The Education Dept. provides a significant amount of funding for our public schools, especially supporting students with disabilities and schools with a high proportion of low-income students.

And one other thing - social media can be great for sharing information, but can also multiply panic and hopelessness and disinformation. Be careful with your messaging.

Social media is also a tool we can use strategically in our fight, but shitposting alone will not defeat fascism.

- My advice to individuals who aren't trying to use a public platform for any sort of info-sharing or organizing is to do whatever makes you feel good. Social media really doesn't have to be your thing if you don't want it to be, but it's worth understanding both the value and danger of it.

- Things don't feel stable enough to rely on just one platform to reach your people. Diversify! Be strategic with what platforms you're using for what content and how those relate to each other.

However, those types of platforms aren't good for reaching total strangers - you have to navigate people there. So we should be thinking about how we can leverage social media to get people onto those platforms that serve us better.

- Where we can, we want to shift towards platforms where we have more over your audience and content such as email/newsletters, websites, and even Discords and Signal or Telegram chats. These offer a lot more flexibility because you don't have to fight an algorithm and you own your audience.

- My rule has always been to not say anything, even in dms, on a social media platform that I wouldn't be okay with having read in a court of law. Even if you think it's private, most of those companies would turn your info in to the feds in a heartbeat.

- Social media can be used for sharing all sorts of important information. It's one of the best tools that we have for getting a lot of people to know about something very quickly. We should lean into that when we need to.

- In order to build movements you have to meet people where they're at. And that's not just in-person, it's also online. Almost everyone uses some form of social media or another, so it's important for leftist and progressive orgs to also be on social media if you're trying to movement-build.

- Because of algorithms, restrictions on political content, shadow banning, and harassment it's harder than ever to get progressive or leftist content seen by people. This decline isn't new - it's been happening for a very long time.

- The people who own these platforms are not our friends. They are owned and run by people who are ideologically opposed to progress and equality. That's always been true, even when the platforms themselves worked more democratically.

As someone who has been doing various forms of digital for leftist groups and progressive nonprofits for over a decade, I have some thoughts on how orgs and individuals who want to resist fascism should relate to social media in this moment: