Traditional Social Media as a Prison

Prison ~ noun

1. a state of confinement or captivity
2. a place of confinement especially for lawbreakers or evildoers
3. An institution maintained by the state for the detention of criminals

From the inception of the internet, social media seemed like a fun experiment; it was your opportunity to carve an identity on a worldwide web filled with strangers who had no idea who you were in real life. Yet places like BlackPlanet (launched in 1999) and BlackGayChat (launched in 2001) tell us that Black people and other minority groups have always understood their offline identity to be inextricable from their online ones.

For them — there was no playing dress up or hiding behind a username; the slightest slip up in language or tone and their identities were unmasked in order to continue the rules, grammar, violence and trauma of the (digital) antiblack world.

Today, social media apps have become a vehicle for community building, world news and political campaigns. Thus making themselves enmeshed with the offline world. When app owners became more eager to collaborate with institutions and the state, the carceral reality that haunts citizens became inseparable from social media, and as Angela Davis puts it in Are Prisons Obsolete: “We think about imprisonment as a fate reserved for others, a fate reserved for the “evildoers”, and because of the persistent power of racism, “criminals” and “evildoers” are, in the collective imagination, fantasized as people of color.”

Prison grounds, prison guards, and prisoners

This would become further evident during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. While white supremacists overloaded social media apps with fake news and antiblack memes about George Floyd’s death, Trust and Safety teams struggled with understanding what could be done to mitigate this violence and protect Black users’ voices. It was around this time that the thought came to me of social media operating as a prison. Where app owners are positioned as prison owners, the state as the warden, the app itself being the prison grounds, trust and safety teams becoming prison guards, the content being prison food and the users being prisoners. Not in the sense that users are whisked away from their freedom, but that collaboration with the state fosters an unavoidable carceral reality for the users and that being deprived of world news and community connection coerces you into participation. For marginalized communities, leaving would mean losing access to valuable infrastructure that offers a place for organizing, coordination around mutual aid or even job opportunities.

Although centralized social media apps are described as walled gardens in theory, they function as a space for mass-surveillance, user-fed slop and violence in practice. A space where flowers that have always grown from concrete are now forced into a solitary space while pesticide continues to rain down on them.

Elon Musk (prison owner) requested that the algorithm of X, formerly known as Twitter (prison), be changed to enhance his visibility on the platform after he and former President Joe Biden posted a tweet at the same time and he noticed a significant difference in interaction to Biden’s benefit. This immediately enhanced his ability to manipulate vulnerable users on the platform with his ideology through his now unavoidable content (prison food).

The previously mentioned antiblack violence would not only be maintained by the users, but by the apps themselves. Despite their Black users’ ability to make their apps a part of the cultural lexicon of tomorrow, X, Facebook, Instagram and later TikTok would all go on to silence the same voices that these platforms stand to benefit from. Content moderation would allegedly move to mute the Black Lives Matter hashtag and remove users who use words like “Black” from algorithms or flag their content as inappropriate. In short, by “attempting” to protect Black users from violence it positioned Black users as lawbreakers or evildoers who were deserving of punishment, later using this technology for other minority groups that attempted to talk about their own dehumanization or injustices (e.g. Pro Palestinian movement 2023).

Per diem model

As the socio-political landscape of the world shifted for the worse after Trump’s re-election in 2024, social media companies rushed to change their policies to placate the incoming dictator-in-chief to procure favor. This meant that the protections that people had worked years to establish were eroded in less than a month. The most well known instance being the adjusted Hateful Conduct policy of Meta, which according to an article by Amnesty International, had already been guilty of having algorithms that prioritize and amplify harmful and violent content regarding race; which they used for user engagement and profit. Ruha Benjamin addresses this in Race After Technology — The New Jim Code by saying: “Not only does the design of such platforms enable the "gamification of hate" by placing the burden on individual users to report harassers.”

It shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that in 2026, we’re seeing a renewed proliferation of antiblack content. Ranging from an AI generated video of the Obamas reimagined as gorillas to AI generated content of Black women performing as welfare queens. This is commonplace in the creation of those that have sacrificed Trust and Safety departments in order to prove their allegiance to an authoritarian government.

The content however is not unique to its time, but has been a part of prison cuisine for as long as social media has existed. Cuisine is a genre of food that specifies its category from which it comes from; cultures, countries, communities, and socio-economic circumstances all contribute to how a cuisine is formulated. Prison cuisine is specific in that it is designed to be the least appetizing while nutritionally low in value, with the intention of dehumanizing the inmates whom it is served to. It is also highly discouraged if not punished when inmates seek and acquire higher quality food.

As inmates (the users on social media) we are served prison food (content on our feeds and explore pages) as a form of algorithmic terrorism (a violent warfare technology utilized within social media platforms to distort collective consciousness, violate, manipulate and abuse marginalized people and change the course of history through reimagined plantation politics.) This food (or to be more modern, slop) is served to us to no end.

Although Black bodies form the foreground for this violence it eventually bleeds out to everyone which would include those who seek to harm us. Without the unmoderated antiblack content surrounding George Floyd’s killing in 2020, we would’ve never seen as much imagery of Charlie Kirk’s murder in 2025. This counts as well for the deepfake porn of Megan The Stallion and eventually Taylor Swift’s. Despite all of it being violent, the controversy surrounding Swift’s doctored photos moved US politicians to call for changes in the law. Put simply, the violence happening to Black people on social media is normative and the violence happening to others is unwarranted, thereby calling for stricter protections.

As Christina Sharpe puts it in In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, “antiblackness is the total climate – or grammar – of the world”, which is why prison cuisine (social media content) is littered with it. It is the slop that we’re served in order to keep us fed enough to engage with one another and bring profit to the prison. If inmates (users) seek reprieve by stepping out of the prison (social media), they are punished with: being deprived of world news and current events, internet culture and its interaction with offline culture, and other social benefits of accessing the increasingly encroaching online world.

Resisting the prison

When Bluesky launched in 2023, a new era started with the promise of a new type of social media; a decentralized one. Here, the power is in users’ hands to control the content they see and create custom feeds based on their interests. Decentralized social media wasn’t a new phenomenon (Mastodon launched before Bluesky in 2016), but Bluesky took a different approach by designing on its own protocol: Atproto. This allowed users to carry their online communities across platforms without having to rebuild.

Enter Blacksky, a Black-led platform on Atproto that aimed to do what other forms of social media couldn’t: Build a resistance against antiblack violence on social media and a framework towards ending the prison. It married the desire for users to control what content they wanted to see, with a care politic that invited them to build community. Although not fully avoidable, Blacksky’s moderation— which focuses on moderating antiblack harassment and digital misogynoir among other things, lays a foundation to shift the carceral relationship between Black users and social media by significantly reducing the visibility of antiblack content on their platform.

Its moderation tool steps away from punitive methodology used by other social media apps (like strike systems), and instead takes a rehabilitative approach to moderation by giving the user the ability to hide, warn, and categorize content that goes against their community guidelines.

As Blacksky continued to grow, the need for a fully unsurveilled Black space did too. Put simply, when a Blacksky user posts their content to the feed it is also viewable by users on Bluesky, which still allows people that aren’t on its server to repost, quote or leave a comment. Blacksky-only posts are the answer to that need; it allows users that are on Blacksky to communicate with one another without interference or surveillance from others. The platform also implemented a feature that allows users to moderate content themselves, similar to Reddit or Wikipedia. This would be a complete shift in how the prison industrial complex (social media writ large) functions and would also be an homage to earlier models of online Black communities (see BlackPlanet and BlackGayChat).

The prison might prevail today, but Blacksky and platforms like it are actively disrupting its culture and economy. In a world where antiblackness and other forms of online violence are ever-present and engineered to compel engagement, that intervention is not optional; it’s necessary.