Category: Social MediaCategory: Social Media

According to Ken Klippenstein, “the government is building a sociological profile of political discontent.”

Homeland security field agents are scouring the social media site Reddit, monitoring the communications of law-abiding Americans critical of the agency.

And if they’re scouring sites like Reddit, you know damn well they’re scouring Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and everywhere else.

Raziq Rauf from Running Sucks wrote about how some running clubs are choosing to not post about their events on social media because they don’t want to tip off ICE.

“I learned about all these run clubs from Instagram, but we’re doing a new thing where if you wanna get with South Central Run Club, you have to be in our Signal chat. South Central deals with hyper-policing. Most of our runners are Black and brown and you never know when ICE is gonna pull up. Instead of broadcasting our runs and making us vulnerable to surveillance, we stopped putting it on Instagram to make people feel safer to come and hang out.“

Exercising our legal right to free speech and protest (or just run with our friends) is hard without some of these digital tools, especially when those tools are owned by the very forces we oppose, but as Priya Parker says, “connection is the antidote to fascism.”

You think if you leave social media you’ll lose community and clients, right?

Well, what happens if you get locked out of your account? Or the platform shuts down?

You’d definitely lose all your community and clients then, right?!

So are you really comfortable leaving all of those people in the hands of the techbro industrial complex?

What’s the preventative action you could take today to ensure you can reach your people?

Consider that most of your potential clients are in their inbox all day.
And you could email those potential clients while everyone else is making dance videos or writing 1000 word “thought leader” posts on LinkedIn.

Perhaps the question isn’t “what if I lose people by leaving social media?”
The question becomes, “how can I future-proof my community and clients WITHOUT social media?”

What could this future-proofing strategy look like for you?

This from River Selby:

Whenever we log on to a social media platform, we risk our autonomy, our agency as human beings. Everyone, myself included, wants to think that they are resistant to the negative aspects of social media: advertising, algorithmic persuasion, etc. But we aren’t. The more time we spend on these platforms, the more vulnerable we are to persuasion.

The goal of every platform is to keep you on the platform, nothing else. The time you spend on their site or app, it builds value for their shareholders, and you hand over data by the truckload with every click, swipe, and like.

Read the rest of “The Resistance Will Not Happen On Instagram (or Facebook or TikTok)” here.

During a recent live stream I got this question in the chat:

You talk about not needing to be everywhere. But what about people who do want to be everywhere—those with big, rockstar-level ambitions? How should they think about that?

Firstly, especially in the vertical video world: TikTok, YouTube Shorts, Instagram Reels – if that’s the game you want to play, fine. Make one video and post it in three places. Go be on every platform. Go post everywhere.

But the odds aren’t in your favor, especially since everyone else is playing the same game.

But what if you took one day a week and instead of posting everywhere, you emailed people who are already rock stars? What if you reached out to the people who are already doing the work you want to be doing? Who are the people that might help you ascend to the next level?

What happens when you become friends with people in those places?

So much of this game is about who you know.

 “I don’t need much to do much” is something I mentioned to someone earlier this week. Maybe we don’t need 4K cameras or big ad spends to get the word out.

Posting on social media is like buying a lottery ticket, because maybe it’ll pay off. But contacting the people who can directly help you? They either write you back, or they don’t – those are 50/50 odds, much better than gambling with an algorithm and hoping it just “works out.”