Why Democrats Don’t Need Their Own Social Network
In the aftermath of the 2024 presidential election, a familiar post‑mortem has taken hold among Democrats: they lost the fight for attention online (again).
In reaction to this reality, some have begun to argue for a new, bespoke left-of-center social network that can counterbalance the right’s digital dominance. Proponents of this approach argue that the left lags significantly when it comes to their investment in alternative online community spaces and would benefit from taking a page out of the right’s playbook.
There’s some logic to this idea. After all, right-adjacent voices did dominate attention streams last cycle and Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (X) was absolutely consequential.
But this prescription misunderstands the root of the disease. Republicans didn’t win because they retreated into their own partisan cocoons; they won because they co-opted mainstream feeds and culturally adjacent spaces that Democrats failed to contest.
Echo Chambers Are Unhelpful
If anything, siloed right-wing echo chambers such as Donald Trump’s Truth Social actually insulated some of the right’s most unhinged rhetoric from mainstream scrutiny. That cloistering may have shielded Trump from backlash among up-for-grabs-voters, but it almost certainly did not win him any new support.
This brings us back to calls for a Democratic-aligned social media platform. Creating yet another progressive echo chamber would only double‑down on the left’s weakest instinct: talking mostly to itself.
Take Bluesky, for example: the upstart platform has rapidly devolved from a potentially promising antidote to algorithmic toxicity (open‑source, built for the decentralized “fediverse”) into a chasm of progressive groupthink and despair. That trajectory is no accident: as Bluesky capitalized on a progressive exodus from X, it became an increasingly homogeneous community.
Homogeneous communities optimize for purity, not for breaking through. They reward the performative over the persuasive and replace outreach with inward‑facing status games.
The left-of-center sphere does not have a community problem (or a need for more echo chambers), it has an attention and trust problem:
Attention: The modern attention economy rewards brevity, emotion, and cultural relevance. Left-of-center messaging has a tendency to arrive late, data‑heavy, or steeped in insider narrative and jargon that alienate casual and less-engaged audiences.
Trust: More than a decade ago, the prophetic center-right researcher and critic Martin Gurri identified the “Revolt of the Public,” in which internet-enabled backlash against the status quo becomes the new status quo itself and generates turmoil for established institutions around the world. Years of algorithmically amplified outrage have left many voters cynical about traditional political and news content — especially from institutions that seem aloof or scolding.
Without trust, attention is fleeting; without attention, trust never forms. The quixotic project of launching a new Democratic-aligned social media platform does little on its own to meaningfully address either dimension of the problem. It merely relegates the task of addressing this goliath challenge to a smaller and less-consequential stage.
How the Right Won the Internet in 2024
Republicans did not win digital share by corralling partisan superfans onto Truth Social. Instead, they employed three complementary strategies that enabled them to meet marginal voters where they already were with a resonant message:
Platform Leverage: Musk’s X became a modest yet influential megaphone that reached beyond the political niche and rippled across culture. Not only did Musk’s modifications to the platform reshape conversations among elites and highly civically engaged audiences, but they ensured right-adjacent messages and themes surfaced in feeds people were already checking for non‑civic reasons.
Cultural Infiltration: Conservative creators and influencers embedded their talking points everywhere: lifestyle TikToks, gaming streams, and above all, podcasts. The Democrats’ widely-caricatured “Joe Rogan problem” was about so much more than Rogan: it was about the knack of a group of savvy influencers on the right for speaking casually to disengaged, persuadable listeners in a whole host of environments that felt welcoming and apolitical.
On‑Ramps, Not Echo Chambers: The right and their allies were prolific in producing dopamine-heavy, memetically-competitive pieces of content (from podcast clips to humor memes) that lured marginal or apathetic voters into low‑stakes engagement loops and then escalated attention into identity and finally into votes.
The Path Forward for Pro-Democracy Social Media
In our view, there is more that stewards of democracy of all backgrounds must do to address the challenges posed by modern social media.
Short of major structural reform with the capacity to radically alter the incentives of the social media landscape (e.g. Congress enacting sweeping data privacy legislation), we see two main paths forward for pro-democracy civic leaders and operators when it comes to the platforms:
1. Compete Better Where People Already Are
If stewards of democracy want to regain the digital advantage, they must redirect creative energy toward the platforms that already shape culture instead of hoping that a new purpose‑built social network will magically reach critical mass. Indeed, many of the platforms are built in ways that inherently privilege sensational nonsense over civic facts, but this structural disadvantage and the urgency attached to it should prompt pro-democracy actors to double down on cracking the algorithms rather than retreating into their own walled gardens.
For better or worse, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and X still constitute important tools for connecting with and reaching the public and cannot be ignored in favor of “healthier” niche alternatives. Winning on today’s dominant platforms will entail navigating the Three-Market Problem, learning how to scale the production of algorithmically-competitive content that authentically enables values and facts to resonate within a broad range of different cultural niches, and embracing constructive aspects of the memetic populism that has delivered attention and votes to upstart candidates on the right and left. Of course, this is no easy task, but it is as worthwhile as any we can imagine.
2. Help People Opt Out of Social Media Mindfully
At the same time, pro‑democracy actors should champion a healthier relationship with social media itself, treating attention and human agency as individual and civic resources worth protecting. We have described today’s addictive, short-video-saturated social media landscape as a virtual reality unto itself called “The Simulation.” Only once we as citizens can see the Simulation for what it is and recognize how it undermines our freedom and happiness can we begin to build the habits and dispositions to reduce its stranglehold on us.
One of the most important things stewards of democracy can do is cultivate a healthy degree of skepticism about social media and the distorted digest of reality each of us encounters there. We should all be more skeptical of the modern information environment, recognizing that algorithmic social media is full of noisy distractions and an awfully unreliable source of factual signal. An America in which citizens of all backgrounds anf ideologies recognize social media’s toxicity, spend more time offline and in real community with each other, and seek out media that respects their attention rather than exploits it would be a stronger, better America for all of us.
Online and Off, Pragmatism Beats Idealism
In short, pro-democracy problem solvers must compete aggressively within the current attentional marketplace while simultaneously building exit ramps that help citizens of all backgrounds reclaim their attention and agency from social media.
If democracy is to survive the years to come, its defenders must play the game that exists, not the one they wish existed. Compete in the noisy agora. Speak in the idioms of everyday life. Invite outsiders into our online conversations, then offer them a graceful pathways for logging off. There is no choice but to embrace this reality.