Alec Karakatsanis-25 Political Influencers to Watch in 2024

An election-year guide to some of today’s most noteworthy political voices online-Civil rights lawyer Alec Karakatsanis (@equalityAlec on X) notes that most tweets and Instagram posts assume that people “know way too much about an issue.” Among many high-profile victories, he won O’Donnell v. Harris County-which resulted in a 2019 consent decree ordering Harris County, Texas, to limit bail requirements for nonviolent offenders. Around the same time, Karakatsanis started tweeting distinctive threads “that situated news in the history of, say, bail and mass incarceration.” As people began sharing his threads and approaching him about them, he thought, “How can I make this engagement actually educational?” Karakatsanis acknowledges the increasing difficulty of posting on X, now that it’s harder to embed links. “You have to think about the algorithm … how to frame the first tweet, build suspense, then give people a place to go to learn more.” After the George Floyd protests, Karakatsanis, who founded the carceral reform nonprofit Civil Rights Corps, began critiquing public assumptions and media coverage about crime. Many of his threads, he said, are in response to requests from educators, advocates, and even journalists themselves. He publishes, he said, “in service of a shared goal-to counter a lot of the propaganda around crime.” His tweets gave rise to his Substack newsletter; his 2019 book, Usual Cruelty; and Copaganda, which will be published next year.