I am an organizer in Pennsylvania. Instagram’s new policy threatens young people in an age of low youth participation in politics.

In late March, I awoke to the news that Instagram, perhaps the biggest social media platform for young people in the United States, would automatically limit recommending political content to users unless they proactively opt in.

As someone who has spent most of my career focused on engaging young people in the political process, this decision was deeply troubling. But perhaps what was more troubling was the shocking lack of coverage and outrage on this wildly consequential decision. While many were preoccupied with the proposed forced sale of TikTok, Instagram’s policy went quietly under the radar. Yet this ill-timed decision will likely have disastrous consequences for speech online, and the future of our democratic process.

I am an organizer in Pennsylvania in my early 20s, and Instagram has been the single most useful tool for engaging with young people in politics. Compared to platforms like TikTok, users on Instagram largely decide what they see in their feed. This has led to the rise of local networks in which information can be distributed to members of a community, rather than to everyone on the platform. Using this, organizers can share information, highlight upcoming gatherings, and give important updates to just those following them.

But to organizers, the primary benefit that Instagram offers is that it is the most popular social media platform of its kind for young adults. It is where most young people my age interact, discuss issues, and most importantly, get their news. Politicians need young people to vote, and cutting out social media threatens the youth vote.

Politics is a messy business, and platforms have historically struggled with regulating political speech on their websites. While users can ostensibly post whatever they want, nearly all online platforms have guidelines on what constitutes acceptable speech on their sites. Meta — the parent company of Instagram — has content moderation guidelines that have been well-documented as particularly labyrinthian, taking context into account in some regards, and not others. This leads to seemingly disjointed and convoluted outcomes that have made them no friends on Capitol Hill.

Over the years, Meta has been at the center of numerous political scandals, from Cambridge Analytica to the removal of Donald Trump from the platform. In the wake of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, Meta has been accused of censorship and promoting misinformation from both sides of the political spectrum on posts relating to the ongoing war in Gaza.

Hosting a functioning public forum necessitates a commitment toward moderation, limiting the spread of misinformation, and ensuring that bad actors stay off the platform, all of which requires a whole lot of effort — something that tech companies seem increasingly disinclined to do.

Thus, in recent years, platforms have begun to disincentivize news and political content. In 2016, YouTube was widely criticized for demonetizing content that was primarily focused on the news or political discourse. This led to many creators whose content was based in these subjects to find alternative revenue streams or pivot the type of content they made.

After launching Threads in 2023, Meta also revealed that their site would avoid political and news-related content, much to the disappointment of many Twitter users eager to leave the platform after the Elon Musk buyout. This change in Instagram’s policy toward political content suggests a continued reluctance of companies like Meta to continue to allow and promote political content on their platform.

I do not envy Meta’s position here. Maintaining political speech on a platform is difficult and thankless work. But the idea that we can easily return to a prelapsarian world where these platforms are exclusively for cute animal photos and targeted ads is a fantasy we cannot tolerate.

While politics may be a headache for platforms to deal with, I argue that as proprietors of the largest channels of public discourse, social media sites do in fact have an ethical obligation to protect civil discourse, and a failure to do so is a dereliction of this duty.

Imagine if bars and cafés forbade discussing current events, or if news outlets no longer felt it was worth the money and hassle to cover politics. What use would our freedom of speech be in a world where we had no venue to discuss the issues that matter most?

Our democracy was conceived and founded in bars and meetinghouses, “third places” outside of home and work in which people could meet on neutral ground and discuss the issues of their time. In the last few decades, these places have gradually begun to disappear. Without them, future generations have fewer and fewer places to meet and discuss politics, with social media partly filling the gap left behind.

While social media is certainly not the only solution to this issue, in a world where people are gradually becoming more isolated, the role it plays in maintaining our political life has only grown, and thus the responsibility of platforms has grown as well.

Pennsylvania is a key swing state in November’s presidential election, and I am concerned that this trend will work to diminish youth engagement in the political process. At a time when less than half of young Americans plan on voting in the general election, we cannot sit by and allow this attempt by platforms like Meta to skirt their responsibilities by depoliticizing the internet.

Jacob Fuller is an activist, policy writer and organizer based in Philadelphia. He currently serves as the East Division Policy Director for Pennsylvania Young Democrats.