While social media platforms are rife with problems — from harassment to misinformation — many argue that the platforms also nurture political movements, such as the and .

But in her new book “,” , a 91̽�� doctoral student in the Information School, argues that social media may not have much political value. Focused on movements on the political left, Cross looks at how platforms like X and Facebook might bring attention to political causes, yet they do little to cultivate lasting change. “The idea that tech is political,” Cross writes, “sometimes obscures the ways in which social media may be anti-political.”

91̽��News spoke with Cross about the book and why people simply logging off — spending less time on social media platforms — may be the best solution.

Your core argument is that social media platforms are fundamentally “anti-political.” Can you explain what you mean by that and why that is?

Katherine Cross: A wave of techno-optimism washed over us in the mid-to-late 2000s, which coincided with the rise of and contemporary social media. These new platforms no longer siloed you in forums or chat rooms. Instead, you were suddenly able to sort of tap a digital microphone and speak to the whole world at once, with no barriers. That made crowdsourcing a reality. We started to see major, leaderless protests , . We saw people going out onto the streets, organized in many ways by simply reading social media posts. It seemed almost like magic, like we had bypassed the old power networks and hierarchies of governments and big businesses and unions. This seemed to change the course of history when movements like the Arab Spring protests toppled governments.

But many of my own experiences in online activism made me begin asking what happens next. As I followed up on a lot of these protests, after the cameras went away, there seemed to be little durable change. Yes, governments fell. But the next generation of rulers that stepped in were the same sort of oligarchs as before. Does anyone really believe that Egypt’s current president is substantially ideologically different from Hosni Mubarak?

That’s the unfortunate story of a lot of these internet-fired movements. #MeToo is another example — the changes were considerably less durable than we had hoped. Time and again, people fixate on moments of individual justice, and they hope that those episodes stand in for collective, structural changes that are more significant and durable. The prosecution of Harvey Weinstein, for instance, was a doubtlessly an accomplishment of the #MeToo movement. Yet .

Crowdsourcing on social media gives the illusion of collective action and power, but it lacks the ability to direct the mass of people towards any kind of sustainable collective goal. You might be able to change one person, but you cannot actually change the world because crowdsourcing is not sustainable organization, and it cannot direct political power.

Do you see the same anti-political patterns playing out in right-wing movements?

KC: I do. Social media compels a fixation on the symbolic, on the gestural, on points of language and aesthetics — things that are much easier to debate on social media than matters of greater substance. The things we see catch fire are less nuanced policy debates and more like the nonsense that flared up around accepting that very brief sponsorship from Bud Light. The unbelievable hate directed against her was in many ways readymade for social media, because it was purely gestural and aesthetic. “I don’t like this person because she’s trans. Let’s debate whether she’s a woman, let’s debate whether she fits into Bud Light’s core demographic, and then let’s ruthlessly pile on to her and anyone who defends her and attack the company to demand — what?” Something nebulous, some vibe.

If you want to attack and try to destroy a person, or to be bigoted against a community by singling out a member of that community for abuse, social media is your best ally in that cause. And yet, those on the right also have their own collectivist visions. Some of them dream of a new Reich or perhaps they dream of . But they’re not going to get those things through social media posting.

You argue also that the new, decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky aren’t a solution to this broken model that Twitter made popular. What problems do you see with the new platforms and their attempts to fix the trouble with Twitter?

KC: The problem with a platform like Mastodon is that Twitter’s culture persists — the callouts, the cliquishness, the harassment campaigns, the prejudice. There are some additional speed bumps in the way of harassment, for instance, but Mastodon really just replicates a lot of the drama-mongering that Twitter became infamous for. I was on a trans-woman-led Mastodon, and it became subject to a lot of vicious drama from outside that led to the destruction of the server.

Bluesky is even more like Twitter, because even though it can be decentralized into various servers, almost everyone is still on bluesky.social, the primary server. So the experience is very similar to the firehose of content that you got on Twitter. It does overall have less prejudice — far fewer Nazis, which is wonderful. Certain marginalized communities have built a new home there. People are now able to create their own servers. That should lead to the full decentralization of the platform, making it less vulnerable to, say, a billionaire takeover, which is all for the good.

But I don’t know that we are going to solve the bigger problems using anything that even remotely resembles a Web 2.0 platform. I’ve started posting less on Bluesky, because I realized I was going back to this old place where I’m angry all the time and starting arguments with people. Instead, I’ve started focusing on talking to the people that I’ve met there off the platform or just responding to the posts that I can be pleasant to. But social media is meant to lull you into acting almost automatically, so the fact that you still have to consciously resist indicates that not too much has changed here yet.

That brings us to the title of the book — “Log Off.” Can you explain why you arrived at that prescription?

KC: Every time I’ve felt my perspective shifting for the better, it has come from spending less time on social media and more time reimmersing myself in my community. I also recognized that those of us who were privileged enough to be able to work from home throughout much of the pandemic ended up spending even more time on social media — the effects of which were resolutely negative. I saw people go down these rabbit holes of political radicalization and paranoia. I thought, “I know you in person, this isn’t you.” But they’d migrated much of their social life onto a platform that rewards this new, more toxic, hair-trigger self.

In preliminary research for my dissertation, several public health experts have told me that Twitter polarized their profession during the pandemic along lines drawn by social media. Historically, their discourse would have been good-faith, behind-the-scenes disagreements about things like transmission mechanisms. But during the pandemic, some of these researchers gained huge followings, and suddenly they had to please people who were expecting them to take a side. That made it harder for those experts to tell the truth as they saw it, or to adapt what they were saying to new evidence. Public health experts hoped to use Twitter to hold a free, graduate-level seminar for the world. But instead, suddenly, there were massive camps of fandom in the general public with signs and slogans and half-baked understandings of the minutiae of those academic disputes. So Twitter beefs began getting litigated in the physical world at conferences and universities.

All of this made me think the most effective solution that an individual can take is to spend less time on social media. Ask yourself very seriously: “If I’m trying to use the platform for some political purpose, will it help achieve my goal? And how?” If you can’t answer that question, in the affirmative, with details, then you should log off and find a different approach.

Is there anything you want to add?

KC: Social media provides a lot of momentary, individual emotional satisfaction, and it’s easy to mistake that for politics. These platforms encourage that individualization. Yes, you are the product, as the cliche goes, but you’re also this solitary unit being served. When that happens, you start wanting to satisfy your emotional needs over everything else. A lot of internet discourse about politics is about venting, the desire to feel heard. It’s very therapeutic. But while that may have some value, in a limited sense, it is deeply antithetical to real politics, because politics is never truly about the individual: It’s about the collective, the polity. But social media’s prioritizing of individual emotion is anathema to real organizing.

For more information, contact kcross1@uw.edu.

Major platform social media is in an upheaval. Bluesky and Meta’s Threads want to be Twitter. LinkedIn’s . Meanwhile, Twitter has become X. And X wants to be — possibly including job listings, payment and ride-hailing — even as . Amid this, after announces the impending death of social media.

The turmoil has many people reconsidering what they want out of social media at scale: Can it be better? Four researchers at the 91̽�� have approached this question from different angles.

, a 91̽��assistant professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, was the senior author of two papers at the in Minneapolis last week. One about where articles on social media came from, with the aim of curbing misinformation; the other looks at affects social media users.

For the last couple years, , a 91̽��doctoral student in the Information School who researches online harassment, has written a that often focuses on the trouble with social media. , a 91̽��doctoral student in the Allen School, studies how people enter dissociative states on social media. , a 91̽��assistant professor in the iSchool, is researching tools to on social media.

91̽��News talked with the four of them about what’s wrong with social media and how it might improve.

What are some significant problems you see with major social media platforms?

Amy X. Zhang:  A big problem to me is the centralization of power — that the platforms can decide what content should be shown and what should get posted to the top of one feed for millions of people. That brings up issues of accountability and of localization to specific communities or cultures. A singular perspective — oftentimes coming from, for example, workers in Silicon Valley — won’t fit for lots of people. Alongside this is the homogenization of our digital social experiences, which don’t come close to the richness and vividness of our actual social lives.

Katherine Cross: Amy is quite right. I would add that open platforms — which anyone can join and on which everyone talks to everyone, constantly — allow for the most rapid acceleration of virality, far beyond anything that has existed previously. It also means that if someone is trying to start a harassment campaign, they can easily spread it virally to thousands of users. Those of us who remember LiveJournal know that earlier iterations of the Internet were no stranger to drama and harassment. But the design of earlier platforms provided a great many speed bumps for toxicity and abuse. A lot of that friction has gone away as a condition of the design of open platforms. So whether it’s Tumblr or Twitter or Facebook, these platforms allow for the most rapid acceleration of the worst aspects of our internet use.

Amanda Baughan: Some other problems are the many mechanisms that seek to draw people in and keep them on a site. These can be notifications that are personalized to the content that you like or the time you normally open the app; the infinite feeds that keep you scrolling; and the rewards structure that keeps you on the hunt for content that might scratch your brain in the way that you find most appealing. Even though social media could be a great tool for connection or self-expression, people are often in an adversarial relationship with these interfaces that are trying to keep them stuck.

Martin Saveski: I will add that these platforms are designed for very shallow connections. Right now, I’m asking: How can we design platforms with scale but still provide an environment where people can communicate and connect more deeply? After Twitter open-sourced its feed algorithm and many of the Facebook files were released, we know what we’d previously guessed: They primarily optimize for engagement. So how do we do that better? It’s clear that there is value in engagement. But perhaps there are other things that we could be thinking about when designing the experience.

How are you trying to make large social media platforms better for the people using them?

KC: My work is trying to do at least two things, practically. I’m looking at the lives and travails of content moderators, the people whose jobs it is to make the internet more usable for ordinary people. They deserve better working conditions and more mental health support. The second part is — I hate to make it seem so simple — almost an exhortation to spend less time on open platforms. As long as we have open platforms, the only effective solution for a number of problems is to simply get people to use these platforms less.

AB: I’ve been thinking a lot about our experiences online as dissociative, rather than addictive. Dissociation can be part of healthy cognitive functioning. Daydreaming, for example, is considered dissociation. But when you combine people’s reduced self-reflection and self-monitoring on a platform designed to keep them on a site, people start to sink more time into the platform than they really want to. This explains part of why people have these fraught relationships with their social media — neither satisfied, nor willing to quit. So I’ve looked at designs that might help people re-engage their self-monitoring and disrupt dissociation. For example, platforms could separate content into smaller chunks, which is currently available on X; add a “you’re all caught up” label; or tell users they’ve been scrolling for a certain amount of time.

AXZ: I’ve been looking at what it would mean to decentralize these major platforms’ power by building tools for users or communities who don’t have lots of time and resources. For instance, if you are getting harassed and you’re developing word lists and blocking harassers, can we that lets you share that with people in a similar situation? I’m also really interested in , like WhatsApp or Signal. Right now, because of encryption, nobody’s moderating content. The platform can’t do it, and there aren’t tools for users or communities to do it. So you just have massive issues with abuse on these platforms.

MS: Recently I’ve worked with collaborators at Stanford to think about how to . Intentionally or not, algorithms reflect values. We found that if we encode democratic values in platforms’ algorithms, we see a reduction in polarization, but people are still reasonably engaged. Now we’re launching a larger field experiment to study how people are affected if we sort their feeds differently or remove some types of information from them?

What do you see as the potential for large social media?

AXZ: I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with Twitter. It has been great for my career in many ways. I used to spend lots of time sharing my research, hearing about other people’s research, sometimes even starting collaborations. Twitter has been the de facto place for academic sharing and conversation, but should it be? Is it a place where junior scholars feel welcome to participate? Is it inclusive of everyone’s voices? Is it what we really want out of a forum for scholarly communication? In some ways, yes. But in many ways, no. Twitter has had so many problems over the years with harassment. If we were to design something that reflects the values of an academic community, which does want to be inclusive and to share its research with the world, what could that look like? I don’t know exactly, but I do think it takes some rethinking.

KC: Again, I agree completely with Amy. Twitter could, in theory, be good for sharing articles. Occasionally, when an article of mine really caught fire, it was partially because it was getting shared a lot on a platform like Twitter. But I’ve watched online harassment dynamics play out between journalists or academics. For example, I followed a lot of epidemiologists and public health experts, all of whom had expertise on COVID-19. And I watched as their excessive use of Twitter led them to degenerate into these warring camps. I’ve spoken to many of these people privately, and they said that it corroded actual academic relationships. That’s where I feel that the professional benefits are sometimes overstated.

These platforms can also be good for interpersonal relationships. I’ve made a lot of friends through Twitter. It has occasionally helped my career. It’s useful for networking in very small minority communities, like the transgender community, or any number of other groups of people who make up 1% of the population. It’s also been great for private crowdfunding because of the ease of virality on an open platform. But I still think that there is something to be said for recouping some of these benefits on smaller, more closed platforms.

Given all the turmoil with major platforms lately, are you hopeful about any of the changes you’re seeing either in platforms or in how the public is relating to these platforms?

MS: In an interesting way, the fact that Musk closed Twitter’s data access has encouraged researchers to think beyond Twitter. I’m personally very excited about new social media platforms — especially Bluesky, because people can own their data and also control what they see in their feeds without it being so centralized. Hopefully, that will lead to a better version of whatever we’ve had.

AB: The recent changes of Twitter have shown how much platform design and governance can have a huge impact on people’s experiences. I’ve seen the quality of my feed get much worse, and it’s led me to log off much more quickly. So I hope that this has led people — who aren’t just social media researchers — to question how these platforms are made and how they want to use them.

KC: I effectively stopped using Twitter when Musk took over, but earlier this year, I gave up on it completely. I think that, like Amanda, I take hope from the fact that a lot of people are clearing away their preconceptions about social media being inevitable and fixed. I always try to teach my students that no technology’s form is inevitable. We have a say over its shape.

AXZ: When I started grad school, Facebook was the dominant thing. It was so hard for me to imagine a world without it, or without the social networking paradigm of people following each other. I just assumed that this was the future. Now we’re in this fragmented landscape. People are leaving Facebook for other platforms, then leaving those platforms for even other platforms. We lose something with that fragmentation, for sure. When Twitter first appeared, there was some excitement about its role for democracy, that it could be “the global town square.” It was perhaps naive of us to think that, and we’ve learned the downsides. Now we’re correcting toward a fragmented landscape, which is maybe more reflective of how we interact socially and is perhaps healthier.

KC: In my dissertation, I argue that social media has often been anti-political. During the previous in 2009, for instance, there was so much hope that Twitter and open platforms like it were going to be self-organizing networks that could change the world. What we began to get were things like the , during which , but not the endurance of democracy, because the latter requires a public to be able to deliberate. In theory, Twitter can get masses of people out onto the streets, which is extraordinarily important. But it gives them no mechanism for deciding what to do with all that power that they have gained. And it’s why these movements often dissolve. These platforms are very good at provoking internecine conflict, but not good at providing a space for safe, effective deliberation to do or become something new as a collective.

For more information, contact Baughan at baughan@cs.uw.edu, Cross at kcross1@uw.edu, Saveski at msaveski@uw.edu and Zhang at axz@cs.uw.edu.