Under the Algorithmic Regime: How Digital Activists Navigate Platform Censorship in Finland

Recently, popular social media platforms have shifted from fostering citizen participation to intensifying algorithmic censorship of political content (Elmimouni et al., 2025), creating new and unforeseen constraints on freedom of speech in democratic societies. Paradoxically, activists can freely participate in public protests, but expressing the same views online is censored (Earl et al., 2022). Building on social media’s dual role as both a facilitator and a controller of public discourse, this ongoing study explores the current state of political censorship in an atypical context, a Nordic high-trust society, identifying political topics that are considered sensitive to social media algorithms. Although privately owned platforms have the right to control their content, there are concerns about activism increasingly becoming vulnerable to their political and commercial steering. While prior studies indicate that groups with marginalized identities are disproportionately suppressed by platforms (Szabo, 2025), reduction techniques just continue amplifying voices that are already overrepresented while suppressing marginalized people, deepening social inequities. This ongoing study presents findings from 15 interviews with digital activists who reported having experienced political censorship on social media. They used several platforms, with Instagram being the most popular for activism and the most frequently mentioned in relation to censorship, the most censorship-triggering topics being Palestine and LGBTQ+ rights. The findings show that activists must constantly consider platform affordances to optimize visibility and avoid censorship. While platforms marginalize activist content, activists themselves have adopted the visual, influencer-like modes of communication, leading to a blurring of boundaries between platform-friendly and activist content. This study reveals a deep conflict of values and distrust towards platforms, which are just strengthened by censorship. Activists explain censorship by commercial values that drive moderation: serious political content does not fit the platforms’ preference for light, feel-good material. Digital activism takes place in the intersection of commercial and political discourses, underlining the entertaining and consumeristic lifestyle content, in which activists are trying to fit their message. Because non-normative and minority identities are more likely to be suppressed, content on queer rights is more heavily moderated than, e.g., environmental activism. The findings underline the volatility inherent in globally operating, privately owned platforms and question the sustainability of digital activism that relies upon them. Platforms can unilaterally change their policies, and such changes are closely tied to broader political shifts, whereas activists lack realistic alternatives to platforms that are overwhelmingly dominant in terms of visibility and audience reach. Earl, J., et al. (2022). The digital repression of social movements, protest, and activism: A synthetic review. Science advances, 8(10). Elmimouni, H., et al. (2025). Exploring Algorithmic Resistance: Responses to Social Media Censorship in Activism. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 9(2), 1-24. Szabó, H. D. (2025). LGBTQ+ TikTok creators: Strategic visibility negotiation in commercial and activist online spaces. Journal of Digital Social Research, 7(2), 62-96.