Remember when social media was used to start revolutions?

Now it upholds regimes.

Remember when social media was used to start revolutions?

Mark Zuckerberg didn’t see it—he built Facebook to analyze the facial features to rate the women that he went to college with (we should have probably known then)—but Egyptians didn’t care. It was a space that was just little known enough that they could create a post calling others into the streets, an event that no one imagined would actually ever happen.

Instead, it resulted in a gathering of 50,000 people in Tahrir Square, who eventually overthrew Hosni Mubarak.

Egyptians weren’t the only ones. Tunisians had similarly used social media platforms to overthrow Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, and then Yemenis and Libyans jumped in to challenge Ali Abdullah Saleh and Gaddafi. Syrians bravely followed in their footsteps—fourteen years later, they’ve finally had their victory.

Tahrir Square, 2011, Creative Commons.

These were some of the first stories that I covered as a journalist—from afar, of course, as I was a child journalist still just dreaming of being voluntarily teargassed and shot at in the name of breaking news—but it was the first time that I got to have a glimpse of the way that people from across the Arab world were taking their future in their hands, an image that was sorely lacking in the post 9/11 media landscape I grew up with, where Arab men were terrorists, and Arab women were disempowered and oppressed. Social media allowed me—and the world—to see something different, that hadn’t been filtered through a Western gaze or agenda. Social media allowed us to see something real.

At that point, social media became an essential tool for me—and so many others—as a journalist. It was where we found stories and sources and learned important details that we might not have known otherwise. It was where we connected with readers, and engaged in debate and dialogue and discourse that helped us stand out in the crowd, and let journalists like me—young, mouthy, not white or conventional—stand out in a crowd and get commissions to refine our voice. Perhaps most beautifully of all, we built friendships—real friendships, where, when we got the chance to meet in real life, it felt like meeting up with an old friend. The digital world was quickly becoming the real world, we just hadn’t acknowledged it yet.

Somewhere along the line, things started going awry. Of course, it didn’t take long for dictatorial regimes to start understanding the power of social media and using it as a tool of surveillance—but for the Western, allegedly “democratic” world, it might have started with the Cambridge Analytica scandal, where we first learned that our personal data was being used to manipulate our political decisions, without our consent. Somehow, this was less of a wakeup call and more the beginning of a new normal—ones in which the ways that we express ourselves online are analyzed and synthesized by neuroscientists and engineers raking in millions to reinforce a vision of the world as we believe it to be. We see ads for products that feel as if they’re designed for us—in a way, they are.

It isn’t just our data—and the ways it is being manipulated in order to further manipulate us. It’s also the cancel culture “mob mentality” which has sabotaged entire careers over a poorly-timed tweet, leading conscientious writers to second guess ourselves until we wake up one day and realize that we are barely publishing anything at all. When we did publish, we suddenly found ourselves at the whims of the algorithms—which prioritize and deprioritize content according to who is set to profit the most. Do you want to post about the genocide in Gaza? Try to make it seem like you’re talking about travel or lifestyle—that’s the only way you might not get shadow-banned.

If we point out that this is censorship, we are gaslit—as my friend, Dr. Caroline Are has pointed out in a recent study comparing the experiences of pro-Palestine and sex positive content creators (I’m sorry, pr0-P@lestine and s3x p0sitive creators, as I would be forced to say on this app)—and told this isn’t happening at all. Instagram had the chance to be for Gaza what Facebook was for the Arab revolutions—a platform where young, Palestinian content creators and journalists could show the world what was happening to their homeland in real time. Instead, it buried them and everyone standing in solidarity with them, making it normal to simply look away.

It’s created a political environment where posting an aesthetically pleasing carousel about Gaza to your Instagram stories is considered “brave”—and then entire culture wars are fought over who posted about Gaza and who didn’t, creating a battle of virtue signaling that has nothing to do with people surviving genocide in Gaza at all. Amidst this censorship, we are told that social media is all about authenticity—just be yourself! But it is not actual authenticity—it is a carefully curated façade of relatability, cosplaying as authenticity. How do I just be myself? No one should have to spend hours coming up with a marketing plan around this.

Of course, social media can still be an invaluable tool. I met many of the people in Love Across Borders through various forms of social media—and, fittingly, social media facilitated so many of their love stories. Facebook brought two childhood sweethearts back together after they were separated by the war in Yemen, and WhatsApp allows families separated by the US/Mexico border to stay in touch in spite of deportations and border restrictions—and will doubtlessly become even more important to these families in the coming months.

But Big Tech is even trying to manipulate love. This week, the New York Times published a story about a woman has fallen in love with her ChatGPT-powered AI boyfriend, and hundreds of men are falling in love with their AI girlfriends, who listen to them and indulge their sexual fantasies amidst a loneliness crisis borne of a dearth of human connection. No matter how you feel about this—that these people are lonely or pathetic or onto something, what with the current state of dating these days—these robots are taking the most intimate details of someone’s life, whether they’re deeply held secrets or sexual fantasies, and storing that data to be used—how, you ask? Who the fuck knows.

I also think that there is something to be said for social media being a vehicle to deliver valuable information to people where they are—and in a world where more and more traditional media outlets are shutting down, where newspapers barely exist, and television might be replaced by YouTube at any moment, this feels incredibly important. But it also feels increasingly impossible in a world where platforms can be banned and shutdown, where instead of letting people start revolutions, it is being shaped to normalize toxic masculinity and mass deportations.

Now, it is perfectly okay to say “immigrants are trash” or “trans people are immoral”—but TikTok is being banned in the name of national security. Apparently, this is in line with the principles of “free speech,” but I really wonder if “white men are turds” or “western colonialism wrecked the world” will be welcomed with the same gusto as “I’m a proud racist.”

Once upon a time, social media was used to power revolutions. Now, it upholds regimes.