404 Media

2025-10-03 13:36:21

Can You Win a Congressional Seat Without Social Media?

Carleigh Beriont is running for Congress, and if you know about her campaign, it’s definitely not for the same reason you’ve learned about other local politicians in recent years. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has become a household name in part because of her ability to use social media and livestreams to talk to people directly. Zohran Mamdani hasn’t even won an election yet, but is already a national political figure thanks in part to his fluency on TikTok.

Beriont, on the other hand, is not using social media at all. She’s been on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook in the past, but has not been on social media since 2020 after getting frustrated with the kind of discussions and divisiveness she saw there.

Beriont is a former union organizer, a teacher, and vice chair of the local Select Board. Now, she is not only trying to win the Democratic primary for the New Hampshire District 1 congressional race, she has also made social media abstinence a part of her platform.

Eric Schildge, Beriont’s husband, reached out to me after reading my article about an Instagram account promoting Holocaust denial t-shirts, and explained that Beriont was promoting herself as an “anti-social Democrat” because she thinks “Democracy works better offline.”

According to Beriont’s campaign manager Carly Colby, Beriont raised over $232,000 from over 2,300 individual donors. Over 250 of these individuals donated in response to receiving a message specifically about Carleigh not using social media.

I called Beriont to find out why she thinks it’s possible to win an election without social media.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

404 Media: Why did you get off social media?
Carleigh Beriont: I'm a millennial, so I grew up like when Facebook required the .edu and it was a great way to connect with new classmates going into college and old friends when you had moved away from where you grew up, which I did. During the height of the Black Lives Matter protests [in 2020], there were a number of conversations that I saw happening on my feed where one relative would post something and a friend from school would post something, and they'd be yelling at each other, and I was like, these people don't even know each other and they're fighting online. It just felt like the experience was getting more and more degraded. It was more and more ads, more and more videos, less and less communication between people, and I signed off because I think that it was making it hard for me as an academic and a parent and someone who was very busy, to think clearly.

I was always worried about what I was going to say or that people were going to jump all over me, and I thought that was unhealthy. When I ran for office the first time in New Hampshire, I wasn't sure I'd be able to do it without social media. But I also realized that talking to people on the phone and meeting them at their doors or speaking in libraries, people weren't as angry or as opposed to one another as I'd been led to believe based on social media. And so I started to think, well, what if we don't use social media running for Congress? I mean, you've seen this week how bad things have gotten [Editor’s note: this interview took place the week Charlie Kirk was shot], and I just don't think that democracy works well online. We're seeing Donald Trump try to force the sale of Tiktok to one of his biggest supporters’ children. We're seeing Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos sitting in the front row of Trump's inauguration. They had better seats than Greg Abbott did, and these people are making billions of dollars off of us, and they are destroying our democracy in the process. I don't want to be a part of it. So when I think of what can I do, What can I change, we decided not to use social media during the campaign because we don't want to live in a world where that is where our politics take place, and how they're outsourced, because we don't think that it's productive for democracy.

404 Media: I told my colleagues I was doing this interview and one of them joked that the headline for the story could be: “Can You Win an Election Without Telling Anyone You’re Running?” I hate social media also but I think I have to use it to promote our articles. Don’t you think it’s a necessary evil for you as well?
Beriont: It's so funny. I wish I could get a shirt that was like, “necessary evil?”. I do think that it's evil. I don't know that it's necessary. This campaign is a test for that. It's one thing for people who are trying to promote themselves or trying to sell things to use social media. I think it's another for our political leaders who are in a position where they should be holding corporations and the people who run them, like Mark Zuckerberg, responsible for their actions.

We're watching how the government is literally using that to surveil us and fire people for things that they're allegedly posting that are inappropriate about Charlie Kirk's assassination and things like that. It's incredibly risky for people to be using social media who are trying to preach a message of connection and community and democracy and equality and respect and dignity. I am not seeing those things on social media. Most of what people see, I believe a lot of it is AI. I believe a lot of it is an attempt to sell you something. I believe little of it is things that your friends and family are using as a way to actually connect. In New Hampshire, we've seen local police departments shut down the comment sections on their Facebook. We see political candidates deleting things that they don't like or comments that are negative. And so I think it just skews our sense of what's real and what's possible right now. And so that's why we're not using it.

Instead, we're doing something I'm calling district dialogs. As a facilitator and teacher, I'm happy to involve myself in messy, awkward conversations with people. I love teaching people how to stay in conversations and hold spaces. And so we're asking people what they wish politicians understood better. And we've had about 40 of these conversations throughout the district, and in almost every one we're hearing the same things from people who are exhausted by social media. They go on to check something, and two hours later they realize that they've lost two hours of their life, or they tried to find a post from a candidate, and instead, they got sucked into like some type of Nazi propaganda. And it's just such a shitty way to run a communication system and to run a country, and I think that we've done too much outsourcing to it, so it needs to stop.

404 Media: How are you reaching people without social media?
Beriont: We've been meeting in like public libraries and school cafeterias and church basements and driveways and living rooms, and asking people to bring some of their friends, or if it's a local democratic committee or some type of organization, asking them to invite people, and just sitting around and asking one another what we think we need to be doing right now. What people are saying after those meetings is they're so grateful that they had a chance to hear other people and to be heard, and they don't feel alone, and social media makes them feel alone. It makes them feel crazy, it makes them feel overwhelmed. And actually sitting and talking with the people in your community about what you can do to make it better is, I think, an antidote for a lot of that feeling of overwhelm and disassociation that people have right now.

I ask people what they think about my position on social media, and the number of people, especially millennials, say “I wish I could throw my phone out the window.” It seems to be really the political consultants and people who work in politics who are the most opposed to this idea, in part, because, for a lot of people, it's a low lift way to get involved. I think we have to ask ourselves whether it's actually an effective way of making a difference right now. I don't believe that that's the case in 2025.

404 Media: Have you done any polling or do you have any data that shows that this strategy is working?
Beriont: We haven't done any polling yet. It's tricky because there's six other people in this primary right now, one of the things that I think has been differentiating me is my willingness to sit and have a conversation. So a lot of politicians are operating the way that they have been trained to, which is to show up at a place, get a picture for Instagram or Facebook or Twitter, and then leave and people notice and are frustrated with that because they don't feel like they're actually getting an opportunity to talk with the people that want to represent them. As someone who has been on the other side of that, I decided to run because I was really frustrated with all of these monologs and these directed cameras telling me how to think or how to feel or how to vote or why, you know, the sense of reality that I had was wrong. And I think people really want more dialogue right now. They want more real, authentic exchanges. And I think they deserve that, and I think that that needs to be the foundation for democratic politics going forward.

404 Media: When I was in the VICE union there was an organizer with Writers Guild of America East who told us that support for the union on social media doesn’t mean anything, and can be counter productive because it makes people feel like they’re supporting the union without actually supporting it. Is your no social media approach to campaigning influenced by your experience in union organizing?Beriont: Yeah, absolutely. I was one of the people that helped organize the graduate student union at Harvard with the UAW. I think you're absolutely right about that. I also think that local politics has been great for this, because it's nonpartisan. And one of the things that I've realized is that in order to get things done in a space that is politically quite divided, you can't just be posting shit about your opponents the minute you don't get your way. You need to really build relationships and recognize that you're not always going to get your way, and this is true in a negotiation. When you show up to bargain at a table, you don't assume that you're going to get every single one of the things that you ask for, but you assume that people meet you in good faith and you'll be able to move forward. And I think that a lot of the relationship building and the coalition building that we need right now is lacking at the national level. We're seeing people, pouring fuel on partisan fires and preaching to the choirs, and they're doing that to raise more money, and it's not winning over anybody, and it's not helping to de-escalate the situation that we're in right now. And I think that it's frankly making us a lot less safe, because instead of actually holding social media corporations accountable for what they're posting online, which they could be doing, they're choosing not to do that.

404 Media: Do you think a no social media strategy can work on a national level?
Beriont: Absolutely. I think it's well suited to New Hampshire because this is a state that is very used to hands on democracy. Our State House has 400 state reps in it, and we used to have the first primary in the nation. So most people in New Hampshire who are politically active are used to interacting with political candidates and politicians and getting to know them quite well, and expect that from their politicians. This is a state where the majority of politicians who run, if they're posting anything on Facebook, they're probably going to get like, two or three likes. And it just doesn't seem to be the most effective way to organize in a place like this. But I also think that, at the very least, we should be asking our politicians to get offline and stop exacerbating tensions on platforms that are only benefiting billionaires. They're buying our politicians. They're buying our politics. And it needs to stop somewhere. So it should probably start with the people who are attempting to be our leaders.