Mickey Huff and Shealeigh Voitl on Social Media’s Role in Democracy and Activism
Random Lengths News recently interviewed State of the Free Press editors Mickey Huff and Shealeigh Voitl, with Voitl the newest editor to join the executive editorial team. The 2025 State of the Free Press had already gone to press to be published before Nov. 5, so I intentionally waited until after the election to see how much of the editors’ thinking would change.
In 2019, I noted that the State of the Free Press’s Junk Food News chapter had grown increasingly punchier, throwing jabs at individuals in ways where it felt it was punching downward instead of upward as pop culture news stories occupied ever larger territory in attention spans.
The term “Junk Food News” was coined in 1983 by Project Censored founder Carl Jensen. Since then, this chapter was formulated as being a fun chapter that poked fun at the ways the attention of media consumers is being grabbed and focused on other things that are not as important.
This year, Project Censored writers focused their sights on Barbie, the movie, and the commentary about the film’s so-called “feminist” importance and it getting snubbed for an Oscar nomination in a moment when women’s reproductive rights weren’t just an underreported debate, but an existential crisis of bodily autonomy. Then Vice Kamala Harris lost and exit polls showed that women, particularly white women then didn’t show up.
It wasn’t all that long ago that Americans, and I would imagine media consumers the world over only received their information about the world through a few new television channels, radio stations, and newspapers. Today there’s a whole social media ecosystem bound up in an audio-visual universe that is accessible by handheld devices. It’s created a reality that essentially anyone with enough captured eyeballs following their every move can be a “trusted news source.”
Media, and what we call today media influencers, have expanded and democratized who we trust as purveyors of good, trusted information.
It’s not unheard of for artists who are fixtures in pop culture to flip the script and do something entirely different. Voitl is one of those figures. Before she became an editor at Project Censored, she was a singer/songwriter and actor on the Disney Channel.
Voitl recounted being homeschooled for most of her high school career, before going back to school her senior year to be with her friends.
She engaged in a tough battle with the music industry in retaining the rights to music she had written.
Voitl took a gap year after high school to write music and just play around Chicago. But then she went back to school, enrolling in Community College for two years before transferring to North Central College and studying journalism.
She took Steve Macek’s media criticism class and learned about Project Censored.
Macek is a frequent contributor to Project Censored’s yearbooks and co-coordinator of the Project’s Campus Affiliates program.
“I think being a kid, I want to be a musician. I wanted to pursue music. But I’ve always wanted to go to college. I always wanted to learn and keep learning in higher education. It’s just how life happens sometimes.”
Voitl was 18 when Donald Trump first became president and will be 30 when he gets out of office for the second time.
“When I was 18, I felt hopeless,” Voitl said. “I was like, ‘This is just devastating, there’s nothing I can do, I’m powerless, I’m small.’ I was looking to the adults in my life like ‘Where do we go from here?’”
Huff addressed the promise and and the potential of social media by discussing “attention economy, a subject and the shrinking of it on ‘antisocial media,’ as media scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan, refers to it in the subtitle of his book Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy … a subject that he has taught whole courses on in college classrooms.
“I think it’s really important that we have what Tiffany Shlain calls a digital Shabbat — It’s planned time away from social media — which is very difficult, but can be learned. I think critical media literacy education promotes this, and I think having more media literacy that addresses these things in non-finger-wagging ways like Shealeigh was addressing is really important.
“Like, instead of saying throw the whole toolbox out, let’s figure out what we can do with it.”
Huff argued that there will always be things in popular culture that will grate on your nerves and there will be plenty of people out there who will tell you, “Maybe you should just shut up. The movie wasn’t for you. It’s for other people, and maybe they’re getting something out of it, and I’m like great, but I’m a cranky fucking middle-aged white guy and I’ve already been through this shit and I’ve seen the bad side of it.”
But he has also seen the good side of social media.
This is why those critiques mustn’t come in ways that are hierarchical or shaming, but rather more didactic, or expanding where there’s open space to hear different ideas, Huff said.
Huff said this is particularly true when the ideas are from younger people because they’re not going to have the 50-odd years behind them to inform them about the ways of the world.
“It’s great to be reminded of those kinds of perspectives because the flip side on social media is that the reason that they were trying to ban TikTok is because that’s where the kids were learning about the genocide in Gaza,” Huff said.
Voitl said that now she’s an adult, she sees the work that Project Censored is doing.
“I’m so invigorated by it and even though it is devastating. There’s so much damage that could be done in three years … catastrophic rollback of LGBTQ rights, gender-affirming healthcare, mass deportations, climate crisis. It’s all bad. It’s so scary. But I do hope that people now will become activated and invigorated and just at least energetic to create the change that they are not seeing in their political leadership. They have power. We do have power.”
Voitl said she hopes that others in her privileged position will see that and fight back as well.
