Regular commentator, KimSJ, made this observation on the blog yesterday:
It seems that our politicians are still thinking of defence in terms of military hardware. They are fast asleep when it comes to the true modern battleground — social media.
I'm not advocating censorship, I just want to see the good guys putting as much effort into flooding the Internet with good information as the bad guys put into spreading disinformation.
I have a lot of sympathy with this comment. If we are to be a resilient society that can stand up for itself and is worth defending, then it is essential that we do make sure that social media, which is now the favourite communication tool for the vast majority of people in the country, is heavily populated by those whose messages are ones with which we agree.
The inclination has been to leave it alone because it can be toxic, but in that case, I suggest, it is at least partly our fault that it appears so toxic, and so we need to make sure that it can, instead, become the basis for a message of hope about a politics of care.
I do my best in this regard. I, aided by the team here, post every day on this blog and on YouTube, and on most days on:
- TikTok
- X
- Bluesky
- Substack, and more occasionally,
- Mastodon
However, we are inevitably a team of finite capacity, and so our range is limited to the core messages that are also found here every day. If, however, anyone wants to take on a really useful task, creating social media content is massively important for amplifying your message, our message, and the message of others you like. There are several ways to do this.
Likes
You can simply like what we write. It does make a difference. The algorithms that promote posts on some media, like YouTube, are influenced by the number of likes a post gets, so we know it is enormously beneficial to get more likes.
Reposting
You can, however, do a bit more than this. To repost an item is useful. Even if you only have a few followers, reposting something you like indicates to those who think your opinion is important that the post you are sharing is significant, which helps its reach. It might also provide the basis for a conversation between you and them, maybe, at some time in the future. You never know, you might find that you have more in common with them than you think.
Reposting with a comment
To repost with a comment that suggests why you like a piece is even more helpful. This does not require the greatest degree of ingenuity. Just one item reposted per day, on one platform, with one of the following comments could make a really big difference in spreading the word.
- I thought this was very good and well worth sharing.
- I found this quite insightful and so worth sharing.
- I enjoyed this and thought it deserved a wider audience.
- I thought this made some genuinely interesting points worth considering.
- I found this surprisingly compelling and wanted to share it.
- I think this articulates something I've been struggling to express.
- I was impressed by this and thought it was worth sharing.
- I found this refreshingly clear-headed and thought others might too.
- I thought this was genuinely worth reading, so I'm sharing it here.
- I liked the approach here and wanted to share it.
These are pretty generic, but I hope they give you an idea of where to start. Reposting with a comment always adds value over a straightforward repost.
Posting your own ideas
And then, if you want to be more ambitious, just start preparing small posts. I recently produced a guide on doing this.
We have also created a guide to AI that provides some ideas on how to do this, available here, but as I will always stress with AI, if you do not like the output, ask it to have another go, and do check that what is produced makes sense to you, and that it is consistent with what the source material says, if you are directly promoting something. And remember, you can always change AI output: you are in charge.
The point is that if you did this, you would become a campaigner in your own right, sharing social media content that promotes ideas you like. The more people who do this, the more likely those ideas are to become noticed.
Creating reach
If everyone reading this blog did some of these things, we could massively increase our reach. To help, you only have to use the share buttons down below.
By doing so, you would also increase your own reach, and that would be really good too.
We need as many people as possible in this space. Even short commentary helps, and if you want one place to start, Bluesky tends to be much friendlier than things like X.
Dealing with comments
Finally, one word of warning. Do not worry about what people say about what you have written.
Some people will not be kind. The best advice I can offer you is what Larry Elliott once told me: that in all his years at the Guardian, he never once read any of the comments posted on any article he wrote that was reproduced on the paper's website. As he put it, he kept his sanity as a result, and there is nothing wrong with that approach. You are not obliged to read comments, let alone reply to them. I might, but you do not have to. That will never invalidate what you do.
Good luck
Please, give this a go. Start small, see what happens, and start with any social media you already use. But if everyone does this, we make the message, and that is important.
Thanks for reading this post.
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Wars are for political ends. IMO American politicians have often neglected this because they have overwhelming firepower. The most successful war is one that can be won without use of troops and artillery.
The Cold War was a different sort of war to WW2. Modern warfare is different again. The term hybrid warfare is used to describe what is happening now. Cambridge Analytica was one example. It is easy to ignore parts of this threat.
A good defence strategy has to take account of the differing threats and find ways of responding -as you write, the incentive to defend what we have is an important component. But the hardware is also necessary. An inadequate defence is at best, a still expensive irrelevance. At worst a provocation.
Almost two years ago 800 officials from the EU, Uk and US wrote a joint letter saying Isreal’s response was disproportionate; we were in danger of complicity in war crimes and they were not being listened to. The BBC said it unprecedented. We have heard nothing since which tells us it has been shut down.
We tend to listen to politicians and journalists more than the military and academic professionals who have warned us about the hybrid wars being conducted. The threat also comes from the Fascist friendly parties within the UK Europe as well as from outside. We need leaders who can see the bigger picture and integrate these factors into a strategy. Or, are willing to listen.
Lost count of the number of times I have given links to the taxing wealth report.
It must have some effect.
Thanks!
I must buckle up and link instead of mentioning. I am a bit worried people distrust links, but on comments I think that’s probably not true. I have managed a few interactions with commentators who turned out to be people not bots.Many comments of mine are to reassure people that RJM has indeed covered another aspect, or defined terms, but you can’t fit it all into the first video they come across.
Thanks!
Popularised by Tesco’s but it still holds true that ‘every little helps’. I’m sure there are many readers here that are not activists, are not particularly well connected, don’t have lots of friends either on social media or in real life but it still holds true that if one tells two and those two tell two and so on, by the 9th communication more than 1000 will have been informed
Precisely