An Essay in English  Intracommunal versus Intercommunal Solidarity: Risks and Opportunities for Democracy on Social Media

By Natalie Kim

Please note: This essay was written by a student who is learning German. It has been published exactly as submitted, without any edits or corrections to grammar, spelling, or content.

Introduction

Through the formation of NATO, the U.S. and several European countries, including West Germany, aimed to foster democratic solidarity: the mutual protection of egalitarian society. At the same time, women, immigrants, and political minorities felt excluded, leading them to form their own solidarity movements. As new technologies began to advance solidarity by expediting communication between different groups, both small civil rights movements and global political organizations capitalized on them.

With the advent of social media, solidarity movements not only exponentially increased in number, but also became fragmented. For the purposes of this essay, there are two different types of solidarity: intracommunal solidarity, which refers to individual users forming communities to support like-minded individuals, and intercommunal solidarity, which refers to ideologically separate communities collaborating to support their common interests. Both types of solidarity can coexist on social media, as seen through feminism, debates surrounding immigrants in the West, and controversy regarding the Russia-Ukraine war. However, social media ultimately favors the formation of intracommunal solidarity due to three factors: its sheer scale, its changing regulations and algorithms, and its separation from physical reality.

#MeToo & Scope

The feminist social media movement #MeToo demonstrates how the scale of social media carries different risks and opportunities for solidarity movements. While the scope of social media has given the #MeToo movement widespread attention to marginalized voices, it has also created an inflated sense of progress and has led to the main #MeToo movement’s domination by larger, more influential groups. The #MeToo movement, while created in 2006 on MySpace, became viral on Twitter in 2017 after Harvey Weinstein faced several sexual abuse allegations (Frye 2018). When the #MeToo movement became prominent, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter had become larger and more globalized compared to MySpace in 2006, causing more users to recognize the #MeToo movement. The 2017 #MeToo movement's focus on famous figures such as Weinstein also complemented social media’s scope, as women felt empowered to speak against sexual abuse due to the number of people that could support them. As the #MeToo movement grew, the global scale of social media eventually led to 85 countries responding to the movement as of now (Strum 2017). In France, the #MeToo movement inspired the #Balancetonporc (lit. "call out your pig") movement, with actresses such as Judith Godréche feeling empowered to speak out against French directors that had sexually abused her as a teenager at the Cannes Film Festival (Jones 2024). Both movements faced mixed results in France due to cultural differences. French film directors argued that sexuality was an essential element of French cinema, while the French newspaper Le Monde featured a tribunal speaking out against the #MeToo movement as an example of American puritanism (Har-Peled 2018). However, the #MeToo and #Balancetonporc movements eventually grew large enough to create outrage against sexual abuse in the French film industry, which culminated in director Gérard Depardieu's conviction of sexual assault in 2025 (Porter and Ségolène 2025). Similarly, in Germany, the #MeToo movement gained traction, with directors Dieter Wedel, Luke Mockridge, Julian Reichett, and Til Schweiger all facing sexual abuse allegations on social media (Klode 2023). Like the #MeToo movement in France, the allegations made against these directors initially had little effect, with Wedel resigning but dying only four years after the allegations (and hence being unable to stand trial), and the other three directors being able to maintain their careers. Finally, in America, a study comparing perceptions of sexual assault before and after the #MeToo movement became viral showed that while actual sexual abuse rates stayed the same, female sexual assault victims were more likely to recognize and acknowledge that they had been sexually abused (Jaffe et al. 2025, 209-218). All three examples thus demonstrate a risk of using social media as a platform for solidarity movements: the scale of social media makes progress seem deceptively fast, even though laws and enforcement of democracy must catch up.

Anti-Immigration & Regulation

The scale of social media also creates a different problem: in large spaces, naturally large voices can be amplified exponentially compared to smaller ones, seemingly pushing out minority voices. While the #MeToo movement was originally founded by Tarana Burke, an African American woman seeking to provide women of color support, the movement's sudden uptick in popularity under famous actress Alyssa Milano led to white women dominating the movement (Strum 2017). A 2021 study showed that white women were majorly overrepresented in the #MeToo movement on Twitter, with 31.48% of Tweets referencing the #MeToo movement being authored by white women despite women of color facing higher rates of sexual assault (Mueller et al. 2021). This co-opting by white women has particularly had a harmful effect on Muslim women (many of whom live in both the U.S. and Europe), who often feel underrepresented by the main #MeToo movement's emphasis on white feminism. For example, the #MeToo movement in France has also been aligned with reinforcing the hijab ban for Muslim women, as both are seen as antithetical to white feminist freedom (The Cube 2021). However, an opportunity corresponding to the scale of social media is the ability for marginalized voices to find their own niches and create their own communities. In response to the #MeToo movement, Muslim women broke off to form the #MosqueMeToo movement, which emphasized sexual assault in the Islamic community while still supporting those who wished to wear hijabs, with Egyptian-American activist Mona Eltahawy gaining an interview with Time magazine thanks to social media (Researcher 2018).

Several factions seek to change social media regulations and algorithms to better control solidarity movements. These attempts to control social media carry their own risks and opportunities, as exemplified by the immigration debate in the West: algorithms and regulations can make it easier for large, political, intercommunal solidarity movements to operate at the cost of polarizing users, but they can also make social media a safer place to discuss differing opinions at the cost of repressing certain voices. In both Europe and the U.S., the anti-immigrant perspective has been increasingly viewed as a solidarity movement, with people viewing immigrants as a drain on the collective West. Trump, Elon Musk, and various European parties have used social media to collaborate and spread the narrative that immigration is a threat to Western democratic solidarity. For example, Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), an anti-immigrant political party in Germany, has taken on Harris Media, a media consultant that has previously aided Trump and the anti-immigrant UKIP party in the UK (Mcintosh, 2017). Through Harris Media, the AfD party has been able to circumvent German Facebook regulations to promote anti-immigrant content. Elon Musk has also been suspected of influencing X algorithms to promote AfD and other anti-immigrant content to users: a 2024 study by the NGO Global Witness showed that even non-partisan media users in Germany were more than twice as likely to see right-wing content as opposed to centrist or left-wing content on Tiktok and X (Benton 2025). The dominance of algorithms pushing anti-immigrant content has also polarized discussion about immigration policy in the West. A study on the immigration debate on Twitter in the UK also shows that anti-immigrant users are more active than pro-immigration users, suggesting that their rhetoric has become polarized by algorithms (Nasuto and Rowe 2024).

However, Western proponents of immigration believe that the anti-immigration movement runs counter to democratic solidarity, and some of them believe that hateful online rhetoric can be rectified with the right types of regulations and algorithms. For example, the EU plans to pass the Digital Services Act (DSA), which would force large social media companies to report how their algorithms work, prevent them from disseminating inflammatory content, and force them to follow liability rules (Bakiner 2022). Under the DSA, most anti-immigrant content using racist rhetoric would likely be banned. Furthermore, a study on Internet regulations also shows that by having social media platforms and other websites regulate digital racism more strictly, racism online and in the physical world may slowly fade (Chen 2021, 477-524). However, Musk and Trump have denigrated the DSA, arguing that its terms act against the First Amendment, which guarantees freedom of speech (Windwehr 2025). Overall, while social media algorithms and regulations have boosted the intercommunal solidarity movement against immigration into the West, defenders of immigration, which have been split into more intracommunal solidarity movements, are also potentially considering algorithms and regulations as methods of increasing their own solidarity.

The Russia-Ukraine War & Missing Geography

Even as social media becomes more regulated, social media remains distinguished by its separation from reality: unlike with television or newspapers, users can remain anonymous and spread information discreetly. Social media's separation from reality can allow persecuted people to safely seek intercommunal solidarity with the rest of the world, but it can also lead to the easier spread of misinformation and reduce actual sympathy for solidarity movements, as demonstrated by the use of social media during the Russia-Ukraine War. During the war, mainstream media faced difficulties covering the war due to the physical danger posed by Russian forces. However, social media platforms, such as r/IAMA, provided a fast, anonymous, and safe way for Ukrainians to find support and provide coverage of the war (Child_Summer 2024). Ukrainian influencers have also used short-form social media platforms such as TikTok to portray itself as an intimate friend of many Ukrainian supporters through comedy skits and interviews (Marks 2022). Finally, the Ukrainian government has used social media to discreetly capture footage of the destruction and deaths caused by the Russian invasion and garner global sympathy (Karalis 2024). The separation of social media from physical reality has also made it easier to support Ukraine without risking one’s life. Online charities donating to Ukraine such as United24 and help.rescue.org have used Youtube ads and Twitter to advertise their campaigns to help Ukrainian people (United24 2022). A 2024 study on perceptions of the Russia-Ukraine War on Twitter have also shown that 67% of tweets did not support the war, with the remaining 33% generally either being from bots or supportive of the Ukrainian people, suggesting that while Twitter users were afraid of entering violent conflict, social media allowed them to still support Ukraine (Breve et al. 2024).

However, social media's separation from reality has also made it much easier for misinformation to spread and divide intercommunal support for Ukraine: anonymous sources cannot be easily vetted on social media. For example, Russia has used bots and AI deepfakes to spread pro-Russia propaganda throughout TikTok and Twitter. In particular, Russian propaganda has targeted Latin American and African countries, citing colonialism and white supremacy as a reason not to support Ukraine and its allies (Karalis 2024). Since users from these countries have negative histories with colonialism and a greater distance from the war, they are less likely to be able to see Russian propaganda for what it is. Fake charities such as help-for-ukraine.eu and ukrainesolidarity.org have also taken advantage of social media to advertise themselves, diverting fiscal support away from Ukraine (Crawford and Smith, 2022). Finally, the spread of pro-Russian propaganda and fake charities exposes another flaw with social media's separation from reality: the Western public, due to constantly hearing about Ukraine on social media, has developed compassion fatigue. After reading reports of the war online, users on WeBo and Twitter grew less likely to support Ukraine (Zhan 2022). The separation of social media from reality has both facilitated and eroded democratic solidarity between Ukraine and its allies.

Conclusion

Ultimately, while social media has fostered both intracommunal and intercommunal solidarity to preserve democratic ideals in Europe and the U.S., it primarily fosters smaller, more fragmented intracommunal solidarity movements due to its scope, the growing battle over regulations, and its non-physical nature. While social media will likely become more important for fostering transatlantic solidarity as more people use it, great care must be taken so as to guarantee an egalitarian society.