Social media has become a significant distraction in daily life. People under 30 spend three to five hours a day on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. If you’re 30-49, that drops to two to three hours. Over 50? You’re more likely on Facebook, spending an hour and a half scrolling through baby photos and political news. Over 65, it’s less than that. The numbers vary, but the through line doesn’t: we invest enormous amounts of time and mental energy in these platforms, and a good deal of what we’re doing is expressing outrage or consuming someone else’s.
That dynamic has found a comfortable home in politics. Since the flood of content creators arrived during Operation Metro Surge, we’ve noticed a sharp uptick in politicians taking to Instagram and other platforms to get their message out, unfiltered, unedited, and directly to voters. The results can be impressive. AOC has 9.6 million Instagram followers. New York City’s newly elected Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who won the Democratic primary and general election on the strength of smart, funny, and genuinely compelling social media videos, has her beat with 11.4 million. He set a standard that will be difficult to match.
But here in Minneapolis, we find ourselves asking a different question: does the rush to go viral and dunk on opponents actually serve democracy? Shannon Watson, executive director of Majority in the Middle, has been watching this dynamic play out up close at the Minnesota Capitol, and she wrote about it in her MinnPost column, “Middle Aisle: Social Media is Polluting the Minnesota Legislature.” Her argument is pointed: when legislators spend more energy performing for their feeds than negotiating in good faith, passing bills and balancing budgets becomes harder for everyone. We sat down with Watson to find out what it’s actually costing the Capitol.
Interview Summary
Shannon Watson explains that the problem isn’t abstract, it’s personal. When colleagues post attacks on each other, or when party caucus accounts amplify those attacks under an official banner, it becomes nearly impossible for legislators to negotiate in good faith. She describes a culture where the incentive to perform for social media has begun to outweigh the incentive to actually legislate, particularly in an election year where all 201 legislative seats are on the ballot and the endorsement caucus process rewards ideological purity over compromise.
Watson introduced two key concepts from her article. The first is the idea that “we are all trackers now”, a reference to the campaign operatives once hired to follow opponents with cameras. Today, every legislator operates knowing that any hallway remark or floor speech can be clipped and weaponized by anyone with a smartphone. The second is “moral framing,” the tendency to present policy debates as having an absolute right and wrong answer, which performs well on social media but makes compromise nearly impossible. She argues that when legislators stake out moral positions publicly, they box themselves in and make it harder to do the negotiating that governing actually requires.
On solutions, Watson is clear-eyed but not pessimistic. She points to legislators like Senator Julia Coleman (R-Waconia) and former Senator Matt Little (DFL-Lakeville) as examples of people willing to publicly reject negativity, though she acknowledges Little lost his race after doing so, which doesn’t exactly encourage others to follow suit. Her core argument is that what gets rewarded is what will continue, meaning citizens have more power than they realize. A simple thank-you email to a legislator who chose collaboration over combat can send a signal that civility has an audience. She also stresses the importance of consuming news from diverse, editorially accountable sources rather than relying on social media feeds that are algorithmically designed to reinforce what you already believe.
Thank you for reading and caring about Minneapolis.
