The original publication of this article can be found on the author's substack page, as a part of a series of posts titled "Syria, self-made."

In post-Assad Syria, as elsewhere, social media has stoked sectarian incitement and disinformation. But Syrians are also putting digital tools to creative, constructive use in bridging gaps and building community. Much of this occurs on messaging apps, beyond public view and away from Facebook’s rage-baiting algorithm. WhatsApp, and to a lesser extent Telegram, play a central role in civic, economic, and political life.

Some of the most interesting, uplifting modes of organizing I’ve encountered in Syria take place in message groups, to include:

Crisis communication

In Syria’s volatile transitional phase, communities have struggled to manage rising theft, violent crime, and sectarian flareups. Many have formed neighborhood- or village-level WhatsApp groups to monitor and manage problems as they arise. Topics range from the severe—a killing, a kidnapping, a fight that might spiral into bloodshed—to the more banal, like a loud noise that might or might not be gunfire. When something serious happens, leaders within a group might pull in local security forces or others with the authority to deescalate.

Combating disinformation

If such groups respond to real crises, they can also defuse exaggeration. Even in communities where the threat of violence is very real, locals readily acknowledge that social media can inflate or invent problems. “Facebook takes incidents and makes them bigger than they are,” said a mother in Homs, where kidnappings and killings have sown terror in certain communities. “There was an episode where a woman lost track of her daughter for a few minutes, and it was suddenly on Facebook that a second grader had been kidnapped.” Private groups with trusted interlocutors can function as a check on this tendency: Likewise in Homs, a nurse periodically chimes into a WhatsApp group to fact-check reports of violence, using her access to the city’s medical infrastructure.

Of course, such vital work also occurs in public social media fora—just take verify-sy, an initiative that fact-checks news to a following of more than 609,000 on Facebook and 138,000 on Instagram. Public and private formats complement each other, reaching different communities via different channels in relation to different problems.

Organizing solidarity

Critically, message groups are not just for reacting to crisis: They also enable slower-moving forms of community-building. Local leaders use them to raise funds to fix up infrastructure like roads and schools, or to revive services like waste management. A woman in Damascus explained how her neighborhood coordinates via a WhatsApp group with more than 1,000 members, including locals based inside and diaspora with links to the area; they have tackled priorities from installing solar-powered streetlights to cleaning up the filthy local segment of the Barada river. Elsewhere, the wife of a man detained in northern Syria created a WhatsApp group for families to coordinate shared transportation to visit loved ones in faraway detention facilities—easing both the financial burden and isolation of making such a trip.

Here, too, public and private platforms complement each other. In Damascus, a neighborhood organizer noted that he uses every possible platform to solicit donations for public projects—but largely sticks to WhatsApp groups for the technical work of documenting how funds are spent. Similarly, a public Facebook group might be indispensable for a major crowdfunding campaign, but inappropriate for the more sensitive work of organizing around detainees.

Sharing practical knowledge

For others, message groups help build and share knowhow needed to earn a living. In a village northeast of Homs, a landowner in his sixties spoke fondly of a WhatsApp group where hundreds of agricultural engineers share tips that have helped him learn new techniques and plant new crops. “There are people from this area but also in northeast Syria and outside the country, like Tunisia and Saudi Arabia. I’ll share a question and get responses from some twenty engineers, on questions like what type of fertilizer to use at a specific time of year.”

Of course, messaging apps pose plenty of problems. They are natural echo chambers, cocooning us alongside those we choose to share them with. They are noisy, fueling our digital overload and fragmenting our attention between ever more disparate streams of information. And they are perfectly capable of spreading disinformation and hate speech, albeit without Facebook’s algorithmic incentive for flamethrowing.

Some Syrians also critique the degree to which WhatsApp has crept into official communications by state bodies, creating a sense of randomness and informality when people are hungry for structure and clarity. Al-Jumhuriya has reported, for example, that civil servants at Syria’s ports were informed by WhatsApp that they would be transferred to faraway land border crossings—only to learn that their instructions on WhatsApp contradicted decisions circulating privately within state institutions.

None of which, it should be noted, is unique to Syria. As they navigate their transition, Syrians also face a global turning point in how we produce and consume information. A vacuum of trust in, and funding for, traditional media; the latter’s replacement by social media platforms expertly designed to addict and enrage us, which grow ever less useful thanks to what Cory Doctorow brilliantly dubs “Enshittification”; the rise of a political class that governs by Tweet and war plans by group chat; the advent of AI slop, which threatens to supercharge all of the above: These global currents are buffeting all of us, fueling waves of anxiety, confusion, and alienation.

But they also spur precious forms of innovation and solidarity: from Damascus to Minneapolis, ordinary people in extreme circumstances are finding ways to make the internet work for their communities rather than fracturing them. As we all careen into a bizarre digital future, we’ll do well to learn from their experiments.