It’s time for movements to rethink social media

This piece was originally published in Waging Nonviolence.Last September I made a short video that was by far the most viral piece of content I’ve ever put out.I can’t trace all the views, but at least a million people watched it across Instagram and TikTok, and possibly elsewhere. Neighbors in Athens, Greece told me they’d come across my face in their feed; Chinese accounts captioned the video and reposted it. I felt like I’d made a dent in the universe and — I’m not going to lie — a little bit special.The video wasn’t pop wisdom or a dance routine. It had a job to do: get people to sign a petition, created by DiEM25 and Progressive International, to block Germany’s genocide-enabling former foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, from becoming president of the U.N. General Assembly. And on that, it failed. It had 49,000 signatures that July, two months before I posted. I watched it closely through my week of internet mini-fame, and the number hardly moved. Baerbock got the job — the…