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What Online Platforms Can and Must Do to Help Mitigate Escalating Political Violence

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Political violence is on the rise in the United States. According to a 

 of key trends from the Princeton University Bridging Divides Initiative, this rise is reflected across a range of different statistics, from an increase in targeted violence and assassination attempts to an increase in the overall volume of threats and harassment against political figures at the 

, both on- and offline have coincided with a bout of assassination attempts and acts of targeted violence in the United States. A growing number of violent acts over the past decade have demonstrated a clear nexus to the perpetrators’ social media use, including the September 

 against Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.

We are now entering the midterm election cycle with more serious threats emanating from the online systems than ever before, and with fewer protections than we’ve had in a decade.

To be clear, perpetrators of violence are responsible for their own actions, and factors well beyond social media contribute to the increasing polarization in America. Nevertheless, online platforms have empowered once fringe and violent views to become more mainstream and are modern day tools for recruiting individuals; distributing messages intended to incite political violence; and organizing groups that may carry out violent acts. At the same time, online platforms have significantly degraded their policies and teams dedicated to trust and safety, as the federal government’s infrastructure for addressing foreign influence operations deteriorates.

Against this backdrop, we convened a group of experts—former tech company employees, policy makers, researchers, and academics—to consider what role online platforms are playing in potentially fueling violence and what the companies could and should do to mitigate these risks. We convened with a shared sense of urgency and recognition that the window for intervention is narrowing as polarization deepens, trust in institutions 

, and acts of political violence become an increasingly 

 feature of American public life. We convened with an equal sense of urgency to chart a path forward that protects free expression and that fosters online spaces in which a genuinely free and fair competition of ideas can take place.

, titled “Political Violence in the Digital Age: What Online Platforms Can Do to Mitigate Escalating Threats.” Its 26 pages capture insights from the participants and include specific recommendations where we found consensus among the working group.

We are steadfast in our conclusion that these companies can, if they so choose, do more to help mitigate tech-fueled political violence. Accordingly, we are continuing to create a public record to counter the idea that—as 

 in the aftermath of real-world violence that had an online nexus—placing any significant responsibility on platforms is unfair.

Evolution of the online threat landscape and company actions

While societal ills such as political violence and polarization are not solely caused by social media, empirical research 

 between structural features of online platforms—including their algorithmic promotion of certain types of content for engagement—and the severity of divisions in the United States. 

, suggests that the algorithmic targeting and amplification systems of large online platforms have at times led users—often young men and boys, who now perpetrate a large share of extremist and politically motivated violent acts—down radicalization pathways, helping violent narratives become more mainstream.

Extremist groups as well as individuals sowing division and 

 and fringe digital platforms and technological capabilities 

 to organize, communicate, and plan in a decentralized manner. More recently, we are seeing an increasing trend of tech-fueled violence associated not with organized groups with a clear ideological program, but rather self-initiated individuals influenced by harmful online communities and diffuse networks.

These trends come as public officials—across the aisle—face growing threats and violent rhetoric online.

And yet, the major tech platforms have implemented what a February 2026 

 from the Center for Democracy & Technology called “consequential changes” to their content moderation policies “that will influence the information environment ahead of the 2026 elections.” This includes 

 in the trust and safety functions at the major platforms, with rolling layoffs of thousands of trust and safety workers in recent years.

Companies must step up to meet the moment

Platforms are unlikely to match the scale of their 2020 or 2024 preparations, but there are still steps they could take ahead of November. While it may seem futile to offer recommendations in this context, we believe it is important to continue providing potential interventions, policies, and design changes that the companies could employ. We do not anticipate that platforms will simply “do the right thing” without the proper regulatory and business incentives in place, but we aim to publicly document what companies could actually do, if they choose, to act more responsibly. The days where companies could say “we could not have seen it coming” are behind us.

Our list is not exhaustive and includes recommendations we and others have made before, but bear repeating. We prioritize concrete measures that companies could take to anticipate, monitor, and reduce the risks of political violence around the US election, and how they might work with civil society to mitigate those risks.

The full set of nine recommendations—encompassing both immediate steps and broader design and product decisions required to reverse course toward a healthier and safer online environment—are spelled out in the report. Underpinning most of the recommendations is that platforms must 

 for the threat by investing in multidisciplinary expertise, robust threat assessment, and crisis response protocols for dangerous viral incidents. Other examples from our recommendations include:

Clarifying and enforcing election and dangerous content policies: 

Platforms should publicly define and consistently enforce clear policies on election integrity, incitement to violence, harassment, AI-generated deception, foreign interference, and coordinated manipulation. This includes acting quickly against violent threats, temporarily slowing the spread of inflammatory viral content during crises, and improving cross-platform threat detection to identify emerging risks.

Enforce rules equally, including against high-value users: 

Online platforms should uniformly apply and fairly enforce their existing rules for all users, regardless of status, political orientation, or follower count, including for influential figures whose content may disproportionately shape public discourse. Equally important, nobody, regardless of status or business importance to the companies, should be able to monetize content that incites violence.

Platforms must be more responsive to user-generated reports, especially for those in imminent danger. Social media companies should, at the very least, make clear that they will not tolerate threats against public officials and election workers and put their money where their mouth is: resource the response.

Stop incentivizing, profiting from, and rewarding divisive, inflammatory and dangerous behavior: 

Platforms should reduce algorithmic and financial incentives that amplify dangerous content, particularly during politically sensitive periods. This includes redesigning recommendation systems to promote healthier engagement and removing opportunities to monetize content linked to election denialism, hate speech, or glorification of violence.

On this last point: removing the ability to profit from election denialism, hate speech, glorification of violence, and potential incitement would diminish the financial and engagement incentives from those who use this type of content to grow their audiences and extract monetary value. This is a design choice: platforms can take steps to reduce or counterbalance these incentives.

While so much of the public conversation has moved on from social media to AI, it is urgent to remember that these platforms still serve as the megaphones through which political leaders and other influencers reach the public, and the infrastructure through which divisive and violence-promoting narratives are distributed, amplified, and monetarily rewarded.

With less than five months remaining before November’s elections, technology platforms have a crucial role to play in helping turn down the temperature, and they must be prepared in the event that political violence occurs. The recommendations we provide here should represent the floor, not the ceiling: minimum steps platforms can take in a broader commitment to an information environment that nurtures democracy rather than division and political violence.

Gina Romero is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly.

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When I assumed my role as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association in 2024, I immediately began hearing alarming stories from civil society organizations and protesters worldwide indicating a sharp increase in state-led surveillance, with activists’ phones 

 across the globe with Pegasus and other highly invasive spyware.

But the true turning point for me was seeing how surveillance trickled down into everyday spaces of youth activism. Watching university campuses rapidly deploy advanced surveillance networks to aggressively curtail student organizing, especially as the pro-Palestine solidarity 

, made it clear that this was a coordinated global pattern. It extended far beyond police departments putting up more AI-powered CCTV cameras 

 under the guise of enhanced security or data maximalization measures.

 on how digital surveillance affects the rights to assemble and associate, which I am presenting today to the Human Rights Council. The research underpinning this report was guided by three objectives.

First, to unpack a phenomenon everyone talks about but few truly understand: the "chilling effects" of surveillance. Because these effects have historically been dismissed as too subjective or difficult to prove, my research team and I wanted to provide a concrete human rights framework that courts can use at the national and regional levels.

Second, we wanted to break out of the traditional privacy silo. Most legal approaches to surveillance focus almost entirely on the right to privacy, and occasionally on freedom of expression. This overlooks how deeply surveillance harms other interconnected rights, including freedom of assembly and association, creating compound harms across the broader human rights framework.

Third, I wanted to take a closer look at how surveillance is reshaping freedom of association. While the impact of surveillance on public assemblies is often visible, the gradual erosion of an organization’s ability to organize, operate and survive on a day-to-day basis is far less visible but no less consequential. This is the issue I want to focus on because the evidence we have uncovered is deeply concerning.

The right to freedom of association in general, and civil society in particular, has been deeply affected for years now by the abuse of national security, counter terrorism, money laundering, and cybercrime frameworks. Civil society organizations, social movements, and grassroots activists have been systematically mislabeled as "national security threats," "foreign agents," "criminals," or "terrorists.”

 creates an environment of permanent suspicion, which in turn fuels harassment, violence and criminalization, while rationalizing intrusive monitoring.

This monitoring does not consist of isolated acts of surveillance, but rather represents the establishment of a permanent, interconnected, remote and invisible surveillance ecosystem. It combines spyware, location tracking, data scraping, SIM cloning, cyber patrolling, among other practices, which, in many cases, are followed by offline actions.

Perhaps most troubling was hearing from civil society actors in nearly every region of the world that they now operate under the assumption that they are being surveilled.

The work of civil society, and the exercise of freedom of association, are deeply rooted in trust and engagement. But when these pillars are eroded by the permanent suspicion of monitoring, the entire fabric that sustains collective action begins to unravel.

This creates a process of de-socialization that fractures movements, breaks associations, and ostracizes civil society actors. Colleagues, communities, allies, donors or benefactors, and even family members and intimate partners may fear guilt by association, isolating those who may be targeted because of their work.

As organizations operate under the constant assumption that they are being monitored, their core functions are profoundly affected. Their ability to serve as watchdogs, provide rights-based services, protect victims of human rights abuses, and educate the public is severely constrained. Ultimately, the very possibility of advancing and protecting rights, democracy and the rule of law is undermined. Two consequences of digital surveillance are especially damaging during the sector's 

First, civil society organizations are being forced to dedicate scarce resources to digital security measures while altering their methods of work to reassure community members that engagement remains safe. As a result, operational budgets are redirected toward security expenditures, diverting funds from core mission-related activities.

Second, when organizations withdraw from public engagement and reduce their social media presence to avoid criminalization, they become less visible to donors. This can cut off potential funding streams and threaten their long-term survival. Beyond these economic hardships, some organizations have been forced to delete websites and online archives to protect staff and networks. When they do, critical institutional memory disappears. The loss of these digital repositories weakens organizational continuity and increases the costs of rebuilding knowledge and capacity over time.

These trends disproportionately affect local organizations and associations representing vulnerable communities, including those in exile, as digital surveillance increasingly enables transnational repression. This demonstrates that digital surveillance-related chilling effects also create a profound intersectional harm.

Finally, one of the least discussed consequences of the pervasive surveillance is the severe psychological harm it inflicts. It creates a state of constant hypervigilance, deep psychological stress, clinical depression, burnout and chronic trauma, ultimately forcing individuals to leave the sector and abandon human rights work entirely.

 that provides concrete evidence of these chilling effects across eighty-four countries and territories, my 

 presents clear recommendations to dismantle this architecture of permanent suspicion. The study reveals a lack of transparency surrounding the relationship between state power and non-state actors, creating an information vacuum that makes surveillance practices exceedingly difficult to challenge through litigation. As a result, the right to an effective remedy is fundamentally weakened.

To address this gap, governments and corporations should adopt interdisciplinary, precautionary approaches to risk in their human rights impact assessments and due diligence processes. That means moving beyond a narrow cause-and-effect framework and assessing how surveillance systems operate as a whole. Policymakers and companies must evaluate the cumulative human rights harms these systems can produce and their long-term effects on civic space, democratic participation and fundamental freedoms.

If civil society is to remain free and vibrant, people must be able to organize, speak and connect without fear of being watched.

of student essays produced in collaboration with the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

Modern cities can be contradictory. Sometimes, they seem more like an investment opportunity than a place for people to live. For example, as real estate speculation drives up property values, 

. Yet cities remain where we encounter new people, new culture, and new food, too.

 to labor and the economy. The future that technocrats extoll will likely exacerbate the problem of inequality that’s already so rampant in our cities. It’s now not hard to imagine a paradoxical city where people are underemployed, living near empty downtowns, 

 to run errands for AIs, and spending what little they have to Waymo around while the stock market soars. The luckiest few may be directing a fleet of AI assistants, and an increasingly small group of elites could have extreme amounts of excess capital to invest.

Such a vision of the future prompts this call to arms for American urban planners, community-based planners, community-engagement planners, and private sector planners to fight against and alleviate the shock of this coming change. Our chance to support a new type of city, one that values residents over capital accumulation for the increasingly small few, has come. Planners should consider what AI-caused mass un- or underemployment will mean for cities, from the way projects are financed to the role of the city in providing welfare to the social implications of having communities of unemployed residents. This may even be an opportunity to exercise imagination and resistance, as urban planners have failed to do in the past.

In my graduate studies at Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), I hear plenty of conversations about data centers, about their climate impact, about the resources they use and their health impacts on humans, as well as concerns about sovereignty and sprawl. These are important conversations, but the data center issue is a canary in a coal mine. The field of urban planning and urbanism must think about the AI future that the current data center boom portends.

Discourse around data centers illustrates how urban planning is already wedged uncomfortably between idealism and practicality when it comes to AI. As data centers proliferate, they create, to borrow Alan Berger’s term from his book 

, “waste landscape.” They gobble huge swaths of urban outskirts and rural land, and they guzzle resources from nearby municipalities. Construction 

 jobs, but once up and running, centers provide few economic benefits. Regulating data centers, especially at the local level, feels hopeless. For example, in Chile, 

when the government tried to put reasonable regulations on data centers

, the centers threatened to move abroad. In US cities and towns, data centers may relocate to a friendlier jurisdiction or even abroad to a city with less capacity to resist. New 

At the same time, data centers have inspired practical, creative urban infrastructure and mobilized community organizing. Architect Marina Otero Verzier, in her 

 at the GSD, shared examples of heat generated by data centers warming chicken coops and nearby houses in winter. Though connecting urban infrastructure to data centers in this way may lead to dependence on them, something Otero Verzier cautions against, it also embodies a creative optimism that urban planning should embrace. As for mobilization, activists in New Jersey, galvanized by AI threats, just 

 is taking hold nation-wide. It is this ground-up energy that I urge planners to encourage and nurture; urban projects should emerge from social movements instead of capitalist investment, as geographer David Harvey 

Because if AI continues on its path, we may be on track to have a future marred by unfathomable inequity. This future is plausible. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s co-founder, has 

predicted AI could replace half of all entry level white collar jobs within 5 years

 frontier AI models to help companies and wider society understand AI capabilities and what risk they pose,” confirms that ChatGPT and Claude powered AI Agents 

 in the ability to complete complex tasks, even tasks that take a series of days for humans to complete. Amodei and the economist Noah Smith, who writes the Substack 

 that without policy intervention, AI-driven automation could sharply widen the gap between capital owners and everyone else, concentrating wealth among the Silicon Valley elite.

Jobs that were once the bread and butter of the 21st-century city (like ‘consulting,’ that slippery term, or entry level law jobs) may disappear. Residents of cities will face unemployment even as the cost of living remains high. City budgets and processes will also feel the impact—look at the 

 Cities may have to cater even more to private developers to encourage or finance projects, which means less democratic control and likely fewer positive community impacts. A reduction in jobs may also cause social depression and alienation, with huge swathes of the public feeling unimportant and unneeded. We know how dangerous that is.

The first defense against this possibility in the United States should be federal regulation, but it seems unlikely that the federal government will act. Amodei 

 that the regulatory “pendulum has swung,” and we are “closer to real danger in 2026 than we were in 2023” because regulation has shifted from mitigating AI risk to chasing AI opportunity, leaving AI risks to compound. Additionally, as the 

government increasingly relies on AI for its military

, the federal government is likely to protect AI interests over the public interest. Given this trajectory, cities may well be left to their own devices to manage the consequences. But cases like the data center stopped in New Jersey offer a path forward. Planners can encourage mobilization for federal oversight and against policy that favors tech oligarchs. This could be through education campaigns, or through task forces at the city level. It could also mean supporting and nurturing existing community actions against AI’s impact or against AI products and infrastructure specifically.

Local government may be the last and only governmental group working in defense of people. Urban planning is, at its roots, not a radical profession, but with the arrival of AI, planners must be prepared to rebel. In “

,” David Harvey argues that urban planning takes class relations (and therefore capitalism) as “fundamental.” The city is built for capital accumulation with every space and feature designed to make work possible. The job of the planner is to make things just okay enough that the whole capitalist experiment can continue. Under a guise of pragmatism, planners maintain or reinforce systems that oppress. Historian Tracy Neumann, in her book 

, argues that planners allowed cities to become testing ground for neoliberal economic policies when cities de-industrialized in part because planners were overly pragmatic. As federal policy shifted away from Keynesian welfare and toward corporate responsibility, city governments adapted quickly, testing neoliberalism’s viability through public private partnerships because it made the most financial sense in the short term. Her interpretation suggests that planners have agency to fight against what might be capitalism’s most dangerous iteration yet. Planners should not be complicit in urban development that primarily serves investments by the increasingly few, as development historically has.

I do not know what the future will look like, but I do know that planners must begin careful scenario planning now. We should not leave things on the table as AI takes hold. City governments should double down on fixing regressive tax structures to do whatever small part they can in ensuring the oligarch class pays their fair share. City governments should not cow. The 

 to leave places where taxation has increased, like California, but cities have leverage. Living in a quickly disappearing estuary is not the same as living in the Bay. People want to be in vibrant communities with art and culture, and that’s what cities can be when they prioritize workers and artists and immigrants. Planners should facilitate coalition building and help social movements navigate to successful outcomes.

American cities are already implementing visionary initiatives that in the past may only have been proposed at the state or federal level. For example, New York City 

 a targeted guaranteed income program to support young people without secure housing. It’s this sort of bold initiative that should inspire meaningful change in other places, too, as we enter an uncertain future transformed by AI. Urban planners can create spaces for people affected by technological disruption—and potentially mass unemployment—to find purpose in building community, transforming the city into a community built on care and connection.

Last month, Meta laid off more than 8,000 employees in one fell swoop as it deploys AI. Layoffs in tech, by some 

, have passed 148,000 since the start of the year and are on track to surpass 2025. Polls show 

As IT workers at the University of California, we’re not going to stand by and watch as this powerful technology is used in dubious ways. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman 

 that many people are justifiably asking, “What is my economic future? What is my agency?”

At UC, we’re answering those questions by unionizing: bolstering our professional security and establishing a seat at the table where decision-making happens.

On May 21, we submitted paperwork to the California Public Employment Relations Board seeking recognition of an enlarged IT bargaining unit as part of 

University and Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE)

. We added 2,100 employees to the unit, for a new total of 8,400 IT employees spread across California. To our knowledge, this makes us the largest tech union in the United States. Our victory comes after months of bottom-up union organizing.

Tech is a notoriously anti-union space, with collective bargaining rates that hover in the 

 delivers better pay, protections against unilateral layoffs, remote work support, and the ability to bargain over the deployment of AI.

Unfortunately, this type of job security is almost unheard of in the tech sector today.

So how did we do it? Our campaign began with identifying what is most important to tech workers. We had hundreds of conversations at worksites and in virtual meetings, and knocked on hundreds of physical front doors. By doing this we were able to have real, honest conversations about the state of our work, often with colleagues we had only known from an email thread or a Slack conversation. These conversations made us realize that our IT departments, often siloed and separated from each other, were experiencing similar problems across the state. We launched a workplace survey and found that 65 percent of respondents are being asked by UC to take on additional work due to staffing shortages. IT professionals worried these vacancies would be turned over to AI. Only 22 percent felt secure in their positions.

This growing sense of insecurity is manufactured, not inevitable. Across our ten campuses, we can see for ourselves the enormous wealth being generated by these technologies. The University of California is constantly investing in 

; it sits on some $26 billion in liquid and short-term capital and a staggering $41 billion in endowments.

The university’s enormous wealth must serve the public good. In our conversations with application developers, instructional designers, data systems analysts and others, a theme emerged: we identify strongly with UC’s mission of public service, and we are passionate about using technology to enable learning and discovery. We feel a sense of accountability to all Californians (not shareholders). We have an opportunity to model how to use technology to deliver public excellence — not slop and a race to nowhere.

If we are an institution committed to public excellence, why are we leaving these critical decisions to people who couldn’t patch a server or debug code to save their lives? Are they responsible for managing dashboards and data pipelines that make the university’s services work? When was the last time they stayed in a server room all night performing server updates? These services are too important to the public to be left in the hands of private sector consultants. We need people with the day-to-day understanding of these tools to have decision-making power.

 have set new quality standards across UC hospitals to increase patient safety. As tech workers, we can play a similar role when it comes to digital infrastructure and AI — ensuring these powerful technologies are used responsibly. We’ve already seen 

 rushing headlong into buzzword-driven AI transformation in ways that actually worsen the quality of education.

Throughout our organizing campaign, we created something new: not an app or device, but a new way of understanding our technological work, in which our conditions aren’t determined by false precarity. We’re demonstrating how to do technology differently in the public sector — that by standing together in solidarity, we can set a new standard for our profession that can uplift all tech careers, private and public. Zuckerberg-style mass firings won’t fly at the University of California.

. As tech’s influence continues to grow, we’re going to need greater union density to take our future back from the tiny cohort of billionaires who think they run the world. Through unionizing at an industrial scale we can show the world that real innovation comes from creativity unlocked through job security, and genuine commitment to bettering the lives of working people. Organized people can defeat organized money. We’re proud of the example we’ve set — and we encourage tech workers across the country to take notice.

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