Before They Shrink March 28, Share It
Don't wait for mainstream news or the algorithm to tell the story of this weekend. Tell it yourself, while you still can.
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There’s a comforting fiction in American life that suppression is only suppression when it’s obvious.
It’s comforting because it allows people to believe that if no one has openly forbidden them from speaking, then speech must still be free in any meaningful sense.
If no one has physically prevented a protest, then public dissent must still be moving through the country unimpeded.
If no law has been passed against a movement, then that movement is competing on equal terms in the marketplace of ideas.
But history has rarely worked that neatly, and power almost never does.
Power adapts and modernizes by learning the language of neutrality while preserving the substance of control. It discovers that in a country still attached to the symbols of liberty, the more elegant strategy isn’t always to forbid dissent, but to narrow the reach and dilute the urgency.
That’s the condition many of us are living in now, whether we notice it or not.
We post something important and watch it travel far less than we anticipate. We see groups organize something meaningful and see it treated as incidental. We witness thousands of people motivated to do something meaningful and then open their phones to find the event flattened into minimal participation.
This requires a system in which a very small number of immensely powerful people and companies control the platforms and channels through where political energy is seen, interpreted, ranked, recommended, and monetized.
Meta has publicly acknowledged for years that it has experimented with reducing the distribution of political content in Facebook’s News Feed and in 2024, Instagram and Threads separately announced that they would not proactively recommend political content from accounts users do not already follow.
In January 2025, Meta announced it was ending its U.S. third-party fact-checking program and moving to a Community Notes model. The company framed the shift as a move toward fewer mistakes and more speech, but Reuters reported that the broader policy overhaul came as Zuckerberg sought to improve relations with the incoming Trump administration.
Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund following a private dinner between Zuckerberg and Trump at Mar-a-Lago in November 2024. NBC News and CNN both reported that the donation was part of a deliberate effort to build a friendlier relationship with the administration. Engadget reported that Meta also contributed to the construction of Trump’s White House ballroom.
Just yesterday, March 25, 2026, the White House announced that Trump appointed Zuckerberg to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.
The one who controls the platforms where hundreds of millions of Americans encounter political content now sits on a formal advisory body to the president whose administration that content most frequently concerns.
None of that proves a secret order to suppress No Kings but it makes it impossible to treat the architecture of visibility as innocent.
It’s dismissive to think that incentives, ownership, policy choices, and political relationships don’t matter here.
A post can remain technically visible and still be made politically weak.
A movement can remain technically legal and still be made culturally faint.
And a demonstration can occur in full public view and still be rendered strangely weightless if the systems through which people discover, verify, and amplify civic life have decided that political urgency is something to be managed rather than something to be carried.
For example, thinking about this past year, most of the civic engagement we have done has happened alone. On the phone, on a screen, reading the news... we have been resisting in isolation, and then wondering why we feel depleted, why our posts seem to travel nowhere, why the things that are clearly important to millions of people somehow never seems to break through.
Authoritarian politics has always depended, in one form or another, on convincing people that resistance is smaller than it is, weaker than it is, less organized than it is, less welcome than it is, and less worthy of risk than it is.
If people can be made to feel alone, they don’t have to be forcibly silenced because many will silence themselves.
If citizens can be made to believe they’re marginal, or outnumbered, then the work of demobilization is already half done.
Over 3,000 events are planned for Saturday across all 50 states.
Communities across the country have been building carpool systems, training de-escalation teams, organizing mutual aid drives, and planning post-event actions to sustain the momentum.
If people show up across the country and the day is reduced to a handful of cropped images, a few dismissive news-headlines, and a social media feed that decides celebrity gossip is more engaging than democratic resistance, then the country will be encouraged to misread what happened.
This is the task in front of us:
Show up, yes. But also witness and document. Name your town and photograph the turnout, honestly and proudly. Show the handmade signs, the grandparents, the teenagers, the parents with children, the veterans, the first-time marchers, the disabled activists, the quiet people who decided they were done being quiet. Show the world that we still have democratic courage.
And just as importantly, be credible. Do not exaggerate crowd sizes or post rumors as fact. The strongest counter to minimization is evidence and it’s thousands of people sending a message at once, clearly and consistent.
We are our own distribution network.
This may sound small in comparison with the scale of what we’re facing, but it’s not small, really. It’s the central democratic fact of the digital age.
Our primary channels of public attention are owned by billionaires, shaped by opaque ranking systems, and increasingly responsive to political and commercial incentives. We must make sure that what happens is seen, remembered, and shared.
The person with 300 followers makes a difference. The woman posting from a rural county makes a difference. The nervous first-time marcher posting just one photo helps. The older reader texting three friends the event link helps. Together, we can all make it harder for truth to be outcompeted by indifference.
Sharing isn’t vanity, especially not when the future of our country is at stake. Sharing is protection against being forgotten by history. Sharing is how we make sure millions of people are never made to feel like they’re standing up for democracy alone.
On March 28, show up if you can. And if you can’t, help light the way. Share the event, share reasons to show up, share the photos when they pop up on your timeline this weekend and next week.
This movement doesn’t have to be banned to be buried. It only has to be left untold. And we’re under no obligation to let that happen.
What have you noticed about how your posts about No Kings are traveling, or not traveling? The more we talk about this, the harder it is to ignore.
Sources
Meta (February 2024) | “Our Approach to Political Content on Instagram and Threads”
Meta (January 2025) | “More Speech and Fewer Mistakes”
Reuters (January 2025) | Meta to end fact-checking program in the U.S.
NBC News (December 2024) | Meta donates $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund
CNN (December 2024) | Meta donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund
Engadget (March 2026) | Mark Zuckerberg, Jensen Huang and Sergey Brin join Trump’s tech advisory panel
White House (March 25, 2026) | President Trump Announces Appointments to PCAST
NoKings.org | No Kings event finder and March 28 logistics
What Communities are Building
I have had my hand proverbially slapped by FB multiple times (account restricted ), and after the last one, I dug around to see what was the “inappropriate content”: it was Liz Cheney and Adam Kinziger!!! I posted that I was leaving FB, but still check it, try not to post anything, and stick to Substack and Bluesky much more…
Originally from Oregon, I now live in Australia (no guns and no Republicans) and a member of the state chapter of Democrats Abroad Australia. We are working to get out the vote among US citizens living here. I also share a lot of articles to my Facebook page and Facebook groups I am a member of that are anti Trump. My sources include Mary Trump, Dan Rather, Robert Reich, Mary Geddry and reputable news sources such as the BBC, CNN, Newsweek, and others. I have friends in Portland who are participating in demonstrations. We must ensure that a Blue Wave occurs in November to get rid of this corrupt administration and all who enable it.