In March, 2024, Instagram users, particularly those engaging with political content, including myself, were alarmed by Instagram’s sly move to roll out a change to their suggested content algorithm. By default, all users were forced to opt-in to limit political content. The details of this move, however, have not quite penetrated common understanding, as many assumed that this limit would affect the content of those they follow, and whether or not the content they themselves posted would be visible to others. Meta has stated that they do not “want to proactively recommend political content from accounts you don’t follow.” Meta “won’t proactively recommend content about politics on recommendation surfaces across Instagram and Threads,” so that those platforms can remain “a great experience for everyone.” This change then affects Instagram’s Explore, Reels, Feed, Recommendations, and Suggested Users features.
The fear that seems to prevail in this moment is that the politically-inclined or politically-curious are being enclosed into echo chambers. Their opinions and political expressions will not go beyond their followers. You are less likely to be discovered by someone to whom said expression or opinion may confront their pre-existing beliefs and stances. This is coupled with the experience that many have reported of being shadow banned, i.e. that their political content receives less viewership than their food content or selfies. This has lead to the phenomena of the algorithm selfie, where users who would not typically show their face are doing so to attempt to trick the algorithm to let the rest of their content be seen.
What is interesting to me about this move to default to limiting political content, is that Instagram now requires your consent to show you political content in their suggested content streams. Our techno-feudal overlords have found a way to weaponise our agency against our ability to engage with content that might disrupt our “great experience”. It requires one’s consent to open oneself up to the possibility of escaping the echo chamber, that one’s bubble might be burst.
Can we hear that our voices have been silenced?
I took to my Instagram stories to share that I have been trying to find the right words to articulate this feeling coming over me that I imagine is happening to others as well. Is it hopelessness? Powerlessness? What does it mean to even post on Instagram anymore? Why are we even still on this platform? The argument that it allows us to reach those on the fence or on the other side becomes less valid given the ways in which the movement of information is being controlled.
If we are to continue using this platform, should we then re-calibrate as to who we are speaking to? If this is truly an echo chamber that we are speaking in. We said “shame, shame!” to those who looked away as genocide was live-streamed. Were we saying “shame, shame!” just to ourselves? Would we speak to each other any differently if no one else can hear us? Would it engender a certain kindness? A softness?
In response, an old friend and fellow artist said: “I think my friends are not an echo. If at all perhaps my artist friends are – but definitely not my Colombo friends. For this reason, I keep posting. Even if it’s one elite Colombo aunty that wakes up and listens to a new reality, that is a win. But also, we want to know what you are up to. I have been pondering if my screams are falling on deaf ears too though. Sometimes it feels like that.”
To which I responded: “I can see my stories go from 200 to 50 viewers, all in the same day, with political posts getting the latter, and “non-political” the former, which is why I feel like it’s further strengthening the echo chamber.”
They then looked at their stats and realised the same was true for them. I had become aware of this in October, when a friend and fellow poet shared that they had been experiencing this. Until then, I had not really experienced the phenomena of shadow banning. Or perhaps I never noticed it.
Another friend, who is Afro-Asian, acknowledged that it does seem to be an echo chamber, reinforcing commonly held beliefs, and asked: “How do we convert this into practical application?”
I find myself reflecting on how we might approach our social media communications with this in mind. If it is that we are being clubbed together by the machine, how do we then speak to each other? How do we use this space? If we are no longer heard outside, what must we hear from each other?
Is it that it becomes a space of nurturing?
I am reminded of B.R. Ambedkar here. Educate. Agitate. Organise. How does one agitate in an echo chamber? Does the agitation then take place outside of it? I am leaning towards using the space to nurture than to agitate. But then I have to figure out where to agitate. The irony of the 2022 “revolution” in Sri Lanka was that it took place on a state allocated “agitation site”.
How do we reach that outside? Within Instagram, we can send posts out directly to people we feel need to see it. I suppose that is a way to agitate and bypass the political content limit, but you will likely get your account suspended for spamming or violating “community guidelines”.
My friend responded: “It made me think of how there are echo chambers within echo chambers. All of them vying for liberation but rarely if ever as a concerted effort. I think these online spaces are great for nurturing. I am also reminded of the Black Panther Party and how they went to Algeria and other places in Africa to try to build bridges with other movements. Perhaps I am a lone example but when I see your posts and your advocacy for Sri Lankans, some of the repressive laws etc., and compare them to similar laws being passed here, it does breed an awareness that the threat to civil liberties is a global concerted effort. Not comparing myself to the Black Panther Party, but I think they understood this. Even though you would be preaching to the choir, where I am concerned, the awareness you spread with regards to the things happening around you offer a greater and less ‘Amerocentric’ view of what is happening globally. Something that I think is crucial at this moment.”
These are anecdotal accounts of how we are using social media, though I do find them encouraging in terms of the efficacy of our communications. There is an image I hear in my mind, of nodes in a network, sending and receiving signals, echoing in different directions. When we think of echoes we think of walls bouncing a sound back. But what if we thought of resonances resonating with each other and with something much more primordial?
Are there productive ways to make use of an echo?
Right at the outset of her book “Undrowned: Black feminist lessons from marine mammals”, Alexis Pauline Gumbs asks us to “listen”.
How can we listen across species, across extinction, across harm? How does echolocation, the practice many marine mammals use to navigate the world through bouncing sounds, change our understandings of “vision” and visionary action? Is social media already a technology of bounce, of throwing something out there and seeing what comes back?
Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2020) Undrowned: Black feminist lessons from marine mammals
She uses the example of river dolphins to activate this metaphor, yet she also uses the example of a giant sea mammal to warn us:
Once upon a time there was a giant sea mammal, who weighed up to twenty-three tons, swimming in the Bering Sea. In 1741, a German naturalist “discovered” Hydrodamalis gigas swimming large and luxe, at least three times bigger than the contemporary manatee. Within twenty-seven years, the entire species was extinct, killed on thousands of European voyages for fur and sealskin.
So she knows what we know. It is dangerous to be discovered.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2020) Undrowned: Black feminist lessons from marine mammals
How does this help us think about our current predicament? This notion of a ‘technology of bounce’ is certainly affirming in the sense that it is not that we are simply posting into the void. I have often felt that about my own use of social media. There are so many people I have become acquainted with because of this technology. What that has helped strengthen is a sense of solidarity across borders and waters. Yet it can also feel dangerous in a climate where it seems that if your communication lacks nuance and can be deemed problematic, that your voice will be shut down and called out.
What is unfortunate about this media environment is that there exists the possibility to call in, to exercise empathy and listen closer to what an individual is communicating. We can have conversations with those who feel have communicated something that is lacking nuance. We can learn from each other and feel less as though this is a race or competition to have the politically correct thing to say. I know that this might make some uncomfortable, to acknowledge that there is a competitive nature to this. It is in large part because of capitalism that we behave in this way. So it is then crucial for us to unlearn these proclivities and work towards nurturing each other and unlearning and learning together.
Situated on the edge of appearance
In an interview for LARB on her book KITH, poet Divya Victor has spoken about situating oneself as an echolocating act, using writing to emit sound and triangulating one’s location with an imagined community, in her case, a Tamil diaspora.
DIVYA VICTOR: I like to think about “situating” as an echolocating act. I write to emit sound, and the environment of the poem returns this sound to my ear, triangulating my location within an imagined community I belong to (“kith”). This compositional act becomes a co-constituted environment, where the poetic line is the azimuth — a way of imagining a direction towards a place where kith lives, rather than a geographic residence in itself. There is no home in these poems. There are no timeless representations. Like all animals that echolocate, writers who compose from or into diaspora are always measuring distance and displacement from a roving origin. I am the sonic register of delayed messages that are returning to a home in my ears, from where I write.
Andy Fitch (2019) A Home in My Ears: Talking to Divya Victor
Victor’s notion of the co-constituted environment is helpful for me even beyond the page and the poem. We can think of our media environment as one that is co-constituted. Yes, it is algorithmically controlled and ‘community guidelines’ and shadow banning are enforced to limit the possibilities, but are we not smart enough to work through it? What is the azimuth between two nodes in a network? Can it be as simple as sharing an infographic directly to someone’s inbox and not just posting it on our stories? Is this somehow considered more confrontational than posting to stories? I feel like this is worth reflecting on.
There is always tonality to be considered when we are sending out a signal. This tonality preempts how others may receive said signals. What are ways in which we can be mindful of tone without feeling like we are being tone-policed? I feel like at this point we have to consider the power dynamic at play. If a certain tone is acceptable because it obeys the status quo, then, yes, there is a violence there in how it is asked of us, and we can consider it a policed tone. Yet, we find many examples of empathetic tonalities when we read poetry. There are ways in which a writer is able to open up our hearts that an infographic sometimes fails to do. Not everyone reads poetry, however. That does not mean that we cannot be informed by poethics in how we use social media.
Malgorzata Myk in her journal article for Text Matters, stated that this echolocating method of Victor’s echoes human voices amidst the noise of dehumanising political regimes and technologies. Writing about the reconstruction of the archive of anti-South Asian violence in Victor’s acclaimed poetry collection Curb, Myk notes:
I turn to Brandon LaBelle’s Sonic Agency: Sound and Emergent Forms of Resistance (2018) and his sense of “sonic agency,” sensitive to postcolonial contexts and defined as “a means for enabling new conceptualizations of the public sphere and expressions of emancipatory practices — to consider how particular subjects and bodies, individuals and collectivities creatively negotiate systems of domination, gaining momentum and guidance through listening and being heard, sounding and unsounding particular acoustics of assembly and resistance”.
LaBelle specifies four sonic figures, “the invisible [also referred to as the acousmatic],” “the overheard,” “the itinerant,” and “the weak,” which resonate with Curb’s focus on what LaBelle terms “unlikely publics,” situated “on the edge of appearance”. In his account, their unlikely status results from being unseen, or “being beyond the face,” yet recognized “through a concentrated appeal to the listening sense,” being overheard or misheard in the world’s global networks, subject to lyrical “intensities of listening” complicated by transience, migrancy, homelessness, and movement, or struggling to uphold sound uttered “according to a condition of weakness”.
Malgorzata Myk (2023) Duration of the Archive: Soundscapes of Extreme Witnessing in Divya Victor’s Curb
The critic listens out for: this sound that relates us to the not-yet-apparent. A gathering of listeners, in the squares, or in the classrooms and market places, the backrooms and storefronts, may perform to create a gap, a duration drawn out, detouring the flows of normative actions, of declarations and decrees, with a persistent intensity—a nagging quietude, possibly: this act of doing listening, together; and by gathering attention it may also create an image: the image of the listener as one who enacts attention or consideration and, in doing so, nurtures the condition of mindful engagement.
What is interesting here is how she is contextualising LaBelle’s concepts. Can we apply this then to our present predicament with social media? How would we “creatively negotiate systems of domination, gaining momentum and guidance through listening and being heard, sounding and unsounding particular acoustics of assembly and resistance”? Who are then the sonic figures that LaBelle posits? I realise that it might be a stretch to try to connect these ideas together, but I am following my instinct. I am reporting what I am hearing and what is resonating.
What is resonating with you?
The honest way to conclude this newsletter is to admit that I do not know with certainty what the solution is. Yet, I feel a sense of responsibility to try to articulate what I feel are problems. I hope that these reflections are helpful amidst the powerlessness we are collectively feeling. That we can feel inspired towards nurturing each other and strengthen our solidarities through that.
In the future of my dua, we will call in more than we call out.
In the future of my dua, we will be mindful of our tonalities and who we are speaking to.
In the future of my dua, we will find each other and hold on to hope that inspires.
In the future of my dua, we will create and sustain our own technologies of communication.
In the future of my dua, we will not be controlled by algorithms and content limits.
In the future of my dua, we will listen and feel heard.
In the future of my dua, we will feel safe in being visible.
In the future of my dua, our echoes will help us survive and will survive us.
IMAAD MAJEED 
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