Shekuva Alizada
Dek: Digital activism is indispensable, especially for marginalized communities. But the same infrastructures that help our causes scale can strain the relationships that movements rely on. Centring a feminist ethics of care, expanded by intersectionality and Black feminist thought, offers a practice cadence for keeping care intact across disagreement.
I. Why visibility feels good and why it frays ties
Some nights ago, I watched a stranger grieve. The video was colour-graded, the caption careful, the music just melancholic enough to invite a long exhale. Thousands of comments gathered beneath like flowers at a vigil: heart emojis, prayer hands, “sending love.” I clicked away feeling… moved? Or performed upon? Social media is brilliant at making feelings legible to many at once. That ability has powered vital digital activism, especially for communities long excluded from legacy media and formal institutions (Papacharissi, 2014; Tufekci, 2017). Yet the same features that help movements scale – speed, visibility, and algorithmic amplification – can also unsettle our everyday relationships. This is not an argument against online action, but an exploration of how digital polarization seeps into our friendships, families, and workplaces, and how the feminist ethics of care expanded by intersectionality and Black feminist thought, can help us practice care that survives the feed.
I don’t think people are being dishonest. I think we’re exhausted. The world keeps breaking in loops – wars, fires, verdicts, layoffs, and with headlines going off in such sirens, we want to do something with the ache that collects in our chests. But the distance between feeling and action is wide, and posting is a bridge we can build quickly. So we post, and for an instant, it promises that the emotional toll you’re paying means something, that it counts in the global ledger of pain. It’s also the bridge with the best lighting; the more we are seen as aware, the more we appear to be the kind of person who cares. Pain becomes a public utility, in which a tragedy that resists narration risks being ignored, while one that is easily legible can be packaged and sponsored (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012; Gerbaudo, 2012; Milan, 2013). The dilemma is not feeling versus action but how infrastructures for visibility shape what caring looks like and rewards it receives.
Contemporary movements often organize through “connective action,” where decentralized networks mobilize via personalized expression routed through online platforms rather than formal hierarchies (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). These are Papacharissi’s “affective publics”: hashtags and threads that translate private feeling into collective presence (Papacharissi, 2015). But the same infrastructure that allows a young organizer to reach thousands in minutes also optimizes for what travels, and what travels most efficiently are moral–emotional and out-group–focused messages. Studies show that such posts are likelier to spread, nudging us toward sharper language about the people we disagree with and subtly rewarding performances of certainty (Brady et al., 2017; Rathje et al., 2021). When exposure to opposing views happens without trust or context, it can even backfire, increasing ideological distance rather than bridging it (Bail et al., 2018). Add “context collapse,”– multiple audiences converging into one flattened stage – and ordinary nuance begins to feel risky; we talk to our imagined followers even when we’re technically talking to one person (Marwick & boyd, 2011).
So what? Polarization does not only polarize politics; it polarizes our personal, everyday lives. Before the 2020 U.S. election, nearly half of adults reported that they had stopped talking politics with someone because of something that person said, a data point that, while context-specific, captures a broader pattern of withdrawal under strain (Pew Research Center, 2020). Other survey work suggests a smaller but non-trivial share ending friendships over politics, with variation by ideology (American Survey Center, 2021). The precise percentages matter less than the everyday consequences: once conversation exits, relationships degrade. Online norms (call-and-display, speed over reflection, audience over intimacy) migrate into the kitchen table. We begin addressing a partner, sibling, or colleague as if we’re addressing our followers; the result is misrecognition: we perform to an imagined crowd while the person in front of us recedes (Marwick & boyd, 2011). This is precisely where a feminist ethics of care (attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness) can re-anchor practice in small, durable acts that algorithms do not optimize (Tronto, 1993, 2013).
II. Care ethics – with power: from “caring about” to resisting tone-policing
Feminist ethics of care helps explain why polarization frays relationships in the first place. While care is often understood as an emotion – which it is – it must also be recognized as a practice grounded in relationships, interdependence, and the equitable distribution of responsibility (Gilligan, 1993; Held, 2005; Kittay, 1999; Noddings, 2013; Tronto, 1993). Tronto (1993) describes phases of care: caring about (noticing), taking care of (assuming responsibility), caregiving (the labour of doing), and care-receiving (attending to the response and adjusting); Tronto later adds caring with, the democratic dimension that stresses justice and collective responsibility (Tronto, 2013). Platforms supercharge the first phase – caring about – while starving the middle phases that require listening, adjustment, and accountability. The asymmetry helps explain why visibility can feel meaningful yet still fray ties: we inhabit the notice-and-signal stages without resourcing the slower work that relationships require.
However, an ethics of care that brackets power risks reproducing the very exclusions it seeks to heal. Without attention to race, class, gender, and voice, calls for empathy can end up centring the comfort of those already cushioned by privilege. Intersectionality and Black feminist thought sharpen this critique by insisting that care without a power analysis often becomes tone-deaf policy. From an intersectional view, what gets read as “civil,” “measured,” or “compassionate” is not neutral but patterned by race, gender, class, and migration status; the same anger that is legible as principled in dominant groups is pathologized as excess in Black, Brown, and immigrant voices (Crenshaw, 1989, 1991). Black feminist thought further shows how those already tasked with disproportionate care labour are then asked to package their critique in soothing ways – extending empathy upward while absorbing harm downward (Collins, 2009). In that arrangement, “care” becomes a gatekeeping device: dissent is recoded as incivility, and the burden shifts to the marginalized to be gentle enough to be heard. Accordingly, a care ethic worthy of the name therefore protects the right to speak in registers other than comfort – anger, refusal, sharpness – as forms of care for truth and community, not deviations from it (Collins, 2009; Crenshaw, 1991).
III. Social-work practice in polarized, platformed spaces (repair without retreat)
I’m wary of purity narratives that imply visible empathy is false by definition. Digital activism and public grief can mobilize marches, strikes, and fundraises. For marginalized communities, especially, the gains of digital visibility are existential; documenting harm, mobilizing resources, archivig memory, and pressuring institutions for change. Recognizing that the gains are real, the relational downsides are even more urgent to solve. If advocacy depends on networks of trust, then the everyday strain that polarization places on those networks is not just a private problem; it is a sustainability problem for movements themselves. The question then becomes how to keep the strategic advantages of “connective action” without importing the interpersonal habits that corrode attachment (Papacharissi, 2014; Bennett & Segerberg, 2012).
A social-work cadence fits the problem: assess before intervening; prioritize safety and relationship; iterate; document. Keeping relationships intact in polarized environments begins with acknowledging the infrastructures we inhabit. Platforms compress time, expand audiences, and translate emotion into engagement (Papacharissi, 2014; Brady et al., 2017). If we want our relationships to survive those pressures, we expand the context where platforms collapse it and slow tempo where platforms accelerate it. One way to start is by separating audiences whenever conflict touches people we know offline. Moving a heated exchange from a public thread to a private channel changes the incentive structure: without spectators, there is less pressure to perform and more room to ask clarifying questions. It also helps to name the audience explicitly–
“I am speaking to you, not to an audience” – which signals an intention to prioritize the relationship over the crowd (Marwick & boyd, 2011).
Deliberate pacing also matters. High-heat topics rarely benefit from instant publication, especially when safety is not at stake. A practice of drafting and returning twenty-four hours later can turn a statement into a conversation. Research on exposure to opposing views suggests that contact without relational scaffolding can backfire (Bail et al., 2018). Taking the first exchange into slower channels, such as direct messages, voice notes, or a scheduled call, creates the conditions where listening is possible and where a shared definition of terms can emerge before positions harden. Shifting from identity claims to issue framing can further reduce defensiveness. Instead of “people like you always…,” a more precise move is to state the concrete concern and the stake: “I’m worried policy X will do Y to group Z, and here is the evidence that leads me there.” The goal is not to mute conviction but to prevent algorithms’ preference for out-group talk from dictating the tone of intimate conversation (Rathje et al., 2021).
Repair benefits from making maintenance visible. In movements and relationships, crescendos get attention, but trust is built in the middle. In group chats and teams, record the “boring wins” that never trend: forms submitted, calls returned, appointments rescheduled, so effort doesn’t vanish into the feed. Research on “small wins” and daily progress shows these incremental steps sustain motivation and coordination (Weick, 1984; Amabile & Kramer, 2011). This translates social work’s day-to-day ethic into digital life: care as repetition and documentation rather than one-time flourish (NASW, 2021; Sidell, 2011/2015/2024). When disagreements threaten a tie that matters, narrate intent and capacity with clarity and pace – moves consistent with relational-maintenance and repair literature showing that explicit, de-escalating bids help relationships weather conflict (Canary & Stafford, 1992; Canary, 2015; Kashian, 2019), and with social-work guidance on boundary-setting and confidentiality in practice (Reamer, 2003; NASW, 2021).
Finally, refusal is also care. Sometimes the bestand most ethical activism is refusing extraction: declining to narrate others’ trauma without consent and declining to turn every disagreement into a public test of purity. It is important to highlight that in this context refusal is not withdrawal from accountability, but rather an ethic of consent and scope that asks who benefits from a disclosure, who is exposed to harm, and whether a performance of grief serves care or merely the feed (Tronto, 2013; NASW, 2021).
Conclusion
The same digital infrastructures that amplify messages can also narrow our capacity for relationship, rewarding certainty, performance, and out-group talk over repair (Brady et al., 2017; Rathje et al., 2021). A feminist ethics of care, expanded by intersectionality and Black feminist thought, offers a counter-cadence: move from caring about to caring with; pair recognition with responsibility; make maintenance visible; and protect registers of dissent (anger, refusal, sharpness) as forms of care rather than deviations from it (Collins, 2009; Crenshaw, 1989, 1991; Tronto, 2013).
Digital activism and visibility convenes “affective publics” and fuels connective action, especially for communities historically excluded from legacy media (Papacharissi, 2015; Tufekci, 2017). Such visibility functions as infrastructure, making recognition, and mobilization possible. Yet if visibility is what allows our causes to scale, then sustaining the relationships that make that visibility meaningful becomes just as critical; without them, digital activism risks burning bright but brief.
For social-work practice and movement life alike, the task is repair without retreat. This involves expanding context where online platforms collapse it, slowing tempo where algorithms accelerate it, and shifting conflict from the spectacle to environments where listening and mutual understanding are possible. It also requires documenting incremental progress so that effort does not disappear into the feed, naming audiences to ensure that relationships take precedence over performance, and setting boundaries so that consent, confidentiality, and safety remain the structural foundations of trust (NASW, 2021).
I still watch online videos. Sometimes they offer necessary release; sometimes they split me open in the places that have gone numb; sometimes they remind me that I am not alone. And often, they become a way of partaking in digital activism itself; bearing witness, adding weight to a collective pulse that insists on being felt. While such moments do not resolve the structural fractures that sustain polarization, they reorient us toward the relational work that makes repair possible. Even mediated through screens, these gestures signal an lasting capacity for care and collective presence. Thus, if polarization is the water we swim in, then caring with is the boat we build together: patched, patient, and just sturdy enough to keep us rowing toward one another as we row toward change (Tronto, 2013).
About the author: S. Alizada is an undergraduate student in the School of Social Work. Her writing has appeared in the UBC Human Rights Collective and the Canadian Student
Review–Fraser Institute, exploring themes of forced displacement, decolonial thought, and youth digital activism.
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