The Activist’s Double-Edged Sword: Social Media
When Elon Musk acquired X (formerly Twitter) and declared himself a free speech absolutist, the practical result was not more speech. It was a shift in whose speech the platform amplified. The same question applies to social media more broadly: not whether it gives people a voice, but whose voice actually gets heard, and why.
#MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter showed what social media can do when it works: turn private experiences into public ones, build solidarity across distance, and push issues that traditional media had largely ignored into the mainstream. The barrier to entry is genuinely low. A post can reach millions for nothing. For marginalised groups that previously had no platform, that matters.
But those same features cut both ways. Platforms optimise for engagement, not accuracy. Emotion spreads faster than nuance, and controversy travels further than fact. A movement that chases what performs well online can end up winning attention while losing the argument.
The EU's 2022 Code of Practice on Disinformation is an attempt to address this at the policy level. It is a voluntary framework, signed by major platforms including Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, along with advertising and civil society groups. But voluntary means optional, and the platforms that signed up still profit from the engagement that misinformation drives. That is the part the code cannot fix.
Social media is not a neutral tool that activists can just pick up and use on their own terms. The incentives, the misinformation, the framework failures all come with it, and they shape what advocacy looks like, whether activists want them to or not. That is probably the most important thing to understand. It is not just that social media is powerful. It has its own logic, and that logic does not always point in the same direction as the cause.
If the platform is built to serve its owners, the activist using it is never fully in control of what gets heard. A voluntary code of practice does not change that.
