The Right Wing Takeover of Social Media
Hi friends –
Social media is a special kind of paradox. In many ways, it has brought voice to the voiceless, powering movements ranging from the Arab Spring to Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.
But it is also easily abused and manipulated by powerful entities — whether it is Russian operatives trying to spread propaganda to disrupt the U.S. election, or Myanmar generals trying to stoke ethnic violence.
For awhile, the tech platforms tried to fight back against powerful interests. They fought back when governments around the world started demanding that they censor speech. Twitter famously called itself the “free speech wing of the free speech party” and sued the Indian government to avoid complying with orders to take down dissident’s tweets.
During the 2020 U.S. election, they fought for election integrity. Fresh off of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified in Congress that he would double the number of workers screening content on the platform and the company gave journalists a tour of its “Election War Room” preparing for combating misinformation. At the same time, Twitter started fact-checking President Trump’s lies.
But in the 2024 election, the companies reversed course and allowed lies to flow across their platforms unchecked. Meta declared it was getting out of politics — the realm of the most contested facts — by suppressing political speech on Facebook and Instagram and gave up on labeling false posts. YouTube said it would stop taking down election lies. X, formerly Twitter, dismantled its content moderation team and reinstated accounts that had been banned for inciting violence, hate speech and other noxious behavior.
In my latest piece for New York Times Opinion, I argue that social platforms caved to a pressure campaign from the right – and that their capitulation was probably inevitable. In retrospect, it was unrealistic to expect profit-driven social media companies to act as good faith gatekeepers to facts that challenge power.
What’s the Problem? The social media reversal began after the tech platforms cracked down on Donald Trump’s lies about the 2020 election being stolen. After his accounts were suspended on Twitter and Facebook, a conservative backlash soon ensued.
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter, with the explicit goal of molding it to his political goals. He immediately set about dismantling Twitter’’s content moderation team, relying instead on a crowdsourced fact-checking system that researchers have found fails to catch many lies. Soon, Twitter — which he renamed X — was cozying up to the Indian government and letting known harassers and lie-purveyors back onto its platform.
At the same time, the Republicans began working the refs. They launched a legal and political campaign against what they claimed was tech platform censorship of conservative speech. After gaining control of the House of Representatives in 2022, they used their newfound power to issue a flurry of subpoenas and document requests to fact-checkers and disinformation researchers. They also passed laws in several states aimed at preventing the tech platforms from allegedly censoring conservative speech. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court declined to overturn those laws, but sent them back to state courts for further adjudication.
The platforms caved to the pressure. And the result was possibly the most misinformed electorate we’ve ever seen – a group that was convinced of lies such as an unprecedented flood of immigrants crossing the border, rising crime rates and soaring inflation.
We will never know how much misinformation may or may not have swayed voters, but we do know that the lies influenced one side dramatically: Republicans. In a recent Ipsos poll, Americans who answered questions about inflation, crime, and immigration incorrectly were more likely to support Trump.
What Can Be Done? It’s become clear that the tech platforms are not going to risk their profits or their political power by joining the fight to protect high quality information. And the U.S. government – now firmly in the control of the Republican party – will not push them to.
In other words, no one is coming to save us from this polluted information environment – not the government or the companies. If we want a good quality information environment, we are going to have to build a new one beyond the walls of the existing Big Tech social media platforms.
We can do that by funding people who do the hard work of collecting facts (aka journalism) and by finding new ways to reach audiences. Luckily, there is a new movement brewing that aims to break open the gates of the closed social media platforms – the so-called “fediverse,” also known as the social web.
The social web is a transformation that could revolutionize how we interact online. Simply put, the fediverse will allow you to post to multiple social media platforms from a single account, instead of the current model of only reaching people who are the same platform.
This is how email evolved. When it was first invented, users could only message other users of the same system. But with the development of an industry standard for messaging in the 80s, email users were able to message each other from different systems.
A similar industry standard is emerging for a new breed of social networks: Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky. Earlier this year, Meta began implementing fediverse interoperability between its Threads social network and other networks including Mastodon. It’s not perfect yet, but it’s a good start toward a future that we need.
If we can break out of the closed social networks and build a social web experience that is beyond corporate control, we can give truth a fighting chance.
As always, thanks for reading.
Best
Julia