It’s time to divest from Instagram politics – Dazed

“If you are not from Venezuela, you better shut the fuck up!” begins an Instagram video of a woman with long dark hair explaining how Venezuelans have suffered under Maduro’s rule. This sums up one of the defining attitudes of political discourse in 2026. Since the start of the  year, my social media feed has been awash with content creators from Venezuela, Cuba, and Iran trying to convince us that they are reliable sources of information and unchallengeable authorities simply by virtue of being from the countries that the US government is currently trying to enact regime change in. Front-facing camera videos and infographics dispensed by both well-meaning but useless liberals stuck in 2016, and bad-faith, right-wing stooges who seem to have discovered a passion for identity politics despite spending the last ten years railing against ‘woke’, tell us that the only legitimate way to form political opinions on these complex geopolitical issues is by “ listening to X voices” . This conflation of lived experience – or even tangential ethnic connection – with expertise has led to genuinely farcical instances of political commentary that would be hilarious if they weren’t so harmful. We are told to accept that “
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