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

This article

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.

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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.