Lately Meta made the headlines in Brazil, and arguably worldwide, for its lack of impartiality during Brazilian federal elections, which would be not only anti-democratic, but also external interference in a country’s sovereignty. The country’s digital activists quickly started to demand that the federal government invest in a Brazilian social network — curiously enough that idea was spread in Instagram and WhatsApp groups. Their claim is justified by the need to create a platform resistant to billionaire capture and big tech oligarchy.

From that I started to wonder what people really want from that. As a sociologist, usually I am terrible when it comes to answers and solutions, so this is not the answer but my reflections about that topic: what is social media for, or, in other words, what do people want from online social networks for the next years?

The failure of the attention economy

The other day I posted that what was supposed to be the attention economy became a tension economy instead. I was playing with the dynamics of an attention economy combined with human behaviour: what gets people hooked on the platforms are mostly emotional triggers such as outrage, so platforms that depend on users being there (seeing ads) will give you more outrage to keep you longer. Getting us tense, anxious all the time is what makes platform capitalism happy. That is what drives screen time, reactions, shares, clicks and all the metrics of success of most online social networks.

That seems like a counter-intuitive metric to measure the success or failure of social media (and, in spite of knowing they are not exactly the same thing, I have been using social media and online social networks interchangeably here). The problem is that it does not measure what I see as the real potential of the internet when it comes to democracy. One does not have to be a PhD in sociology to recognize the unethical and inhumane nature of attention economy but, well, I happen to be a PhD in sociology so I can confirm that to you.

My research is from a post-Arab Spring world, when we saw that people organizing online had potential to create something new; we were excited we could promote change and at the same time we were afraid of what change would look like. My thesis looks at crowdfunding, its potential and boundaries when suggested it could be framed as a new way of political action:

Empowering numerous smaller groups might even sound more plural than processes in which only one idea is allowed to survive after a majority election, for example. The intrinsic need of financial and community support to execute projects through crowdfunding would create a kind of gatekeeper for individual morals and judgements, and, at the same time, create free and open spaces for the most different sorts of ideas and initiatives.

The idea was that connecting people and ideas would be the main advantage of the internet, and back then, of online social networks. And that calls for a completely different metric for success than the attention economy, mainly because it was a means to promote action away from the keyboard, from the screens; not a strategy to keep you glued to a screen. So, how did we end up measuring success by likes, shares and clicks instead?

Economy as performative

In economic sociology there’s this argument saying that science, social science in general, and economic science in particular are performative, meaning they do not only describe the world objectively, but they realize it, provoke it and constitute it by creating tools and operating on it via a multitude of ways. To put it simply, a country is not necessarily successful because it has a high GDP. But economics created a full toolbox to measure success that makes every country that properly uses that toolbox look successful. This idea is not new: among the scholars, this specific argument has been around since the 1990s; for the non-academic public, you can just note how we try alternatives to GDP, for example, using the Gini coefficient or the Happiness Report when GDP alone does not help us explain or justify what we expected it to explain or justify.

The attention economy is a product of a set of tools developed by social media platforms for their purposes in the context of capitalism: they usually sell ads, so the longer they keep you on their platforms, the more they can get to know you and show you ads. They want to know you to understand which ads to show you. At the end of the day, that means more advertisers will give them money to show their ads to the right target. In platform capitalism companies have to choose between charging their users or selling their eyeballs.

When people think about what makes an online social network powerful for them, they usually start with two critical components: on the one hand a mix of freedom and transparency and, on the other hand, the network effect. This means people do not want to be censored or silenced, and they need people to be there to listen to them, so their message has reach — within their communities and beyond them.

The platform capitalism business model is definitively not aligned with that. Not only because the financial interest of these platforms comes first, but mainly because the notion of reach, engagement and visibility is second to that. There is a gatekeeper, there is a single institution playbook to get (or prevent) reach, to promote (or demote) social impact. And that means the power is on whoever writes these rules, not on the users of the platform.

Lessons from Brazil

What we have learned from Brazil in the last couple of weeks is that we can hack the attention economy algorithms if we understand (pretty well) their playbook. And that is great, although I believe that this strategy is unsustainable on the long run. On top of that, we cannot forget Janonism replicated precisely the alt-right digital behavior in some aspects, meaning that it can be mimicked as a strategy emptied of the popular, democratic roots seen in the 2026 Brazilian elections.

More important than that, we are still playing in a field where the logic of platform capitalism comes first. When we see online social networks as an arena for public conversations, usually we imagine two ideal outcomes. First, that the power of “micro donations” of time when posting, sharing, liking, clicking can really re-shape (political) leadership. Second, that this is the closest we can get to a direct democracy where decisions are made listening to people’s voices and not by (usually old, white men) democratically elected representatives in a specific fancy room, somewhere in the country.

When André Janones led the Brazilian left to a historic win in the runoff, we were literally 10 million people (almost 11 million, to be honest) on a WhatsApp channel acting in a very organized, scripted way. This was pretty effective precisely because he knew the playbook and helped millions of Brazilians to play it well. It was immensely important for democracy in Brazil that we did that — and for decades we might thank him, Lula and these almost 11 million Brazilians for securing our democratic institutions. In spite of that, I believe that is not the online social media we want.

Hacktivism

The big problem is that the (once) open internet is now dominated by ad-financed platforms that require a high level of control of these flows of information:

On many platforms, including Facebook, algorithmic manipulations are performed routinely; they range from purposes as mundane as deciding the color of a button, to decisions as significant as which news article is shown to the public. These decisions are increasingly central to social, political, and civic processes; consequently, the algorithmic harms that may arise from such computational form a brand new category, including a spectrum of issues from libel to violence.

We are (still) playing by these rules given to us: platform capitalism, attention economy. At the same time, we are struggling to deliberate, have open constructive conversations in our social bubbles, let alone to reach outside our own bubbles. What André Janones led in Brazil was basically a workaround bypassing two limitations: his leadership dismissed deliberation, and his knowledge about the algorithms allowed the message to dominate the digital agenda, the trending topics.

Some theorists such as Hannah Arendt envisage the political as a space of freedom and public deliberation, while others see it as a space of power, conflict and antagonism. So far we had tried to see our digital lives as that open democratic space, and that failed us under platform capitalism. Next, during these elections we have learned to fight back, understanding that this is a battlefield, a power struggle between opposing political views, mediated by financial interests. In a hacker way we battled (and did it pretty well) without changing the rules of the game.

And that is how I land once more to the beginning of this text: Brazilians want to change the rules of their social media. They want to keep up fighting, but not in a hacker way. For Brazilian activists, Meta represents that platform capitalism that mediates democracy. And they do not think a public space should be mediated by any corporation, let alone an international one.

What would that post-platform world look like?

Let’s start with the core: no platform capitalism. No corporation owns the space, but someone still has to pay for servers, moderation and code. ActivityPub is almost 9 years old and delivers that, but never got enough traction to have the same social impact as Meta, our example at hand. AT Protocol is slightly newer, and also offers a great alternative where data belongs to users, infrastructure can belong to many different players, moderation is open, and each of them can have their own take on what a social media should be. My point here is that there are already protocols that guarantee the rights of individuals and communities, but that, by itself, does not seem to be enough.

Maybe, people would say, it is the network effect. There are enough people, or there is not enough key people there, so reach and impact are limited. Here it is crucial to not measure success in the post-platform world as we would measure success in the platform world. For example, during the same election in Brazil, people claim that a movement started in Bluesky (built on to of At Protocol) was crucial to call into question and, as a consequence, force the takedown of a biased website that would, in theory, help voters choose who to vote for. That website was always leaning toward conservative politicians, regardless of how users answered the questions. Yet, it was backed by, among others, one of the best-paid TV hosts in the country in his Sunday show. Still, pressure that started on a decentralized online social network took it down. That is impact.

I like to think that network effect has its value, but there are other things to care about at different levels and in different roles. So I would be more interested in how this new era of social media allows us to better work and express our identities, to allow a multitude of takes on privacy, to allow grassroots organizations to coordinate in a multitude of ways. I do not know what this looks like, but I know that it is not fast-paced short videos, with accelerated voiceovers that look and feel the same regardless of their content, topic or political orientation.

From my experience — as sociologist, as software developer, as activist — I can say crowdfunding and open source both proposed a different relationship between money, technology and community, and neither went mainstream. Maybe the barrier is UX, maybe we need newsrooms to amplify our voices, maybe we need politicians to be there listening to us. But the interesting thing is that we can learn from these three maybes:

• As a product it must be easy for new adopters; if people cannot understand how to join or if they are not able to pragmatically feel the difference between whatever is next and the old platforms, we failed.
• We can have our own bubbles (it is in fact crucial for coordination), but if we are only able to have that, we failed. An echo chamber, or a platform with a plurality of echo chambers makes little to no difference in the world.
• We need to have our democratic institutions debating governance of these spaces. That might be contentious, but regulation might help prevent a single player from taking too much power while reinforcing the decentralized nature of power in that new era. That is crucial.