Reimagining Social Media and Social Movements in Crisis

Once regarded as a democratizing force that social movements could leverage, social media has increasingly become a site of corporate control, state surveillance, and algorithmic suppression. The relationship between social media and social movements has reached a crisis point in recent years amid ongoing global geopolitical shifts, including the rise of authoritarianism, escalating attacks on progressive movements, and humanitarian crises. As governments and corporations tighten control over digital spaces and information warfare is escalating, there is a need to reimagine how social movements engage with social media—and to examine the role of computing scholars in documenting, theorizing, and facilitating these engagements.

Social movements are collective efforts oriented towards change [4] and have long innovated with and leveraged technologies [3], even before the emergence of the Internet. However, the rise of social media reshaped how social movements communicate, mobilize, and organize. Platforms such as Twitter (now X), Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp have been used to amplify messages beyond mainstream media coverage [8, 13], increase visibility [2, 7], mediate emancipatory journalism by allowing marginalized groups to report on their own experiences [15], and serve as semi-permanent records of activism [1]. Beyond communication, social media has facilitated mobilization and coordination. Public-facing platforms have extended the reach of movements by increasing their capacity to mobilize [21]. Further, messaging applications such as WhatsApp, Messenger, Signal, and Telegram have been crucial for internal coordination [10]. The affordances of social media have shaped the nature of organizing; for instance, leaderless movements [10, 11, 17, 20] have illustrated how digital platforms enable coordination without hierarchical leadership.

However, critiques have cautioned against a techno-utopian view of social media inherently enhancing the abilities of social movements to achieve democratizing change. Some have criticized "clicktivism" as a shallow form of engagement that prioritizes online visibility over sustained political action [6]. Others have argued that hierarchical organizations with resources are better positioned to take advantage of the affordances of social media [18]. Moreover, there have been continuities between traditional media repression and digital repression, through censorship, surveillance, and Internet shutdowns.

Though these debates have been ongoing for close to two decades, in recent years it has become increasingly evident that social media has fallen short of being a utopian democratic space. Activists and citizens now face growing uncertainty and fear on social media due to surveillance, platform censorship, and algorithmic suppression. Authoritarian regimes have actively sought to deter activism and non-conforming online discourses by sowing mistrust and fear within communication networks [14], resulting in self-censorship and decreased use of ICTs in mediating and organizing social movements [16]. Recent technology policy changes have exacerbated these concerns, such as the shutting down of fact checking on Meta platforms (Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook) in 2025, following X in 2023 [9]. Simultaneously, government-led censorship, chilling effects, echo chambers, and polarization have intensified globally. Coupled with the widespread deregulation of AI, these trends have contributed to a rise in misinformation. These ongoing sociotechnical and geopolitical crises have added new layers of complexity to the imaginaries of social media and social movements.

In response, we call on HCI scholars, designers, practitioners, and activists to take a step back and critically think of the following:

• How might we better recognize and understand the evolving challenges and tactics of social movements in the context of ongoing sociotechnical and geopolitical crises?

• How might we extend our theoretical lenses to approach the intersection of social media and social movements?

• How might we reflect on our roles—as HCI researchers, designers, practitioners, activists, or somewhere in between—when engaging with this topic? And how might we draw from HCI’s legacies of justice-oriented and liberatory research to navigate these crises collectively going forward?