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With Donald Trump’s election win on Tuesday, many Democrats and their allies are feeling afraid, demoralized or deeply frustrated. But fascism feasts on shattered dreams. So in the immediate aftermath it’s important to take the time to assess the conditions that brought us here and start work on making them more equitable and empowering.
That means addressing what feels to me like the biggest problem plaguing the United States: the grip that social media platforms — and their Trump-friendly operators — have on the public.
Trump’s campaign succeeded in part because it was aided by major social media and Big Tech platforms that helped promote (or failed to stop) far-right bigotry, extremism and conspiracism. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos all celebrated Trump’s election win on Tuesday. And while Musk is the only one who officially endorsed him, it’s noteworthy that each of them oversees a massive platform (multiple platforms in Zuckerberg’s case) that has become a hotbed for pro-Trump bias, misinformation and conspiracies.
Musk, who plunged millions of dollars into electing Trump, essentially turned X (formerly Twitter) into what NBC News called “pro-Trump echo chamber” where pro-Nazi accounts can purchase verification to get their abject racism prioritized across the site.
Zuckerberg — who said the look on Trump’s face after the July assassination attempt was “one of the most badass things I’ve ever seen in my life” — oversees Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, all of which have been pinpointed by experts as sources of far-right propaganda and extremism. For example, this Tech Policy article, about the spread of disinformation on Spanish-language WhatsApp, seems especially prescient in light of exit polls that showed Latino men swung toward Trump in significant numbers this election. On MSNBC Wednesday, Maria Teresa Kumar, the president of Voto Latino, said that disinformation played a key role in Trump’s Latino support. Kumar said she spoke with several voters who cited online disinformation that Kamala Harris had jailed parents for their kids’ truancy.
And as for Bezos, researchers found that Amazon’s algorithm, through recommendations and search auto-complete, can steer users who are shopping for certain types of books toward pro-Trump extremism, like content promoting QAnon conspiracy theories. (This makes Bezos’ claim in his Washington Post op-ed that the media is chiefly responsible for losing the public’s trust all the more ironic.)
For years, the ReidOut Blog has been shining a light on the people and organizations doing the work of calling out Big Tech as a vector of conservative propaganda and extremism: people like Nina Jankowicz and Kate Starbird and organizations like Media Matters, Onyx Impact, the Center for Countering Digital Hate and others. It should come as no surprise that such researchers who follow the spread of disinformation on social media platforms have come under fire from conservatives. That alone tells you how central social media misinformation and manipulation is to the current conservative project, and why liberals need to confront this imbalance more vigorously — with reporting and, eventually, regulation — if we want a political system staked in truth and facts.