Social media’s relationship with politics hasn’t exactly been the healthiest. But don’t expect a split anytime soon — especially with next year’s election cycle on the horizon. Users today have a greater number of platforms available to them compared to the days of the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal that cost Meta $725 million — a shifting landscape that comes with its own set of challenges. Those platforms are more opaque when it comes to how information spreads and feed off of partisan tribalism, according to critics. For hardcore Trump supporters, there's Truth Social; for those wanting both group chats and dedicated channels in their social media, there’s Telegram; and for people tired of Elon Musk's antics on Twitter, there's BlueSky. The list goes on. As online communities continue to splinter, researchers are worried it will be difficult to track how social media platforms are being used to shape people’s views, or how these platforms will affect future elections. Those fears are compounded by the rapid development of artificial intelligence, which is being used to create political ads, or to disseminate deepfakes that could undermine democratic principles. “The platforms that we're looking at in the context of both mis and disinformation have significantly fragmented,” said Nick Loui, co-founder and CEO of PeakMetrics, a company that helps governments and large enterprises identify and combat disinformation campaigns. “It's much more demographic — and psychographic — specific.” “We're in an environment that is very much focused around tribalism,” he added. While membership on these fringe platforms remains small relative to giants like Facebook or Twitter, their influence is nothing to scoff at. In the roughly 70 Telegram channels Loui’s firm tracks that disseminate information about the Ukrainian and Russian sides of the war, he said English posts can receive over 360 million views. Additionally, users who do frequent these fringe or alternative social media platforms are loyal to these sites, reporting themselves as “satisfied” with their social media experience in a study conducted by the Pew Research Center. In large part, audiences are moving to these platforms because they want less moderation, Loui said. His observations are backed by a 2022 alternate social media survey by the Pew Research Center, where the most common response about why users chose to move to alternative social media sites was “lack of censorship,” according to Galen Stocking, a Senior Computational Social Scientist at Pew who helped conduct the study. Stocking said that’s a major selling point for the platforms themselves. “They advertise themselves often as a free speech platform — as a platform that [is] not limiting what people are able to say — and that showed up in our in our survey,” Stocking said. And many of these alternative social media sites skew toward the GOP, Stocking said, noting that across the seven sites his team surveyed, two-thirds of users were Republicans or right-leaning independents. The researchers flagged Twitter’s new leadership as another significant variable in the shifting social media landscape. “With Twitter's new ownership structure, they've made a lot of actual changes to the platform that have reshaped some of how information spreads,” said Loui. Those changes include fewer direct takedowns of content, algorithm changes, and more community policing of information. And bolstered by Musk’s brand of techno-libertarian politics, those changes are also paving the way for Twitter to become a new-wave Republican hub. Over the past couple of years, Pew surveys about whether Twitter is good for democracy have revealed that “certain policies and practices have made Democrats more wary of Twitter… and Republicans more receptive to [Twitter] overall.” said Pew’s Stocking. That fragmentation makes it difficult to keep an eye on what’s happening across social media. Not only do researchers have to pull data from many different platforms to understand how information spreads, but users are moving to communities that offer more privacy within their closed communities. That makes platforms like Discord harder to monitor. That lack of access is compounded by many social media platforms closing off or paywalling their APIs or application programming interfaces to third parties, which includes researchers. Twitter began charging for API access earlier this year. Reddit users are protesting Reddit’s decision to charge money for API access (with John Oliver as an unlikely figurehead for the movement.) “Facebook 10 years ago was very easy to monitor. Now it's less easy,” Stocking said. And conducting Pew’s study of alternative social media sites “took quite a bit of effort,” Stocking said, because these sites do not have public APIs. | 
