Fired Up
A new generation of social media influencers is gearing up to leverage its clout to fight hate speech and the Trump Administration's attacks on civil society.
Can social media still be used effectively to organize for social change? Free speech attorney Nora Benavidez, GenZ influencer Deja Foxx, BlueSky CEO Jay Graber and scores of other tech leaders and influencers taking the SXSW stage here this week say yes. Some of that work has already begun.
AUSTIN, TEXAS—Last year at the annual SXSW conference held here annually, the vibe was a kind of sub-basement worry over the state of democracy. This year here in Austin? For some, one of shock and awe in response to the new Trump Administration’s ongoing attacks on civil society—a sector which this conference’s leaders and attendees have always held dear.
Despite the weaponization of some of the leading social media platforms by diehard Trump supporters trafficking in hate speech, could social media still be used effectively in some form to fight back?
“It’s now or never,” says celebrity GenZ influencer Deja Foxx. “Right now we’re in such a tenuous global moment regarding our democracies worldwide, I don’t think we can afford to stand back nor rely on our leaders, alone, to save us.”
Fighting Back
Speaking Monday at a gathering of influencers discussing the rise of hate speech online, free speech attorney Nora Benavidez of Free Press urged attendees to “not give up” on using social media to organize for change.
“Social media platforms initially held a lot of promise at the start of the Internet age, enabling us all to be connected actively,” she said. Social movements like #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, #MarchForOurLives and others later became international movements and in most cases, led to policy reforms. “But now,” Benavidez said, “it’s getting harder. We’ve seen all systems, and particularly social media, get weaponized, despite a lot of pressure to push Meta, Instagram, Facebook and other platforms to do better.”
Elon Musk “and other bad actors,” she added, “are now testing the edges of how far they can push the platforms.” Over the last two years, social media companies, including Meta, X, Facebook and others have fired staff that had been moderating content. Fact-checking has also been discontinued.
“But this doesn’t mean the battle is over,” Benavidez said. “It does mean it’s time to fight back.”
Said Foxx: “We’re out on a limb now, a decade after social media was still working more strongly. Today’s platforms are swinging to the right and they’re censoring information, like on things like reproductive rights. And for content creators like me, it’s become increasingly difficult to use these platforms to create change and develop community.”
Bluesky to the rescue?
Bluesky, the popular new platform alternative, has positioned itself to help.
Its CEO, Jay Graber, an early keynoter here this week, told attendees that decentralized platforms like the one she’s building with Bluesky, “prioritize users over the platform’s bottom-line interests.”
“…If a billionaire came in and bought Bluesky or took it over or, if I decided tomorrow to change things in a way that people really didn’t like, then they could fork off and go on to another application,” Graber said onstage. “There’s already applications in the network that give you another way to view the network or you could build a new one as well. And so that openness guarantees that there’s always the ability to move to a new alternative.”
Bluesky is built on the open-source AT Protocol, and its users, Graber said, “like the fact that Bluesky’s open social media ecosystem ultimately means that no one person controls it.”
At 33 million users, Bluesky is still much smaller than Meta Chief Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp tally. Meta, alone, has more than 3 billion daily active users.
But Graber says Bluesky is just getting started, offering people “real choice now,” and not just a new platform but “a new paradigm”—a new way of thinking about what’s possible while being connected in more independent, social change-making ways.
Benavidez says new platforms and more organizing offline will help build the new movement. “Digital life is not real life,” she told conference attendees. “You have to mobilize on social media and in person to make change now, to mute hate speech and organize, and to break the ‘bro-ligarchy’ that Elon Musk and others have now on most other social platforms.”
And the good news, she said, is that “we now have new and very real possibilities, new platforms like Bluesky encouraging us and a lot of growing motivation among influencers. I see that we are starting small, but we’re starting now. The urgency is felt, and the energy is growing fast.”
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Marcia, I used to be enthusiastic about bsky, but became extremely disillusioned when hundreds of people, myself included, challenged this one year anniversary message which reeks of ageism: https://bsky.app/profile/thischairrocks.bsky.social/post/3liu6nuxzdk2c
To this day, questions about it directed at JG have gone unanswered...it has alienated many older adults.