Resistance or Complicity? The Engineered Paradox of Digital Activism

I.

There’s a particular kind of dissonance in watching genocide unfold on a platform designed to sell us things. The urgency, inescapability, and effortlessness of our witness—and its futility. It recalls Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, a 2,000-page artistic-historical work evidencing the Soviet system of repression. Carried in memory and smuggled out on scraps of paper, preserved through countless acts of defiance, it outlived the regime it condemned. Today the archive stands on shelves as warning, its power tangible in its weight.

Meanwhile, on my screen: real-time slaughter, squeezed and flattened into tiles between ads and holiday snaps—then gone with the scroll of a finger. As the genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in the West Bank continue, a question becomes unavoidable: What is the role—and the cost—of tools marketed for connection, but built only to view, tap, and scroll?

Meta has simultaneously censored evidence of the genocide in Gaza and profited from funding it. Between October 2023 and April 2025, Meta complied with 94 percent of content takedown requests by the Israeli government.¹ Meanwhile, between March and July 2025, the company ran at least 117 ads on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads soliciting donations for Israeli military units. These ads generated at least 76,000 impressions in the EU and UK alone and raised over $2.4 million combined through their linked donation pages.² Meta took them down after the watchdog group and journalists reached out—only for a near-identical batch of ads to appear a few months later.

Corporate social media platforms we use are not neutral. They serve shareholders, who profit from our attention and engagement. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), Shoshana Zuboff defines the term as an economic system built to turn human experience into free raw material. Organizations mine our digital data into prediction products that anticipate what we will do next. For activists who use social media, this means that any call to action or information shared can become a commodity—sold to the highest bidder and used to steer our behavior later.

Capitalism and settler colonialism are entwined and mutually reinforcing systems operating through the same logic of extraction and control in pursuit of domination. Whereas Instagram profits by seizing and holding our attention, a settler colonial state profits by seizing and holding land. Both turn life itself into a resource to be captured and monetized. Our every click, every post—no matter how defiant—fuels the same machinery that profits from war and oppression. Regardless of the content shared, the ultimate beneficiaries of these platforms are not the people being starved in Gaza; they are the architects of their starvation.

What does it mean for our movements when we rely on technology we don’t control?

Our participation in these cycles is itself a stance—louder than anything we post. As Howard Zinn wrote, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train.”³ As these systems continue to devour our attention and earth itself, the question to ask ourselves is: In which direction is this train moving? And what if we stepped off?

There is a quote in Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle:

What is the most precious thing in the world? It seems to be the consciousness of not participating in injustice. Injustice is stronger than you are, it always was and it always will be, but let it not be committed through you.

In a world increasingly mediated by digital systems, holding to that compass feels more elusive than ever. Justice no longer resides solely in the physical or political realm—it is embedded in the infrastructures through which we connect. These systems were never built for liberation; profit is their raison d’être. When we entangle them with our resistance movements, justice moves farther and farther out of reach—an outcome hardwired into their code.

II.

During the ethnic displacement of Sheikh Jarrah in 2021, Palestinian activists utilized social media to reach a global audience directly and bypass the editorial filters that long dictated who gets to tell the stories. The violence of Israeli expulsions gained human faces, with Mohammed El-Kurd becoming a key figure: On May 11, CNN interviewed him via Skype, where he repeatedly refused the network’s framing, challenged the reporter’s use of the word “eviction,” reframing it as “ethnic cleansing,” and turned a question about “violent protests” around to the anchor by asking whether she supported the violence of his own family’s expulsion. In Terms of Servitude (2025), Omar Zahzah documents how this breakthrough into mainstream coverage was met, in the same moment, with mass censorship of Sheikh Jarrah–related content across Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The companies blamed “technical issues”; digital rights group 7amleh dismissed that excuse as insufficient, given the scale of the repression. El-Kurd has since reported his posts being censored or removed and argued that the movement succeeded not because of the platforms but despite them. Palestinian activists were heard only because they found creative ways to work around the systems’ constraints.

Visibility has power—impactful movements are built across political lines, and networks that cut across the spectrum are essential. But visibility is not the end goal; liberation is. Awareness only acquires meaning when it sparks a tangible response.

In May 2024, millions all over the world were outraged as Israel announced invasion of “safe zone” southern city of Rafah, housing about half of Gaza’s entire 2.3 million population. An AI-generated image of rows of tents with the text “ALL EYES ON RAFAH” became the most-shared AI image in history, amassing 46.6 million shares on Instagram by May 31.⁴ The message behind it: We care, and we’re watching.⁵

In an attempt to harness the momentum, BDS Movement’s official English-language account posted an “Urgent Action Alert”, sharing some data on Israel’s conduct in Rafah, context, and calling for people to escalate the economic pressure. Supporters were asked “channel their rage into effective, strategic BDS action” and provided a list of practical ways to do so. The post did not go on to reach the same virality: as of September 2026, it has 204 comments. The page of BDS Movement, one of the most established and organized forces for Palestinian solidarity, has 940 000 followers—2% of the number of those who proclaimed to be watching. This is no accident but the result of years of deliberate, multi-million-dollar investment in algorithms engineered to maximize engagement. The platforms did exactly what they were designed to do: Amplify vague, non-disruptive content while burying actionable demands. For us, a rare chance to pressure a key node of power was lost. Instead, the outrage was aimed at no one specific, demanded nothing, and disappeared down the feed. IDF tanks rolled into Rafah. The genocide only accelerated. Since that day, tens of thousands more Gazans have been killed.

III.

Audre Lorde urged us not to be silent, not to let our fear reshape our voices to maintain the enforced comfort of our surroundings: “we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us.”⁶ Our voices, she insisted, must come from within.

Speaking through a digital medium is submitting your voice to distortion before it even reaches anyone. When we type rather than speak, we destine our thoughts for conversion into 0s and 1s, reduction to electrical signals, flattening into copper cables. We hand our truth and inner worlds over to systems few of us fully understand, on a remarkable faith they’ll reach their recipients unchanged.

Lorde warned against letting fear from within silence us. In the digital medium, it is the outside forces that impose their nebulous censorship, forcing us to adapt our language on a mere suspicion that the omniscient system won’t let us in if we don’t. At a protest, our truth is unyielding. Online, we’ve conditioned ourselves to replace the defiant letters of Palestine with a meek watermelon emoji, to post perfunctory selfies in hopes that the innocuousness of our smiling faces might save us from a shadow ban. This is a more insidious form of self-censorship—a preemptive compliance with an arbitrarily evolving set of rules we’ve never been shown, never agreed to, and can’t contest.

IV.

In 2020, mass pro-democracy protests erupted in Belarus after Alexander Lukashenko blatantly falsified the presidential election. The regime responded with arrests, torture, and near-total internet shutdowns. Yet, the scale was unprecedented: a survey by Chatham House found that during August and September 2020 1 in 5 urban Belarusian adults took part in protests, and roughly double of that number support the protests unequivocally. Lukashenko stayed in power, but the movement reshaped civil society and established opposition leader Tsikhanouskaya as a legitimate figure abroad.⁷ Telegram played a key role in protest coordination. Even though it’s a questionable⁸ app,⁹ Telegram’s lack of algorithmic interference made it highly effective for real-time organizing. Messages  warning of riot police movements or tactics, or requests for medical supplies reached every follower instantly, allowing protesters to regroup and outmaneuver security forces. Human-led coordination prioritized agility and safety.

By contrast, X (formerly Twitter), Facebook, and Instagram are algorithmic: Content is ranked and promoted automatically based on predicted engagement. The algorithm does not account for content’s meaning or the author’s intention. Its purpose is keeping the user engaged, not relaying content—which is why we see less from people we choose to follow and more of what the platform thinks will hold our attention. Even without engagement-maximizing architecture, virality never guaranteed impact: Campaigns like #Kony2012 and #BringBackOurGirls achieved massive reach but failed to mobilize sustained action. Actions asked of viewers were symbolic—sharing a hashtag, or buying a bracelet—and left intact the structures they claim to oppose.

Speaking through a digital medium is submitting your voice to distortion before it even reaches anyone.

Developed to maximize screen time, algorithms suppress organizing by deprioritizing anything that nudges users away from the platform. The architecture is designed to be addictive, masterfully engineered to condition our brains to keep seeking the never-ending scroll.¹⁰ Built to feed the company’s profit motive, its endless scroll is structurally incompatible with meaningful political action—making active censorship of disruptive dissent virtually redundant. Lack of transparency also gives these platforms a convenient excuse to cover any manual censorship by blaming “technical issues”—a tactic Meta deployed in public opposition to censorship of content documenting genocide in Gaza.¹¹

What does it mean for our movements when we rely on technology we don’t control? And what can the paths these tools are taking tell us about the future we’re heading toward?

V.

In 2018, Christopher Wylie, a whistleblower at a British political consulting firm, Cambridge Analytica, revealed that the company had harvested millions of Facebook users’ data without their informed consent.¹² Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign weaponized that data by developing precision-targeted ads and psychological profiling of voters.

And yet, this was only the playground for more runaway developments. Today, the AI arms race has turned engineers into strategic assets, their staggering salaries reflecting the extraordinary economic and political power of the tools they build.¹³ Public, non-encrypted online data has been instrumental in developing them.

ICE uses technologies built by Palantir, co-founded and chaired by Peter Thiel, who spent 17 years on Facebook’s board as its first outside investor.¹⁴ These technologies accessed public records, including social media posts, to exert control over citizens through monitoring, detentions, and deportations.¹⁵

US Department of Homeland Security has also asked for information directly, bypassing a judge to subpoena tech companies. In 2025 alone, it sent hundreds of subpoenas across four companies (Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord), including at least one seeking to unmask the people behind Instagram accounts that tracked ICE agents in their own neighborhoods.¹⁶ We know that Google, Meta, and Reddit complied with some of the requests; the information on how many, or what the rationale behind complying or rejecting is, is not publicly available.

The relationship between big tech and the military-industrial complex is symbiotic. Last year, Meta announced a partnership with Anduril Industries, a startup developing military mixed-reality headsets for the US and allied militaries under the codename Eagle Eye.¹⁷ It is not publicly known whether the same data streams that train Meta’s consumer AI feed into its military contracts. As the tech market grows more consolidated, the boundary between the two is increasingly blurred. Against whom will these tools be used? We can only guess. The mutually beneficial and reinforcing relationship between software and military companies is not just about tech; it is about power. This is reflected in the similarly cozy relationship between Silicon Valley elites and the Trump administration. Both pursue personal profit or ego over serving the people they hold power over. These choices can suggest which path these tech tools are taking, but the destination, and our role in getting there, remains open.

VI.

The foundational technology enabling modern social media to share information across a network predates any platform we use today by decades. Meta dominates infrastructures built upon it today, but they won’t exist forever. Instagram will eventually be replaced, as MySpace and Vine were. The internet is a much older, more resilient, and inherently decentralized technology—a truth the tech oligarchs would love for us to forget. The direction in which it evolves will be shaped, in part, by what we use and build today. We can’t—and don’t need to—walk away from corporate platforms all at once. But we can choose how we engage with them today—and be honest about whether our presence serves our resistance or strengthens the very systems we oppose. “Let it not be through you” in 2026 means designing our resistance so our infrastructure does not betray our intention.

To make tech work for us, we have to ask of our own online activity—are we complicit? And are we effective? And accept that the answer may be “yes” to both. To serve the goals of a movement in the physical world, we need to treat digital platforms as funnels, not destinations.

Digital resistance, as resistance more broadly, operates on two levels—the individual and the collective. None of these actions will dismantle the violent systems above, but they can give us more control and resilience in how we organize and how we connect. Here are some practical steps we can take right now.

A movement organized on the oppressor’s cloud is programmed to fail.

Individually, we can adopt digital hygiene to protect our data from exploitation, secure what we can, and reduce our dependence on big tech.

• Learn about how your data works: what’s collected, how it’s shared, and what keeps you secure. Privacy Guides and EFF’s Surveillance Self-Defence checklist are non-corporate places to start; online communities like Reddit’s r/privacy can provide community answers and links to start with.
• Make a migration plan to encrypted, privacy-respecting, and non-extractive alternatives: OpenStreetMap instead of Google Maps, DuckDuckGo for search, Mozilla’s Firefox for browser, LibreOffice for documents. The alternatives are endless and can be easily found online.
• Post with intention: ask whether a share reflects your values or signals them.
• Audit your own cost-to-value ratio: if a platform’s reach doesn’t convert into tangible action, scale back your use or leave.
• Don’t outsource staying informed to an algorithm—seek out and prioritize trusted primary sources.
• Don’t assume corporate platforms will keep your data safe and available—maintain your own backups. Subscribe to newsletters and follow media and creators you trust directly.

Collectively, we can build shared, decentralized infrastructure and apply political pressure.

• Use, support, and help build independent, decentralized infrastructure. Signal instead of WhatsApp, Mastodon instead of Instagram or X. Host mailing lists and collaboration pads ourselves.
• Get involved in initiatives that incubate and fund tech you feel safe using. One example is Tech for Palestine, who incubates and funds Palestine-aligned and BDS-compliant boycott tools, connecting volunteers, engineers, and funding.
• Normalize and encourage migration in your own network, since these tools only work if the people you’re organizing with are also there. Accept that platform migration is a long-term process.
• Support worker-led tech organizing: groups like No Tech for Apartheid, founded by Google and Amazon employees, exert pressure from within.
• Back and participate in organized campaigns pressuring platforms directly on policy: Fight for the Future has run some of the largest digital protests in US history; 7amleh documents and campaigns specifically against the censorship of Palestinian voices.
• Follow BDS and any other boycott guidelines when choosing which platforms and companies you support.
• Recognize that individual and collective tool-switching alone won’t move a trillion-dollar company—sustained, organized, public campaigns are what historically forced concessions individual boycotts couldn’t.

There are hundreds of tools and organizations worth using and supporting—this is only a start.

When we don’t control the means of preservation, our truth disappears. The Gulag Archipelago persevered because, once out, it belonged to people—able to be copied, passed on, kept safe. When we entrust our movements to privately owned clouds, we give tech billionaires and their allies power to erase evidence and bury calls to action. They consistently wielded that power against us: YouTube’s deletion of Syria’s war crime archives,¹⁸ Facebook’s newsfeed change that buried activism,¹⁹ Instagram’s suppression of Palestinian hashtags.²⁰

Erasure is not inevitable. Organizations like Mnemonic originated precisely to break big tech reliance—born from YouTube’s takedown of Syrian war-crime footage, it now preserves human rights documentation from Syria, Yemen, Sudan, and Ukraine on infrastructure outside of corporate platforms’ reach.²¹ When the algorithms turn against us—and recent history suggests they will—we can protect our truths and our movements by using deliberate, resilient, and collective tools. These are the qualities the internet was built upon, before any corporation tried to control it.

VII.

Our choice of tech tools is political. What intention truly guides our reposts into echo chambers, and who are we “influencing” and how? Every repost of a horrifying statistic, every solidarity event advertised, every Palestine T-shirt bought carries a cost—and an opportunity cost of a BDS-aligned platform not chosen. How many of us navigated to that solidarity event using Google Maps? How many of us communicated about it via Gmail, or received an Amazon package that week? Both Google and Amazon are some of the targets of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, a Palestinian-led campaign that calls for economic and cultural pressure on Israel to end oppression and occupation of Palestine.²² Amazon and Google jointly operate Project Nimbus—a $1.2 billion cloud computing contract with the Israeli government and military, providing AI tools and infrastructure that power the Israeli war machine.²³ Every sign-on to these platforms strengthens these companies and undermines the BDS movement.

In his collection of essays One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This (2025), Omar El Akkad writes:

The principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be. From this outcome, everything is reverse-engineered. Being seen as someone who believes in justice—not the messy, fraught work of achieving it—is the starting point of any conversation on justice … It makes sense—when there are no real personal stakes, when the missiles are landing on someone far away, being seen as good is good enough.

For those of us shielded from the outcomes of the violent systems we oppose, intervention is a choice—and there’s always a safe option. We can afford the illusion of impact, fueled by fleeting satisfaction and reinforced by platforms built to deliver it.

Resistance falters without vision. If our vision is ending a violent regime, but our plan depends on the cooperation of the very platforms enabling it—and profiting from its continuation—that vision will never come to pass. Audre Lorde warned, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” A movement organized on the oppressor’s cloud is programmed to fail.