New post for #ResistAndHeal: “Tennessee and Voting Rights”

https://open.substack.com/pub/resistandheal/p/tennessee-and-voting-rights?r=4unjx&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=post-publish

#ConCW #politics #polarization #VotingRights #democracy #CivilRights #history #advocacy #ResistAndHeal #HealOurCulture #MediaLit

"I am not suggesting that censorship offers any solutions, and I am not contending that everyone is equally to blame. I want to pause to acknowledge the strange new physics that is distorting how many people understand the world. The information delivered in feeds and podcasts has been torqued away from reality to seize our attention. Just as many children’s brains have been hijacked by TikTok feeds of cute cats or pimple popping, political debate is now captive to a kind of alarmism that dehumanizes by default and announces any deviation from the norm as proof of systemic collapse. Allen and his cohort would likely echo what my social-media commenters tell me each day: That there is a war happening in the United States, and that the system is irreparably broken. For a nation founded in a revolution that met tyranny with force, violence can seem far too logical in the face of such flawed conclusions.

The truth is more complicated, and more challenging: The nation’s political machinery, upset by technological change, is strained but functioning. We must commit again to the basic national project—to disagree, even viciously, while maintaining respect for one another’s humanity and a desire for truth. We must discount much of the venom we see online, and from pandering leaders, as a distortion of reality, not a mirror. If we do not, more people will die."

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/05/whcd-journalism-political-violence-algorithms/687040/

#USA #SocialMedia #Media #News #Journalism #Polarization #Algorithms #Politics #PoliticalViolence

"That shift is the focus of a new preprint that Törnberg co-authored with University of Amsterdam colleague Richard Rogers. “When we talk about social media, there are certain assumptions about what it is,” said Törnberg. “It’s user-generated, and there’s a platform that organizes interaction, but the platform cannot produce content on its own. So instead the platform allows people to connect with each other, and it just provides infrastructure for that. The [terms] social network and social media is almost synonymous. Those describe pre-algorithm Twitter circa 2012 quite well.”

Now that more and more users are disengaging and often leaving those platforms entirely, the AI bots are moving in, often at the instigation of the social media platforms themselves. “We don’t need the users anymore,” said Törnberg of the reasoning behind such decisions. “We don’t need them to generate content. We can generate our own content and we can automate the users. So there’s a splintering of what used to be social media.”

Törnberg identified three new kinds of emerging online media platforms, starting with private or semi-private group chats like WhatsApp. “The social part has just moved into these private group chat features,” he said. Then there other protected communities like Substack, often organized around a certain influential leader, “where there are more boundaries to joining in such a way that bots doesn’t make sense. The dynamic and logic of those places are very different from social media and much more driven by parasocial relationships.”"

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/05/rip-social-media-what-comes-next-is-messy/

#SocialMedia #EchoChambers #FilterBubbles #Polarization #Algorithms

The
Real
Facebook
Oversight
Board

“ Mark Zuckerberg had recently announced the creation of Facebook's
"Supreme Court" an oversight board designed to take content moderation to an independent court-style setup. That board addressed the wrong issue: content, which had never really been the problem. The first problem was the company's distribution model: an oversight board on content could never match the speed of the dissemination of information online.”

HOW TO STAND UP TO A
DICTATOR
THE FIGHT FOR OUR FUTURE
MARIA RESSA

#meta #facebook #polarization #democracy #resist #nokings

“#RulesforRadicals” was written at a time of epic social upheaval in the #UnitedStates, and it was read avidly by #VietnamWar #protesters, #feminists, #civilrights #activists and warriors on #poverty. More than half a century later, a new mini-genre of “how-to” #books about #dissent and #activism has emerged, drawing lessons from past #protests for the era of “#NoKings” rallies, #BlackLivesMatter marches and the campus pro-#Palestinian #encampments.

Coincidentally but intriguingly, three of these books were #written by #Jewish #authors who, explicitly or not, are offering advice on resistance drawing on Jewish wisdom, role models and historical precedents.

The three books — “How to Be a Dissident” by #GalBeckerman; the forthcoming “On Courage” by #JuliaAngwin and #AmiFieldsMeyer; and “Be a Refusenik!” by #IzabellaTabarovsky — arrive at a moment of #protest fatigue and #political #polarization.

https://www.jta.org/2026/05/03/ideas/new-books-by-jewish-authors-revisit-the-rules-of-protest-in-a-polarized-era

Political Violence Sees Uptick; Public Points to Polarization, Acceptance of Aggression

Political violence is increasing in the US. Experts say polarization and acceptance of aggression are key reasons. Find out how it affects you.

#PoliticalViolence, #USPolitics, #Polarization, #ElectionIntegrity, #PublicSafety

https://newsletter.tf/us-political-violence-rises-due-polarization/

Political violence in the US has increased. This is a serious concern for many Americans.

#PoliticalViolence, #USPolitics, #Polarization, #ElectionIntegrity, #PublicSafety
https://newsletter.tf/us-political-violence-rises-due-polarization/