u/Electrical_Sorbet_31

Microsoft accounts are tied to an email they don't let you change. In circumstances like mine, where my dad set me up with an email when I was a kid and canceled this email when I was older, this basically means my account is stuck using a canceled email I no longer have access to. This includes my Minecraft account I've been using since I was a kid. Back before the Mojang acquisition, Minecraft accounts worked normally, but ever since Microsoft consumed Mojang and forced Microsoft accounts into their system, I now have to synchronize 5 accounts with 8 step verification that takes 90 minutes to get through every time I want to log in while unable to remove an email I no longer have access to from the process. It's ridiculous how poorly designed and frustrating to use Microsoft's most basic systems are. Didn't they pioneer computers to be sleek, technically competent, and just generally cutting edge? What happened?

What prompted me to post was how I missed one of the largest protests organized in a year in my city despite being on the Instagram app for a full hour earlier today and following hundreds of activists and organizers, many of whom posted about it before it happened. In 2024, I would see every protest announced by people I follow the moment it was announced (because that's how the app should work).

Now, Instagram's algorithm has completely stopped showing me any political posts and I've started to miss protests as a result, only hearing about them on the news after. Lots of activists I know no longer have any idea when a major protest is happening because the algorithm no longer shows them these posts. An SJP organizer I knew told me shortly after the Palestine encampments that people suddenly stopped being shown their posts on the algorithm. I noticed this at around the same time, but it's gotten much more noticeable during Trump's time in office. It felt like a progressive process rather than something they turned on all at once so that it's harder to identify.

I'm so fucking tired of social media platforms, one by one, falling to the US government. After I briefly reinstalled TikTok for the first time since deleting it when Trump's billionaire and pro-Israel friend Larry Ellison took it over, it told me I was banned (I also followed political content on TikTok). No reason was provided and no appeal process was made visible. I have no idea why but my suspicion is that I was banned because I used the platform to create private collections on the app of video footage of police attacking protesters called "Police Abuse" or something along those lines.

So now I use Instagram as my main social media platform, which is the main public platform currently used by activists and protest organizers in the US. But now that it's actively suppressing political information, where are we supposed to go instead? Reddit is much less consistent for organizing, and the government is coming after that now too. There's literally nowhere left to organize except for encrypted Signal chats the FBI is infiltrating to expose protest organizers' identities (I am not lying about this, look it up). They're trying to make it impossible for us to resist, and they're doing a great fucking job because every multi-billion dollar corporation in the country is kowtowing to Trump in exchange for private favors.

And it's insane to me how much activists are feeling oppression right now in a way that the rest of people simply don't understand because it is never reported by mainstream news outlets. Europeans say "I can't believe Americans haven't gotten rid of Trump yet!" as they're actively sending FBI agents to protesters' and journalists' homes for protected First Amendment activities.

One of my friends was literally expelled from college for their criticism of Israel and has received police visits at their home. And I had police posted outside my house after I was detained by police in an unmarked police car for hanging up a protest poster on campus after a Palestine encampment and I later had to go through student conduct. Another one of my friends at college, an immigrant student who was also detained, was threatened with expulsion and the university contacted ICE. A Palestinian girl I knew, a very sweet person who was a student organizer, was doxxed and has had more bad interactions with police than anyone else I know. I realize these are a bunch of big claims that sound inflammatory and outlandish, but everyone involved with activism has these types of experiences or stories that do not receive any significant coverage or discussion in the mainstream media.

After the Palestine encampments, I was dumbfounded by how the movement seemed to immediately die, so I asked people about why this happened eager to keep the momentum going at the start of next Fall. But one of my friends summed it up well: he said the people who were attacked and arrested by police, zip tied, thrown in a jail bus, and threatened with criminal charges. And they never want to experience that again in their entire lives. And the people this happens to are always the people who are most active and involved, leaving a power vacuum in the community when they back away with no one ready to step in and take their place. And if you do civil disobedience and get arrested, you get put on probation, meaning if you're arrested for civil disobedience a second time you get put in jail.

Because it's easy to look from the outside and say "well that's just a risk you have to take!" But no one seems to actually understand how horrible this violence inflicted on protesters is because the language we use to talk about this stuff is so incredibly whitewashed with vague bureaucratic language. For example, there was one person I knew of who the media reported the police "arrested" (and that was the end of it). The outlets made no mention of how this involved police tackling them to the ground, gathering around them placing knees on their back, and ziptying them, putting them in a cold metal jail bus for hours where they experienced someone pass out and hit their heads, worrying this person had just died as the police ignored their requests for paramedics.

And it doesn't help that wherever you go if you're in a city in the United States, there are police cameras literally everywhere. It no longer feels like you can walk around unnoticed by the government. It feels like we are in a panopticon where we are being passively surveilled at all times and so you never want to act out of line because you never know whether they're going to make an example of you next. When I graduated from college, I walked around campus, and the only thing I could focus on was just how many more police cameras had been installed on campus since freshman year, with at least 3 cameras watching you from multiple angles at all times no matter where you go.

And if you hold a peaceful protest, here's a secret a lot of people don't know: the police have the authority to declare protests unlawful at any time for literally any reason at all, as long as they call it "disorderly conduct" (or at universities, "violating campus space rules"). There is no protection for free speech. The police do this all of the time, and whenever they do, people usually freak out and disperse. But this isn't reported on in the media or considered "violence" in the mainstream because the police threatened violence rather than having to engage in it. And threatening to arrest someone and give them permanent criminal charges that all future potential employers will see for the rest of their lives is usually enough to scare off a crowd.

Every day I wake up I have this feeling of dread about what's happening and feel afraid of how much worse this is going to get if it continues, and it will get worse because nothing we are doing right now is working. Our country is so incredibly fucked up that at this point we are basically authoritarian, and the average American, now finally sensing this, is choosing to bury their head in the sand because they don't want to think about the implications of fact that we now live in an authoritarian country that does not protect free speech.