It’s time for movements to rethink social media

This article It’s time for movements to rethink social media was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

Last September I made a short video that was by far the most viral piece of content I’ve ever put out.

I can’t trace all the views, but at least a million people watched it across Instagram and TikTok, and possibly elsewhere. Neighbors in Athens, Greece told me they’d come across my face in their feed; Chinese accounts captioned the video and reposted it. I felt like I’d made a dent in the universe and — I’m not going to lie — a little bit special.

The video wasn’t pop wisdom or a dance routine. It had a job to do: get people to sign a petition, created by DiEM25 and Progressive International, to block Germany’s genocide-enabling former foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, from becoming president of the U.N. General Assembly. 

And on that, it failed. By the end of my week of internet mini-fame, the number of signatures had barely shifted. It had 49,000 signatures that July, two months before I posted. I watched it closely that week, and it barely moved.  Baerbock got the job – the petition now asks her to resign. 

I know a few things about digital communication. For two decades it’s been a key part of what I do — I’ve written about it, researched it, advised movements on it. The petition wasn’t mine, but the video was. And I couldn’t make it work. 

Maybe the video could have been packaged better, or the petition link made easier to find. Maybe my pitch was entertaining but not compelling. Maybe a petition was never the right vehicle for stopping Baerbock in the first place.

My organizer friends thought it went great. They congratulated me on the numbers. Nobody asked about the petition.

That last part is what’s bothered me since. Because if a million views and no signatures is considered a success, we’re measuring the wrong thing.

And that opens up a bigger question, one I don’t think we ask often enough: When we use social media in our organizing, what are we actually doing? Is it worth the time we put into it? And is there a way of doing it that actually builds something?

Why we’re all on there anyway

Social media is now a given for organizers, and for good reason. We’ve been using it to fill public squares for well over a decade, from Occupy to Black Lives Matter to last year’s Gen Z protests across the Global South. To get around media blackouts and show the world what power does when it thinks no one’s filming, from Ferguson to Gaza. To make and sink political careers. To tank the stock prices of corporations that deserve it. 

Social media has changed how we communicate. It’s forced us to be quicker, sharper and more entertaining. Because attention is scarce — and we’re competing for it against everything else.

But beneath all of this, most of us are working from the same assumption: that platforms are where the work happens. That the posting is the organizing. That if we get the reach, the rest will follow.

What changed

That assumption has a history. Those of us who were around in 2011 will remember that social media held a different kind of promise. We thought we could topple governments and kings, if only we could get enough people onto the streets. And social media was very good at getting people onto the streets, as long as the anger was already there.

Sometimes that was enough. Tunisian dictator Ben Ali went. Egyptian dictator Mubarak went. But when it didn’t hold — when Occupy dissolved, when Tahrir Square gave way to a military government, when the squares emptied — we told ourselves it wasn’t the right moment, or that the repression was too heavy.

My sense is that a lot of us still carry that same idealism about social media’s power. But two things have changed since then.

The first is that governments got very good at pushing us back. They stifle protest at the source now, with monitoring, arrests and social media operations of their own. Movements can still get around censorship, and often do. But the state has learned to work on the same terrain. Amnesty International has documented how last year Kenyan authorities used the same platforms as the Gen Z movement to threaten and discredit organizers.  And where that isn’t enough, the state can reach for the platform itself — banning it, as Nepal did in 2025, or changing who owns it, as happened with TikTok in the U.S.

The second is that the platforms themselves changed shape. We went from follower feeds to recommendation feeds. What you post no longer goes to the people who chose to hear from you — it goes wherever the algorithm sends it, if it goes anywhere at all. Attention is concentrated on a handful of corporate platforms whose incentive is to keep you scrolling, not to help you organize.

That second shift is the one we’ve underrated in terms of its impact on our ability to organize. In 2011 we posted, our followers saw it and we organized in the replies — as I did during the Athens riots. Distribution and coordination happened in the same place, at the same time.

Comments still exist, of course. But when a post reaches few of your followers, and reaches strangers instead, the reply thread stops being a place where a group can form. It becomes a place where individuals arrive one at a time and leave the same way.

And yet we still use these platforms like it’s 2011. We shoot things off into the ether and hope something will stick — that people will hear our calls to rise up and somehow self-organize. Or that if we point at a problem often enough, everyone will arrive at the same solutions we did. And each time something or someone does break through, it feels like luck.

That doesn’t mean a post can’t start something. In India, after the chief justice called unemployed young people cockroaches, a student in Boston asked on social media what would happen if all the cockroaches came together. Within weeks the Cockroach Party had formed, with millions of followers and protests in several states, and almost no organizing in between. That was three months ago. They have since won a major victory, but nobody yet knows what it will become.

A spontaneous movement can still form from social media. You just can’t plan for it, and you can’t repeat it. And yet a lot of what we do is built on waiting for it.

The tools changed. Our habits didn’t.

Why we didn’t change with them

In some ways this is understandable. Social media is the shiniest and most responsive part of our toolkit. It’s free. We all know how to use it. We understand the algorithms, the buzzwords, the memes, how to play the game. And above all, it answers immediately.

Nothing else in organizing does that. A meeting doesn’t tell you how it went. A training doesn’t report back for six months. And a list doesn’t tell you anything at all until you ask it to do something.

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So we borrow like crazy from the people for whom social media genuinely is the whole job: activist influencers. They build an audience out of perceived closeness — a parasocial relationship, the illusion of intimacy and reciprocity. That’s a real skill, and it has its uses. But an audience is only enough if attention is the goal. It isn’t a base. Nobody shows up on a Tuesday night because they feel close to someone on a screen. 

Meanwhile, the dull part of the work gets skipped — the meetings, the follow-up calls, the trainings, the arguments about what we’re actually demanding and from whom. And that’s the part that turns attention into power. As Zeynep Tufekci argues, social media allows networked movements to reach scale without building the capacity that scale used to require.

You can see what that costs. In Bangladesh, Nepal and Madagascar, protests driven by social media brought governments down — but in each case, what filled the space was something that already existed. An established party in Dhaka, a party formed three years earlier in Kathmandu, the army in Antananarivo. Not the movements themselves.

Worse, I think our use of these platforms has begun to shape our strategy. We optimize for what the platform rewards, because that’s the number that gets sent straight back to us. The silent but vital parts of the organizing work get subtly deprioritized — or stop happening at all.

What it looks like when someone gets it right

In February 2025, Americans angry about Elon Musk’s growing political influence started posting about his company, Tesla. Selling their cars, filming these sales and complaining online. It could have stayed there.

What moved it off the feed was small and specific. A Boston University professor saw a showroom protest in New York City run by the group Rise and Resist, held the same action in her own city and posted about it on Bluesky. Others copied her. A few people built a website and a map, and the whole thing ran under one hashtag: #TeslaTakedown. 

Tesla’s weak spot was its showrooms: physical places, with addresses and opening hours, belonging to a company whose value rested heavily on its founder’s reputation. Organizers picked a time and stuck to it — they protested at the same place, every week. By March there were protests at Tesla showrooms in more than 250 cities across the globe.

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The organizers’ own account of why it worked comes down to two things: Presence beats planning, and regularity builds community. That isn‘t an argument against strategy — choosing the showrooms was a strategy, and a good one. It’s an argument against making people wait while you perfect it. In a moment of anger, people didn’t need a planning document. They needed to be told where to go and what to do.

And the sign-ups ran through Action Network, the organizing platform. Not through the comments of the movement’s social media posts. So when those posts stopped performing, the movement still had its list.

Morocco’s Gen Z protests are another example of how to do it right. Last year brought a wave of protests in Morocco, against corruption, inequality and the state of public services. The movement called itself GenZ 212, after Morocco’s country code.

It got the word out on Instagram and TikTok, but it used the communications platform Discord as its backbone. People were sorted into regional channels, reflecting where they actually lived, and decisions were taken in nightly discussions that ended in votes. One estimate put the number of people on the channels at 250,000 last October.

It was untidy; it was sometimes chaotic. But Discord, which has no recommendation feed, did something for Morocco’s protesters that a feed couldn’t: It enabled them to make decisions under pressure, as a group, and to adapt. When the first days brought arrests, the movement moved its protests into working-class neighborhoods. When deaths followed police intervention, members reconvened to establish what had actually happened and to argue for peaceful protest, countering attempts to paint them as reckless.

Like most of the major Gen Z movements we’ve seen, GenZ 212 was leaderless and decentralized. The distinction here isn’t leaders versus no leaders. It’s whether there’s a room where a question can be settled and a decision can be made.

What these movements have in common

One word: a handoff.

In both cases organizers recruited on social media, just as in 2011. But they didn’t stay there. They moved people quickly into spaces they controlled. Here it happened to be Action Network and Discord; it could as easily have been a mailing list, a forum, a group chat or a room with chairs in it. What matters is that it wasn’t an algorithmic feed.

This reframes the arguments we keep having about which social media platforms to be on and which to quit. Platforms rise and fall, and whichever one holds the attention next, it will still only be the top of the funnel. The better question is: What does a movement need to own so that an algorithm change, or a ban, can’t decapitate it?

Case in point: The Gen Z movement in Nepal, operating on Discord, was able to simply route around the sweeping government ban of social media platforms last year. And the movement brought the government down. 

The handoff has to be engineered

But there’s a catch to the handoff: The architecture of the platforms works against you.

Platforms downrate anything that makes people leave the app — that’s the one behavior the whole system is built to prevent.  Their architecture says it plainly: Instagram doesn’t let you put a link in a caption. TikTok confines them to your bio. And on Facebook, posts containing a link have gone from about one in seven to one in 66 — by Meta’s own count.

So the handoff can’t be an afterthought. It has to be designed as carefully and deliberately as the hook.

That means putting your ask wherever the platform allows it — the profile link, the first reply — and telling people where it is, because they won’t hunt for it. It means ideally making the destination a date (“we’re on a call Thursday at 7 p.m.”) rather than a page. It means writing the follow-up before you post, because most sign-ups go cold in the first few days if nothing lands in their inbox. And it means one named person owning what happens next — one person who responds to the people who signed up, who runs the call, who they can reply to and get an answer.

Be clear about what you’re counting

The other half is measurement, and it’s the half we get wrong most often. The platforms hand us a pile of data for free, and we take it, because it’s there. But going viral is not a win. It was never the goal.

So decide what you’re counting before you publish, and make it something on the other side of the handoff: click-through from the clip to the sign-ups, attendance or completed actions. Set a target. And when the numbers that come back are poor, fix the handoff rather than the hook. 

If your video gets 200,000 views and 40 signups, the problem probably wasn’t the video. Look at what you asked people to do, whether they could find it and what arrived once they’d done it. Every piece of content needs somewhere to go.

Back to the video

My petition problem may not have been the hook. It may have been the thinness of what was behind it.

A form is fine. Tesla Takedown used one. But that form led to a protest at a named showroom at a named time, run by a host with people behind them. Mine led to a signature. If even a fraction of the people who saw that video had been given something more to do  — a call the following week, run by someone with a name, with one clear task at the end of it  — there would have been something left when the attention moved on.

Work out the handoff before you work out the hook. That‘s the whole lesson, and it took me a million views to learn it.

This article It’s time for movements to rethink social media was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2026/08/movements-rethink-social-media-activism-organizing/