The Grassroots Algorithm

Open TikTok and you will see it: a girl in London filming her skincare routine, scroll once and you are in Gaza under bombardment, scroll again and you land at the No King’s Day protests in the United States, where hundreds of thousands boo Donald Trump on his birthday. The absurd proximity of worlds is not an accident of code. Activists have worked out how to bend the most surveilled communication system in human history to their own ends. And yes, I know, this is the moment where I compare TikTok to the printing press, but stay with me because the point is not flippant. The press was invented to crank out religious doctrine, and within decades radicals were scattering Leveller pamphlets through English towns. Telegraph wires laid to stitch empires together carried word of colonial uprisings. Pirate radio in the seventies ducked under state monopolies and transmitted Black feminist and queer politics across borders. The pattern is so old it is practically muscle memory. A tool of control becomes, in the right hands, a weapon of dissent.

Today the battlefield is the feed.

The mainstream media insists on its authority, but the cracks are glaring. Take the BBC. A study by the Centre for Media Monitoring counted the word murder used 220 times to describe Israeli deaths, but once, only once, for Palestinians. The word massacre was 18 times more likely to appear when Israelis were killed. Slaughter, atrocity, barbaric, all four times more frequent for Israelis. This is not an error of style. It is structural. The choice of diction frames who is seen as a victim and who is erased. Say Palestinians died in passive voice and you smudge away the hand that killed them. Pretend genocide is disputed and you shield the aggressor. Edward Said called it decades ago: how we know who we are depends on who has the power to represent us.

Yet open your phone and you will find testimony spilling through the cracks. A grainy clip from Gaza, subtitled and mirrored until millions have seen it, long before the newsroom even reacts. This is not only awareness in the abstract. It appears in the speed at which solidarity protests gather, in the spikes of mutual aid donations, in the way public opinion bends when the raw feed undercuts the official broadcast. No, the algorithm does not abolish structural bias in journalism, but it creates a porous channel where resonance matters more than institutional endorsement. Palestinians are no longer forced to wait for foreign correspondents to clean their story for broadcast. They can speak for themselves, and sometimes, finally, they are heard.

It was not always so. The history of grassroots organising is the history of whisper networks. Leaflets smuggled into South African townships under apartheid. Women in Pinochet’s Chile running soup kitchens that doubled as hubs of political news. Barbershops and church basements in the civil rights movement where boycott plans circulated. These spaces were intimate, trusted, and fragile. Infiltrate one, raid one, cut the phone line, and you could cripple it. Even the early internet was more closed than we remember. Forums and mailing lists demanded technical literacy, insider knowledge, a willingness to dig.

Now a single post can detonate across continents in hours. Hashtags like MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Free Palestine turned struggle into global rallying points. Paulo Freire wrote that the oppressed must be their own example in the struggle for redemption. The digital echo of that is a protester’s phone video, beamed into strangers’ feeds and reframing the narrative in real time. But virality is a double edged thing. Whisper networks endured, sometimes for years, under the radar. The viral clip burns bright and fast, and the real problem is how to hold attention in a space designed to fracture it. A whisper could wait. A viral post expires almost as soon as it spreads. The same feeds that amplify Gaza and Black Lives Matter also amplify conspiracy, disinformation and far right organising. The algorithm does not distinguish between liberation and reaction. It rewards whatever travels fastest. Which means the battle is not only to speak but to outlast and outshine what corrodes.

This is where the question of algo-speak enters. Palestinian organisers have perfected the watermelon emoji as shorthand, a way to evade censorship while carrying history in miniature. After the 1967 war, flying the Palestinian flag was banned, so people carried watermelons to rallies, painted them, wrote them into art. The fruit bore the forbidden colours and became a stand-in for the nation itself. Today the emoji does the same job, slipping through moderation filters that flag explicit political language. What looks like a playful symbol is in fact the latest in a long line of secret codes. Slaves in the American South embedded directions to escape routes in their spirituals. Dissidents in the Soviet Union circulated samizdat, texts typed and recopied in clandestine chains. Queer communities in Britain invented Polari, a slang that concealed identity while building belonging. In every case censorship produced its mirror image: coded language, covert symbols, meaning hidden in plain sight. The watermelon emoji is no different. It is the contemporary samizdat, the latest Polari, a reminder that language bends under pressure and survives.

The fragility is obvious: a policy change or government order can erase entire channels overnight. These are not infrastructures built for liberation but for profit and surveillance. To build on them is to live with the permanent threat of erasure. Yet to step back would mean silence. Codes flourish precisely because they are unwelcome. To use them is to refuse invisibility on the terms imposed by power.

That is why even the smallest symbols matter. A watermelon in a username condenses decades of struggle and defiance into something that can travel across millions of screens. Every stitch, every mirrored post, every coded symbol is part of a living archive of resistance, scattered yet unstoppable. It might look chaotic, but then so did the Levellers’ pamphlets, or pirate radio signals bleeding across the airwaves. History never looked tidy in the moment.

This is the terrain now. Frenetic, adaptive, never entirely safe. It can be censored but it cannot be erased unless movements themselves step back. We can roll our eyes at the endless scroll, or we can accept it as a frontline. The horizon is uncertain. Some argue for new platforms owned by their users, others for binding regulation, others still for tactical adaptation inside hostile spaces. What is clear is that withdrawing is not an option. The feed will be contested ground for as long as it shapes political consciousness.

The algorithm is corporate property. It was designed to sell us products, to turn attention into capital. But it is also a shared language. And languages are never stable. They are bent, broken, remade, stolen back. We are already bending this one. The question is whether we will push far enough that those who built it lose control of what it serves.