies that are used to police sex workers will always be used to target the most marginalized workers and communities and chill speech,” she says. “In Hacking//Hustling’s research Posting Into the Void, we found that sex workers who were also politically involved were significantly more likely to report that they were shadowbanned.”

Offline Consequences

Reproductive justice advocates experienced this crackdown firsthand in the wake of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, which overturned Roe v. Wade. Although fundraising and resource-sharing on social media spiked on the day the Dobbs decision was leaked, soon after, “the shock and rage wore off, and a lot of people just seemed to move on,” says Hayley McMahon, abortion advocate and doctoral fellow at the Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast at Emory University. “Fundraising and advocacy have been a whole lot harder since.”

“The fall of Twitter, especially, has hit abortion advocacy and organizing so hard,” McMahon adds. Underfunded community-based local reproductive justice organizations cannot afford massive advertising campaigns. So organic social media engagement has been how these organizations reach new supporters. “And when everybody started understandably fleeing from Twitter after Musk took over, post engagement and the ability to fundraise went with them,” McMahon explains.

But overt censorship is also at play. After the Dobbs decision, Facebook and Instagram blocked posts about abortion pills, and “Instagram had been hiding posts for saying things like ‘Abortion is health care’ even back in 2021 when … Roe v. Wade was still standing,” says McMahon. She had her own Twitter account suspended after she tweeted out the World Health Organization’s protocol for self-managed abortion.

As is the case with sex work, social media surveillance can lead to real-life consequences—especially as states enact increasingly draconian abortion restrictions. Makayla Montoya Frazier, founder and co-executive director of Buckle Bunnies Fund, which helps Texans access reproductive health care, has been tracking these effects. “We know that folks have been prosecuted for their abortions with ‘evidence’ given to law enforcement by Meta, so they’ve proven to be an unsafe platform to talk in detail about our abortions,” she says. Montoya Frazier points to several examples, including a Nebraska mom who is currently serving two years in prison for helping her daughter self-manage an abortion, and a man in Texas who filed a lawsuit against a group of people who helped his ex-wife obtain an abortion.

Montoya Frazier’s own online accounts are surveilled by local anti-abortion activists, and she often sees her social media posts listed in legal cases against her and her organization. “We know they’re watching our every move, and they know we know!” she says. “They want us to live in fear, they want our patients to live in fear, hoping that we will stop providing care and people will stop reaching out.”

Suppressing Speech, Supporting Genocide

This weaponized censorship can have even more sinister applications, as evidenced by the well-documented suppression of calls for a free Palestine, in which users posting pro-Palestine content frequently see their engagement curtailed, or posts removed for nondescript violations of “community guidelines.” This is by no means a new phenomenon. Rasha Abdulhadi, Palestinian Southerner, writer, and cultural organizer disabled by long COVID, draws a through line from sex work and abortion to Palestine: “Surveillance tech, legal frameworks for criminalizing dissent, [and] interlocking laws from one area are often applied to another front of struggle.”

A 2015 report by Palestine Legal and the Center for Constitutional Rights makes clear just how ubiquitous suppression of Palestinian voices and their allies is. According to the report, U.S. residents speaking out in support of Palestine are often punished with false, inflammatory claims of antisemitism or support for terrorism; academic, professional, and organizational denunciation or exclusion; and even lawsuits or criminal charges—at the behest of pro-Israel advocacy organizations, PR firms, and think tanks.

Here, again, social media mirrors offline life, as censorship and punishment for supporting Palestine are commonplace in both. On Dec. 12, 2023, Instagram suspended Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine’s account, a month after the chapter was suspended by Columbia University administration. The group was given no reason for the suspension.

Sarah Campbell, abolitionist and former director of communications and policy for New York State Sen. Julia Salazar, was fired less than 48 hours after a New York Post article about her anti-Israel and anti-Zionist tweets was published. “I received a call from Senate personnel stating that ‘my services were no longer needed,’” she says. She adds that she was never provided with “any guidance or policy regarding social media content/personal statements made outside of work hours, on personal property, on a personal and unaffiliated account that both of my bosses followed.” Sen. Salazar never communicated directly with Campbell, but did post vague comments to Twitter stating she would not “allow anyone to wrongly pin another person’s reckless and completely unacceptable words onto me or my office.”

In Gaza, sharing the reality of what is being done to the Palestinian people with the world is not only met with social media suppression but also with limitless violence. At least 83 journalists have been killed in Palestine and Lebanon since Oct. 7, 2023, making this war the deadliest for journalists ever recorded by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Many of the journalists killed were targeted by Israel, as demonstrated by the murder of Al Jazeera Arabic Gaza Bureau Chief Wael Dahdouh’s family. On Oct. 25, 2023, an Israeli air raid targeted the house where Dahdouh’s wife, children, and grandson were sheltering. The house was located in an area of Gaza that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) had instructed fleeing Palestinians to go to stay safe from the bombing.

On Dec. 15, 2023, while covering the aftermath of IDF air raids on a United Nations school sheltering civilians in Khan Younis, Dahdouh and his colleague and cameraperson Samer Abudaqa were wounded by a missile launched by an Israeli drone. Dahdouh was taken to a nearby hospital for treatment of shrapnel wounds, while Abudaqa remained trapped as the school was besieged by Israeli forces. Abudaqa eventually died. Dahdouh continuously urged the evacuation of his colleague from his hospital bed, but he says the ambulance that tried to reach Abudaqa came under fire by the IDF. On Jan. 7, 2024, Dahdouh’s eldest son, Hamza, also a working journalist, was killed by an Israeli air strike that reportedly targeted the vehicle he and journalist Mustafa Thuraya were using near al-Mawasi, in southwestern Gaza. Both journalists were killed while a third passenger was seriously injured.

Abdulhadi makes the connection that tech monopolies like Meta and corporate media like The New York Post are key enforcers of the white supremacist, capitalistic, colonial status quo. “It’s not an accident that the system that depends on our annihilation and dispossession is bent on hiding and denying that it’s happening,” they say. “It’s not a bug, or even some tragic side effect—it’s a core feature, a central part of the kernel architecture for the operating system of settler colonialism.”

Liberation Finds a Way

With the odds stacked so heavily against the people, the prospect of using social media in service of liberation can feel futile. But Abdulhadi argues that people have already been using it toward these ends. “Folks finally have a more sober assessment of what these addictive platforms are made to do, want us to do, and how we work around them,” Abdulhadi says. “In that way, it’s not much different from street organizing or resisting settler colonialism: [We’re] understanding terrain better than the people who want to control it, and knowing not only how to use it, but [how] to break what they want to use it for.”

And some tactics for combating this kind of suppression are similarly analog, Abdulhadi notes. To counter shadowbanning of journalists from inside Gaza, for instance, they suggest cross-posting content to other platforms, forwarding their coverage via email or text, and sharing with people offline. Essentially, Abdulhadi encourages social media users to share with as many people as possible “what you learn from them: facts, recent news, and also framework/analysis/big picture.”

Blunt, the co-founder of Hacking//Hustling, also offers tips gleaned from sex workers: “Make sure you have multiple ways of staying in touch with people you organize with in case your account is deleted,” she suggests. “Evading a shadowban is pretty difficult when you are consistently posting content that is algorithmically repressed. You can experiment using steganography like ‘S3x W0rk’ or ‘G@z@,’ but it is likely that the popular ways of cloaking text to avoid a shadowban are already algorithmically repressed.” These coded references could also mean content is not easily searchable or legible to a broad audience.

Ultimately, though, Blunt insists, “We need to fight fascism and censorship in all forms, on the street and online.” We cannot “decouple our hopes and dreams for future internet and social media policy from bigger goals like the decriminalization of sex work and abolition. Punishing sex workers and organizers by suppressing their content, making community more difficult to find and knowledge more difficult to share, only increases our exposure to violence.”

Karim Golding is the founder of The Law Library, a platform featuring “a collection of stories and content that highlight the law as it relates to the criminalization of hip-hop (and its surrounding communities).” As a formerly incarcerated individual, Golding knows the risks of digital surveillance intimately. During his federal trial in 2006, he says New York and federal agencies introduced evidence from his MySpace page to claim that he was a violent gang member. Given Golding’s experience, he suggests learning “how to opt out of public record databases—credit reporting companies like Sagestream, Intelius, and LexisNexis are good places to start.”

He also recommends avoiding using real identifying information in online forms wherever possible. “A good digital safety tool kit would involve learning how to hide or change one’s IP address, using proxy chains, learning how to use Kali Linux, getting prepaid WiFi that is not on a phone plan and refilled with gift cards,” he suggests. At protests, he recommends attendees dress similarly and obscure their faces—using masks, keffiyehs, flash-reflecting scarves, or glasses that disrupt facial recognition technology.

At the end of the day, he reminds us that “everything under the sun can be criminalized,” especially for marginalized people. “There is most certainly a relationship between the government and social media companies,” Golding says. “Theirs is a corporate/government agenda that is aimed at controlling the narrative. With the information (data) that these government agencies purchase, they often track undocumented immigrants, identify individuals as threats to national security, or public safety threats.”

Yet as Golding and so many others prove daily, no one is more creative than the oppressed. And despite the limitless capital, weaponry, and “innovation” when it comes to repressive technology, the internet’s overlords and the nation-states they align with cannot quell movements for liberation and justice. Sex workers, abortion advocates, and formerly incarcerated organizers all find ways to exist, organize, and thrive on and offline. Even when faced with unfathomable violence, Palestinians exemplify revolutionary resilience, inspiring millions around the world to take to the streets in solidarity. This is how change happens—not with the master’s tools, but with the people’s. Revolutionaries don’t wait for state governments or social media CEOs to grant the perfect conditions for liberation—they recognize the reality of the moment and seize those opportunities to make those conditions themselves.