You Can Post Your Way Out of Fascism if You Own the Means of Posting

15 Feb 2025

I’ve been mulling over Janus Rose’s recent 404 Media article, “You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism.”. In many ways, she’s not wrong. But once again people are ignoring an entirely other way of doing social media that can, in fact, fight fascism.

Rose’s article made the rounds in the social media feeds I follow. And for good reason. Many folks are deeply troubled – and frightened – of what’s happening in the USA. People who pay attention know that the difference between a democratic state and an authoritarian one is indifference, which is to say that if institutions are indifferent about stopping someone like Trump from abusing his power, he is de facto an authoritarian leader. And there’s a lot of indifference in the US government right now.

So people want to find a way to stop Trumpism, and they’re eager for guidance – hence the sharing of Rose’s article.

What is to be done? Well, Rose argues that there is no antidote to Trumpian poison to be found in merely taking to social media and posting about his (or Elon Musk’s, or Pete Hesgeth’s, or any other Trumpist’s) bizarre or cruel statements. “If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president,” she writes, “it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want.”

Rose points to the work of political theorists and sociologists, arguing that being outraged and overwhelmed is the point. “Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt warned us that the point of this deluge is not to persuade, but to overwhelm and paralyze our capacity to act.” She draws on the work of Katherine Cross to argue that corporate social media is all too happy to provide an outlet for the rage. Cross “documents how tech platforms encourage us, through their design affordances, to post and seethe and doomscroll into the void, always reacting and never acting.”

Cross’s language is an apt description of corporate social media – X and Meta properties are now full-on algorithmic outrage engines, designed to keep us looking, scrolling, and posting. (And never forget why: they sell our attention to marketers. That’s their whole purpose.)

Instead, as Rose argues, people need to get organized – to do actual, on-the-ground activism, rather than merely posting about the outage du jour.

Slactivism 2.0?

One might be tempted to dismiss Rose’s argument because it’s not new. It’s basically a repetition of the “slacktivism” complaint popularized by Evgeny Morozov in the early 2010s. (Morozov’s own argument repeated arguments made in the 1990s, but I will stick with 2010s on).

Against the backdrop of breathless proclamations about “Facebook revolutions” and “Twitter democracy,” Morozov argued that what was really happening was that corporate social media activism allowed people to confuse clicking “like” on a political post with actually doing something about it. Rose herself repeats this argument (by way of citing Cross): “the greatest [sin] is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism, when it is at best a coping mechanism—an individualist solution to problems that can only be solved by collective action.”

The slacktivism critique probably reached its high water mark with the Kony 2012 phenomenon, a short Youtube video which promised viewers that they could bring an end to Joseph Kony’s use of children as soldiers with “just a click.” Clicking, it was argued, is a far cry from on-the-ground, collective organizing to combat the use of children in warfighting in Uganda.

The memes mocking this notion soon followed. The memes encapsulate the major critique of slacktivism: raising “awareness” of social ills does nothing to actually address them.

“Slacktivism” was thus contrasted with “real activism” – marches, protests, community organizing, raising and distributing resources, and the like.

So, we have a dichotomy here: either you’re posting and liking on social media, or you’re on the streets, organizing and fighting back. It’s a dichotomy that we’ve been hearing about since at least the 2010s.

Indeed, Rose’s argument also goes in this direction, updating it for 2025. She points to anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions and efforts to provide shelter for the unhoused. She argues that these arose from real organizing, not just posting. “Some of these efforts were coordinated online over Discord and secure messaging apps, but all of them arose from existing networks of neighbors and community organizers, some of whom have been organizing for decades.” Such real organizing is what we need: “when it comes to addressing the problems we face, no amount of posting or passive info consumption is going to substitute the hard, unsexy work of organizing.”

Beyond the Dichotomy

There are two ways out of the dichotomy between doomscrolling/posting and getting organized. One way is to argue that it is a false dichtomy – that posting and organizing aren’t mutually exclusive. Critics of the “slacktivism” complaint have done that work, arguing that online activism enables marginalized people to start getting involved, and that arguments that online activism is worthless discourage people from doing anything at all.

I won’t repeat these arguments, though I certainly talk about them when I teach classes about social movements. Instead, here I will point to another way out, one that I’ve been studying since before the “slacktivism” complaint gained prominence in the early 2010s.

It won’t surprise you to learn that I argue for alternative social media where its users – or, as I prefer, members – are in control. These systems have been around since the early 2010s – indeed, they arose right around the time of Morozov’s slacktivism complaint. The latest iteration is ActivityPub-enabled federated social media.

Can folks doomscroll on the fediverse? Yes. Can folks post on the fediverse? Yes. Might they post about the latest outrage of Trump? Yes, definitely.

Does that mean they are failing to fight incipient fascism? No.

In fact, I argue that the act of running, moderating, and participating in federated social media is precisely the sort of organizing that Rose calls for. It’s just taking place in a media environment, rather than, say, in an NGO’s offices in a city.

Communities who make their own codes of conduct collectively establish how they want to relate to one another. They make decisions about content moderation. They make decisions about federating and defederating with other instances. They are governing themselves online.

This is another example of the “hard, unsexy work of organizing.” Moreover, to quote Rose further: “We need to collectively decide what kind of world we actually do want, and what we’re willing to do to achieve it.” Exactly. And part of that world is the communication infrastructure. Who should own it? Who should govern it? To what purpose should it be put – marketing messages and consumerism, or collective sensemaking?

With Silicon Valley executives and media moguls openly allying themselves with Donald Trump – and with Musk, owner of a major communication platform, actively involved in the Trump administration – we need media that operates outside of corporate control. We need non-capitalist, non-centralized media.

Indeed, we already have it! It’s been around for quite some time! And if you want unsexy hard work, set up your own server, recruit people to it, and moderate it.

The Art of Forgetting

It’s odd that I have to write this, because once again I feel like an actual, existing alternative to corporate social media exists.

But what’s odder to me still is that Rose ropes Bluesky into the same orbit as Twitter/X or Facebook:

Many Twitter refugees made a good choice in migrating from Musk’s X to Bluesky, carving out a new online space that is inhospitable to bigoted debate bros and time-wasting trolls. But in their enemies’ absence, many of these Left-leaning posters have just reverted to dunking on each other, preferring the catharsis of sectarian conflict over the hard work of organizing.

I thought Bluesky was supposed to be the alternative that allowed people more control? That puts algorithms in the hands of end users? That gives people choices? Instead, Rose is equating Bluesky with other corporate social media – it, like Meta or X, does not encourage “the hard work of organizing.”

I increasingly tend to agree with that equation. Bluesky PBC has taken venture capital funding. It will face pressure to monetize. And along with that, it seems less and less invested in developing actual ways to decentralize.

However, you might disagree. Let’s set that aside. For now, I will point out that the critique of social media as a space for mere posting, doomscrolling, and algorithmic manipulation simply does not apply to the fediverse. The fediverse demands the hard work of organizing.

But for Rose to write this article, the only way the argument works is to forget the existence of the fediverse.

In my time studying non-corporate social media, I’ve seen this forgetting again and again. Fortunately, I’ve also seen the activists who make, run, moderate and participate in these non-corporate alternatives keep going, in spite of being forgotten or ignored.

That gives me hope that we can post our way out of fascism… on our social media.

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• Alternative Social Media