From October 1, 2025, to November 12, 2025, the United States government was “shut down” due to legislative disputes over the contents of a spending bill. This shutdown meant that thousands of non-essential federal employees were furloughed, and thousands more were required to work without knowing when their next paycheck would come.

Government shutdowns, while uncommon, have occurred numerous times in the past.1 However, not only was this most recent 43-day shutdown the longest in American history, but it was also the first time the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) was suspended over a lack of allotted funding. SNAP benefits provide monthly food assistance to roughly 42 million Americans, or 12% of the population; 70% of SNAP recipients are children, seniors, and people with disabilities.2 What people expected, and feared, became true once the shutdown dragged into November: people would not be receiving their SNAP benefits, it was unclear when (or if) they would receive them again, and they were now left scrambling to find food assistance elsewhere. Some states pledged to cover people’s SNAP benefits for the month of November, but this was only meant to be a temporary, partial fix.

With the end of the government shutdown, SNAP benefits have been restored, and SNAP will be funded through the end of the fiscal year in September 2026.3 While the immediate crisis has subsided, a greater, longer-term crisis still looms. Food continues to grow more expensive, while wages remain stagnant. The One Big Beautiful Bill Act that was signed into law in July 2025 will cut the SNAP budget by 20% over the next ten years, in addition to placing stricter work requirements on recipients.4 A vicious cycle is thus created where more people will end up needing help affording food, while access to help is made increasingly difficult for fewer benefits. Compounding this crisis, and one of the primary reasons for the shutdown, is the astronomical cost of healthcare in this country that regularly forces people to choose between seeking medical care and paying for other basic living expenses. 

I do not want to mince words or downplay this plight: I believe this is a moral failing of our government leaders. In a nation as wealthy and full of resources as the United States, there is no acceptable justification for why food insecurity is so widespread. Our government spends billions of our tax dollars each year on military operations around the world that cause, at minimum, societal and economic destabilization, and, at worst, genocide. Corporations and the richest Americans get tax breaks, while millions more must scrape by on their minimum wage paycheck or meager social security/disability payments. The scale of injustice being seen here is massive and dire, and it should disturb anyone who is paying attention and has a conscience.

As I spend time reflecting on this as a Muslim, I remember the many times in the Qur’an where Allah has urged the believers to feed those who are hungry. The two passages that have always stood out to me most regarding our duties to give come from Surah al-Balad and Surah al-Ma’un:

“If only they had attempted the challenging path! And what will make you realize what the challenging path is? It is to free a slave, or to give food in times of famine to an orphaned relative or to a poor person in distress, and–above all–to be one of those who have faith and urge each other to perseverance and urge each other to compassion. These are the people of the right.” [Surah al-Balad, 90; 10-18]

“Have you seen the one who denies the (final) Judgment? That is the one who repulses the orphan, and does not encourage the feeding of the poor. So woe to those (hypocrites) who pray yet are unmindful of their prayers; those who (only) show off, and refuse to give (even the simplest) aid.” [Surah al-Ma’un, 107; 1-7]

The message Allah shows us here is very clear: giving food to needy people is morally good, even in times of difficulty, and denying food to needy people is morally wrong. The verses of al-Ma’un in particular illustrate the hypocrisy of those who may follow the “letter of the law” (through outward acts of piety like salah) but disregard the “spirit of the law” by ignoring Allah’s Command to care for those who are vulnerable. Throughout the Qur’an, Allah frequently pairs “belief” together with “righteous deeds,” illustrating that our deen requires both from us in order to have sound faith. With these imperatives, it is our Islamic duty to address these issues to the best of our ability.

There is an oft-cited hadith from Sahih Muslim where our Prophet ﷺ says,

“Whoever among you sees an evil action, let him change it with his hand [by taking action]; if he cannot, then with his tongue [by speaking out]; and if he cannot, then with his heart [by at least hating it and believing that it is wrong], and that is the weakest of faith.”

This is frequently used as a rallying call to action amongst Muslims, especially in situations where people may feel that there is little that they personally can do due to a lack of power or physical distance (for example, the genocides in Gaza and Sudan). In the case of the American hunger crisis, however, we are in a position to counter these evil actions (purposeful, artificial shortages of food resources) with our hands, tongues, and hearts. 

 – With our hands: The most direct way we can help our neighbors who are hungry is, unsurprisingly, to provide them with food or money for food. There are many ways this can be done, and some ways may be more beneficial to certain people than others. For example, in my local Buy Nothing group on Facebook, people regularly request and offer groceries and meals. Because this group has a large user base, requests for food are generally met quickly and abundantly.

“The most direct way we can help our neighbors who are hungry is, unsurprisingly, to provide them with food or money for food.” [PC: Nico Smit (unsplash)]

Local mutual aid groups are also a direct, effective way to give assistance. We can donate shelf-stable foods to food pantries, either official ones or informal grassroots ones like Little Free Pantries or community refrigerators. Food banks are able to purchase food in bulk at much lower prices than at retail stores, so monetary donations can be stretched further. Some people may not have the time or ability to cook, so for them, prepared meals or ready-to-eat foods will be the most helpful. Others may not have a car or reliable transportation, so we can offer rides to food pantries or the grocery store. Even people facing food insecurity themselves can help others, perhaps by offering to cook for those who can’t, or by passing along foods that they won’t use to others who will, so it won’t go to waste. If your masjid or Islamic school doesn’t have a food pantry or offer financial assistance to hungry community members through zakat or sadaqah funds, work with them to make this a reality.  

Alhamdulillah, Muslims have already been demonstrating a commitment to serve our neighbors. At the small Islamic school my daughter attends, one parent’s suggestion to provide food assistance to students and their families led to a fundraising campaign that has collected $1,300 for groceries. In a now viral TikTok series, a woman named Nikalie Monroe filmed herself cold-calling dozens of houses of worship requesting baby formula. She did not need the formula, but she wanted to conduct a “social experiment” to see how receptive religious institutions would be to people directly asking for assistance. Most of the churches she contacted either denied the request or directed her to different organizations, but a few places, including The Islamic Center of Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina, offered to help her get formula with no questions asked. Touched by this masjid’s generosity and quick response, donations have been pouring in, which the masjid says it will use to fund a food drive. These are beautiful examples of Allah’s Words being put into action, and illustrate how one kind act can birth even more goodness. Allah says in Surah al-Baqarah: “The example of those who spend their wealth in the cause of Allah is that of a grain that sprouts into seven ears, each bearing one hundred grains. And Allah multiplies to whoever He wills. For Allah is All-Bountiful, All-Knowing.” [2;261]

 – With our tongues: This is where our recent experience with Palestine/Sudan activism will be useful. Get involved with advocacy groups that work towards policies that fight hunger and systemically address poverty and the massive income inequality in the United States. This can be on a national, state, or local level. For example, you could start or join a campaign for your local school district to provide universal free breakfast and lunch for its students, so no child will ever have to worry about skipping meals at school or having lunch debt.

Write and deliver a khutbah or bayan/khatirah about what the Qur’an and sunnah say about helping our hungry neighbors. If you’re a parent, talk with your children about hunger and how widespread it is, as well as what Allah has asked us to do to address it.

 – With our hearts: Du’a and taqwa are our greatest tools. Make heartfelt du’a asking Ar-Razzaq, the Provider, to bless us all with His Rizq (provisions). Ask Allah to help us in helping others, and that we may be agents for what is right. Remember how Allah has warned us against oppressing others, and ask Him to keep us from being among the wrongdoers and those who cause harm.

Pray that the hearts of those in power are opened and guided to the Truth, and that they use their power to enjoin goodness and justice for people, especially those who are vulnerable and marginalized. 

We may not be able to solve problems like hunger alone, but inshaAllah each step we take to help our neighbors means one less person goes to bed hungry. May Allah bless and help those who are struggling in body, mind, and spirit, and guide us to always do what is pleasing to Him. Ameen!

 

Related:

– When The Powerful Eat Full And The Poor Go Hungry

– The Architecture of Withholding: When Charity Becomes Control

1    “Funding Gaps and Shutdowns in the Federal Government”. https://history.house.gov/Institution/Shutdown/Government-Shutdowns/2    “Explainer: Understanding the SNAP program–and what cuts to these benefits may mean”. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/social-policy/explainer-understanding-snap-program-and-what-cuts3    Desilver, Drew. “What the data says about food stamps in the U.S.” https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/11/14/what-the-data-says-about-food-stamps-in-the-us/4    Explainer: Understanding the SNAP program–and what cuts to these benefits may mean”. https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/social-policy/explainer-understanding-snap-program-and-what-cuts

The post The Hunger Crisis: Reflections Of An American Muslim appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

Latino Muslims have often been spoken about, but rarely heard on their own terms. Their stories are too frequently marginalized, misrepresented, or ignored altogether. This is why narrative ownership matters. Without it, the richness of Latino Muslim identity risks being flattened into stereotypes or erased from broader religious and cultural histories.

As someone who has spent more than two decades researching, writing, and advocating for the visibility of Latino Muslims, I have witnessed both the challenges and the power of reclaiming our narratives. The struggle to be recognized as authorities in telling our own stories is ongoing, particularly in spaces that remain patriarchal and dominated by outsiders. Yet it is precisely because of this marginalization that it becomes all the more urgent to affirm the voices and contributions of Latino Muslims in the United States and beyond.

My exploration of Latino Muslim identity began during my undergraduate years at the University of Maryland, where I majored in modern languages and linguistics, specializing in Spanish and education. Having embraced Islam only five years earlier, I was still learning to navigate the intersection of cultural heritage and faith. Through coursework, I became fascinated by how Islam had shaped Spanish and Portuguese culture, and, by extension, the Americas. Linguistic, culinary, and traditional threads revealed connections between my ancestry and my faith, highlighting how deeply entwined Islam has long been with Latino identity. These discoveries reinforced the importance of telling stories that illuminate our history, assert our belonging, and resist erasure.

“Our goal was simple: to make knowledge about Islam accessible to our families and to other Spanish-speaking families. At that time, resources about Islam in Spanish or within a Latino context were scarce.” (PC: Stepping Stone Charity)

This academic curiosity soon evolved into a personal mission as I began volunteering at my local mosque to assist Spanish-speaking visitors and newcomers to the faith. After marrying my husband, another Latino convert whose family hails from Ecuador, we founded the PrimeXample Company in 2005, and it later evolved into Hablamos Islam. Our goal was simple: to make knowledge about Islam accessible to our families and to other Spanish-speaking families. At that time, resources about Islam in Spanish or within a Latino context were scarce. We began translating articles, fatwas, and educational materials, building a website, and offering our services as interpreters and translators at local mosques and community events. Our work was born out of the necessity for resources to explain our decision to embrace Islam in a way that resonated with our families’ cultural backgrounds and values. However, as we expanded, we discovered a broader community of Latino Muslims who shared our experiences and aspirations. Our work transformed from serving our own families to supporting a growing network of Spanish-speaking Muslims nationwide and even beyond US borders.

The Raíces Run Deep

When we moved to New Jersey, my husband and I became active in the North Hudson Islamic Education Center (NHIEC), where we helped their outreach committee and organized events for the predominantly Latino community in Union City. In a city where over 80% of the population is Latino, Spanish was the language of daily life. Take, for example, my husband’s grandmother; she migrated from Ecuador to New Jersey in the mid-to-late 1970s and did not speak a word of English despite living in Union City for decades. His parents learned broken English, but Spanish remains their dominant language.  Even in the mosque, the Friday sermon was simultaneously translated to Spanish on headsets for those who could not understand the usual Arabic. The outreach committee planned open houses and street parties, held regular classes for new converts, translated materials, and created spaces where Latino Muslims could connect, learn, and share their stories. However, the gathering they are most widely known for is the annual Hispanic Muslim Day, held every Fall, typically around Hispanic Heritage Month. A young Puerto Rican convert, Daniel Hernández (now Imam Daniel Hernández), conceived the idea for this celebration with the former Imam of NHIEC, Mohammad Alhayek. This year (2025) was the event’s 23rd anniversary.

Through our outreach work, we learned that Latino Muslims had been building communities long before us. From the inner-city Bani Saqr movement in Newark, New Jersey, and the Spanish-speaking mosque in New York, Alianza Islamica, to the Latino American Dawa Association (LADO), we connected with individuals and organizations dedicated to supporting Latino Muslims. In the days before social media, we networked through Yahoo groups, AOL chats, and email threads, forging bonds that transcended geography. We often reminisce about how we were connected even before social media. There is an untold history that is deeply personal, rooted in the desire to reconcile our heritage with our faith and to make sense of our identities in a society that failed so many times to recognize our existence beyond our conversion stories.

Despite our longstanding presence and contributions, Latino Muslims have often been sidelined in mainstream narratives. Too frequently, nuestras historias – our history and our stories – are told by outsiders like non-Muslim academics, journalists, or other opportunists, who lack the lived experience to truly understand our journeys. I have witnessed, time and again, how the phenomenon of Latino Muslim conversion is reduced to a headline, a curiosity, or a trend, rather than a testament to the resilience and diversity of our communities. The latest tendency seems to be checking off Latino Muslim characters on a diversity list to fulfill equity requirements without offering an authentic voice. I have personally received messages from people outside our community, who have never even met a Latino Muslim, yet want to add such a character to their books or illustrations simply because it is now considered “the thing to do.” Often, this is at the suggestion of an editor or professor eager to feature this so-called “new, up-and-coming” group, even though we are not new at all but have been an integral part of the dawah in the United States since the earliest documented conversions.

What’s Old is New Again?

This observation led me to dedicate my master’s thesis to researching Gen X and early millennial (Xennial) Latino Muslim converts and their contributions to American Muslim communities as I pursued graduate studies at Chicago Theological Seminary. I wanted to shift the focus from conversion to continuity, to examine what happens after the shahada, when the initial excitement passes and a lifetime of living Islam begins. As part of my research, I conducted in-depth interviews with Latino Muslims who have practiced Islam for twenty to thirty years. These individuals have raised families in the faith, established organizations, translated Islamic knowledge into Spanish, and built the institutions that others are now benefiting from. Their stories prove what the literature has missed for decades: that Latino Muslims are not the “new kids on the block” or the latest slot on the diversity checkbox.

“The work of Latino Muslims is not motivated by a desire for recognition, and so many of us are content to stay under the radar. But there is power in preserving history in our own words.” [PC: Social Cut (unsplash)]

Incidentally, marginalization of Latino Muslims, as well as other minority groups like African American and Native American Muslims, is not just external. It is compounded when individuals, sometimes even those with Muslim names, usurp our stories for personal gain. I recently encountered a book, cleverly titled “Latin Islámica,” which purported to explore the history of Latino Muslims. I ordered it on Amazon despite my better judgment, and upon receiving it, I was disappointed to discover that it was little more than a hastily assembled, AI-generated text, no more than sixty pages long, masquerading as scholarship, devoid of depth, authenticity, or respect for the lived experiences of Latino Muslims.

As someone who has spent years writing, translating, and advocating for my community, I find the trend of thoughtless reporting on Latino Muslims deeply insulting.

Our stories are not commodities to be packaged and sold for profit. They are the lifeblood of our communities, shaped by struggle, sacrifice, and unwavering faith. To see them reduced to superficial summaries or exploited for fame is a painful reminder of the ongoing battle for narrative ownership.

Additionally, Latino Muslims are not a monolith; our journeys to Islam are as diverse as our backgrounds. Even terms like Hispanic and Latino do not fully encompass our diversity. Some of us are converts, others were born into the faith, and many have family histories that span continents and generations. We are from several Caribbean islands and from every nation in North, Central, and South America. We are professionals, educators, community organizers, and scholars. Our contributions to our families, communities, and the broader Muslim ummah are vast and varied.

Historically, Latin America has embraced immigrants from every Muslim-majority country, including our brothers and sisters from Palestine, who could not find refuge in the US. They have been able to settle there, establish successful businesses, and reach some of the highest political positions. Yet, despite our shared history, our stories are overlooked, misunderstood, and/or misrepresented. The mainstream narrative tends to focus on the novelty of Latino Muslim conversion, ignoring the rich histories and ongoing work of those who have been Muslim for decades, or even generations. It fails to recognize how we have navigated cultural, linguistic, and religious boundaries to build vibrant, resilient communities.

Uplifting Latino Muslim Voices

The work of Latino Muslims is not motivated by a desire for recognition, and so many of us are content to stay under the radar. But there is power in preserving history in our own words. If we do not take ownership of nuestra historia, others will do it for us. The time has come for Latino Muslims to reclaim our heritage and assert our rightful place in the tapestry of American Islam. To do so means writing, speaking, and sharing our truth so that future generations, searching for guidance, inspiration, and reassurance, can benefit from it. We must also hold accountable those who seek to appropriate or misrepresent our experiences. Outsiders can research, conduct studies, perform surveys, and even sit at our tables, but they will never fully understand what it is like to live in our shoes, to walk our path, and to experience Islam as we do. It is even more frustrating when someone creates an AI-generated text, slaps a Latino title on it, and claims to have researched Latino Muslims. That is just pure laziness and a disrespect to all of us.

I have been raising my voice since at least 2005. And as time passes and I grow older, perhaps becoming less patient, my voice will become louder and more direct, because it is imperative to recognize those who have been working tirelessly to bring visibility to the Latino Muslim community in the US. I do not claim this work as mine. Many others deserve recognition, including Benjamin Perez, Khadija Rivera, Ibrahim González (may Allah have mercy on them), Juan Galvan, the creators of Banu Saqr, and the founders of Alianza Islámica. Dr. Juan Suquillo, Sheikh Isa Garcia, the Dawah committee at the North Hudson Islamic Education Center, the people at Islam in Spanish, and my contemporaries at the Ojala Foundation, LADO, LALMA, Latina Muslim Foundation, ILMM, and so many more have all contributed to our community’s growth and visibility. We must also remember the countless Latino Muslims who converted in the 1920s and 30s, and those who came before them.

We have to be respectful and mindful of our history. Just because we live in the age of social media and AI does not mean we are the first to do this or that, nor does it make us experts on others’ lived experiences. Our stories are not marketing tools or diversity props. They are sacred narratives shaped by struggle, faith, and resilience, and they deserve to be handled with integrity. As Latino Muslims, we will continue to speak for ourselves and preserve our own history, but we cannot do this work alone. I call on the wider Muslim community to uplift authentic voices, to seek out and cite the work of those who live these realities, and to support initiatives that support and empower our Latino brothers and sisters. Most of all, we must ensure our stories are told accurately and respectfully.

 

Related:

– The Fast and the ¡Fiesta!: How Latino Muslims Celebrate Ramadan

– 25 Things Latino Muslims Want You To Know

 

The post Owning Our Stories: The Importance Of Latino Muslim Narratives appeared first on MuslimMatters.org.

At the tail end of the last millennium, before blogs and definitely before social media, there was a book published called Web Pages That Suck, a guide to badly-designed web pages aimed at people who want to design good websites. The author, Vincent Flanders, turned the concept into a website which he continued updating until 2015; the site now has clearly been abandoned, with lots of missing image markers and ads in every in-between space. Bad web pages were often full of animations and other material which distracted from the actual content, or the product someone was trying to sell. One website that really did suck was MySpace, an early social media contender, principally aimed at musicians (it allowed people to upload music for download) but used by lots of others as a networking site. It allowed users to make their pages as over-the-top as they liked and pages often had animations that made the text illegible and which took several minutes to load. It was taken over by Microsoft, which didn’t improve those matters until it was too late, and made it unfashionable in the era of the infamous bug-ridden Windows XP and processor-hogging Vista. It was crying out to be replaced and when Facebook came along, it was swiftly abandoned.

Last year a book was published by Cory Doctorow, former co-editor of Boing Boing and long-time advocate for online freedom as part of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Open Rights Group, titled Enshittification (edited extract here; you can order the book from their bookshop). This book was a thesis about how online services that were (or appeared) good to begin with go bad as their owners try to monetise them. In the early days, the owners portray themselves as freedom-loving in contrast to their competitors (like Microsoft and MySpace) and offer exceptionally good deals to consumers by undercutting existing companies using their venture capital, but then betray their users by selling their data to commercial customers, then betray the latter by making it more and more difficult to sell their products and publications, imposing onerous fees, limiting the reach of content and punishing them if they link to their own websites. The good deals end, the prices go up, the customer service and quality go down. Ultimately, you end up with a platform offering little other than garbage, surviving only because it is difficult for people to move as all their friends are on the site, or because they have bought a lot of music, video or literature which is locked to the apps, or because the competitors have been put out of business. He contends that “ultimately, they die”, but the principal enshittified web services have survived a lot longer than the sites, which included a fair few stinkers like MySpace, that they replaced. (Amazon does provide some value; its Prime membership offers include some films and music, and its returns system is better than a lot of the competition, but the deterioration of the goods on offer is undeniable.)

I’ve been online since 1995, when public access to the net was quite new, and I’ve been blogging since 2004, so I’ve seen how the Internet has developed. Search has changed from a number of competing engines like Infoseek, Excite, Yahoo and others to just Google and the privacy-oriented DuckDuckGo, neither of which existed in 1995. Early Google, in the late 90s, was just so good that it rapidly put most of the early contenders out of business; Yahoo survived because it took over a number of other services, although some have since been sold, such as Flickr; in the drive to monetise the services, paid content comes first after a useless AI-based summary. Social networking and interaction were provided by email lists and the Usenet newsgroup system; in the early 2000s, and particularly following 9/11, blogs grew more prominent. Finally, in the late 2000s, social media and what was then called ‘microblogging’ exploded, including Twitter and Facebook. Other sites existed back then; the Twitter protocol was used by rivals StatusNet and Identi.ca, neither of which still exist, while Facebook had competitors like Bebo, which was sold to AOL in a much-derided $850 million deal that cost the latter’s CEO his job and is now defunct, although it has been relaunched and then closed down again since 2013. Google made several attempts to launch microblogging and social media apps, none of which still operate. I wrote about Google Plus when it first launched, but Google strangled it at birth by not including functionality which Facebook had, or which Facebook had removed and which users might like. It had no group functionality, apart from anything else.

The thing is, Facebook was always horrible. It both sucked as a service, and was evil. It grew because of the disadvantages of the existing social media options: it wasn’t MySpace with its slow animations and legibility-destroying backdrops, it made it easy to share personal content without having to set up a blog, and it has mostly been free of spam, which was the bane of anyone who ran a blog which allowed user comments before 2007. The downsides were that features changed all the time, with valued functionality removed (such as the discussion forums within the group system) or senselessly changed (such as merging mail with chat), as I mentioned in that article on G+. Worse, earlier versions of FB had a ‘ticker’ feature which told all your friends if you made a comment on any post or group which was not private. I used to call this feature Snitchbooking. This was a large part of what makes Facebook actually evil rather than just bad: old social media consisted of email groups and forums about specific subjects, and if you posted on one, it didn’t appear on any other. Here, all your friends were on the same platform and you couldn’t keep groups of friends separate anymore. On most of the old sites, you could use a handle or pseudonym; Facebook demands that you use your real name.

Back in 2008 when Facebook was in its infancy and blogs were still popular, I spoke at a Muslim community event called “Wired Warriors” in London and put my view forward that there was going to be a “blog crunch”: that the blogosphere was heavily dependent on corporate off-cuts and long-shot business models, such things as offering the principal service for free while charging for support that a lot of users would not need, and that this situation would not last very long as blog hosts would need to pay bills. In the event, some blogging sites have not succumbed to this; WordPress still offers a functional free version of their hosted blogging platform and Blogger is still going, though TypePad has closed, LiveJournal was sold to a Russian company and Movable Type, a popular choice to run a blog in the 2000s with free and cheap personal plans, is now an expensive corporate product. However, a number of blogs disappeared in the move to social media and microblogging, as did a number of privately-hosted forums, and it’s those sites that have fallen victim to the crunch I predicted back in 2008: Twitter got markedly less useful as first Jack Dorsey and then Elon Musk sought to monetise it, restricting then blocking third-party clients and making ‘curated’ feeds the standard, while Facebook has undergone hyperenshittification — a shitty site getting even shittier — with friend and chosen-content feeds very difficult to find and the home feed being filled with promoted, often auto-generated slop, clickbait and churnalism. Meanwhile, Twitter (now branded X) has a default feed increasingly filled with racist and politically extremist content, driving a number of long-standing users to decamp to new, but underused, competitors such as BlueSky and Mastodon. On both sites, it has become difficult to promote blog articles, while many of the forums and email lists that previously allowed their promotion have closed.

Cory Doctorow gives some ideas as to how to de-enshittify the online world; these include unionising tech workers and strengthening anti-trust (competition regulation) laws so that one company cannot force competitors out of the market with subsidised undercutting or monopolise the supply chain. Sadly, the political climate right now is very much against any such legislative changes in many countries. Another legislative trend that makes resisting enshittification more difficult is the wave of online safety laws, requiring web service operators to impose age verification or police their services to ensure children are not exposed to ‘adult’ content. The motive is quite understandable, but it is precisely the large, established, enshittified service operators which have the resources to access this kind of technology, not those seeking to re-establish private forums or indeed new, open social media platforms, and this has led to some sites run on a shoestring to close, or to block users identifiable as being in the UK, Australia or other countries where such laws exist. One important way of reclaiming the online space is for a fund to be built up to buy out Twitter, either by an offer to its current owner or in the event of a distress sale. This would secure Twitter as a community resource and restore it to what it was before so much of its functionality was stripped away.

Is there a way back to what we had before social media swept it all away? Do we want those days back? Blogging was a lot more fun when people responded and there were lively discussions in the comment sections, but I also remember dealing with floods of spam and with Islamophobic comments; I don’t think I’ve had a single blog comment in a few years and I haven’t seen a lot of my old regulars for years now. For a while the discussion moved onto Facebook and Twitter and then it stopped altogether. Maybe people don’t read blogs anymore, but there are things you can’t say in a Twitter thread and we don’t want our writings to be stored on a social media site that might just choose to exclude us from it. When bloggers started shutting their sites down and moving onto Facebook around 2007, I had a sense that it wouldn’t end well and my fears were largely confirmed.