Social Media Sites Must Die or Democracy will Perish
Orwellian Social Media Companies Cancel Non-MAGA Voices
It’s like the adage, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well, if a person or organization expresses a heartfelt political idea on Facebook or X and no one views it because it’s blurred or shadow banned, is it a real social media post or just an illusion?
Americans were stunned to learn this week that Facebook and Instagram—social media platforms owned by Meta--clumsily censored ads from organizations helping women obtain abortion pills. These services are particularly vital for women living in the more than 20 red states that outlaw virtually all reproductive choice.
Perhaps, this is what Mark Zuckerberg meant, in a Jan. 10 interview with podcaster Joe Rogan, when he declared Silicon Valley had been “neutered” and we need an infusion of “masculine energy”.
“We know firsthand that this suppression actively prevents Hey Jane [a provider of abortion pills] from reaching people who are seeking out timely health care information,” said Rebecca Davis, who heads marketing at Hey Jane. “Given Meta’s recent promises around free speech, we’re incredibly disappointed to see how the platform is restricting our free speech.”
It wasn’t just Meta’s censorship that shocked the senses, but the Orwellian way in which they did it. Acting as Big Brother, they blurred ads and suspended accounts—which occurred only days after the corporation announced that it was eliminating fact checkers in the name of unleashing heedless expression. Such brazen restrictions on viewpoints are what we’ve come to expect in Russia, Hungary and China—not the United States of America.
This sordid episode emphasizes our new, depressing reality: If American democracy is to survive, people must understand that we are at war with an insidious cabal of right-wing zealots. They are aggressively seeking long-term dominion over our lives and unchallenged hegemony over our politics.
At the heart of this plot is an unholy coalition of greedy oligarchs and religious extremists who fervently believe they are the exclusive ruling class. Any government that is not explicitly on their team is written off as illegitimate and unfit to lead. It was this elitist attitude that was responsible for unpatriotic thugs storming the US Capitol on January 6, in the service of returning Donald Trump to power.
To achieve their aims, it is necessary to remove nettlesome democratic norms exposing the shallowness of their positions, the corruption of their narcissistic leaders and the hollowness of their rhetoric. This entails destroying the foundations of liberalism and discrediting the mainstream media to the point of irrelevance.
Tragically, the conspirators discovered a convenient way to hijack America’s dialogue while ironically posing as free speech warriors. Since our national debate is largely funneled through a handful of social media sites, if they gained control, they would essentially become our informational gatekeepers. All that was required to pull off the heist was determination and gobs of money, the two commodities they held in endless supply.
To trick the masses into believing the online game isn’t rigged, the illusion of choice must prevail by providing several ostensibly distinct offerings, such as Facebook, Threads, Instagram, Tik Tok and X.
But three of these companies are controlled by Meta, which allows “free speech” only if it coincides with co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s myopic political interests. Tik Tok, for all intents and purposes, is a Chinese-controlled government app, which has little interest in fostering healthy public debate in the United States.
X, formerly Twitter, has morphed into a platform for unbridled right-wing extremists under the ownership of Elon Musk. Upon taking over Twitter, he reinstated accounts from sundry nazis who were previously banned.
Taken together, these tainted sites have an unmistakable right wing bent that habitually degrades, frequently diminishes and often purges the views of non-MAGA content creators.
It’s like the adage, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Well, if a person or organization expresses a heartfelt political idea on Facebook or X and no one views it because it’s blurred or shadow banned, is it a real social media post or just an illusion?
The second insidious charade created by these companies is that they provide a modern-day public square. However, when people express themselves in a park, for instance, everyone has equal access to being heard. Each person, no matter what their background or financial status, can make their point. The public can then judge the content from park benches and decide whose ideas are most persuasive.
Rather than genuine public squares, however, social media platforms are akin to private suburban shopping malls. They may offer the accoutrements of a public space but try holding court in the food court and you’ll soon become acquainted with overzealous mall cops.
It’s time we fully comprehend the extent of right-wing online favoritism, or we risk experiencing rapid societal collapse. Our public communications have, in recent years, been shoehorned into a few social media platforms, run by agenda-driven corporations, that play an outsized role in shaping our thoughts and political outcomes. They regularly approve or reject discourse based on narrow self-interest rather than what’s in the best interest of our families, the country or global health.
In doing so, they have contaminated the national conversation, silenced millions of people and created the most comprehensive censorship regime in all human history. Each day, countless liberal and moderate citizens create posts hoping to share wisdom or impact the debate. But they are surreptitiously stymied by these sinister companies and reduced to essentially screaming into a black hole, where they are only heard by a shrinking, micro-universe of online “friends” or “followers”.
Recently, I wrote about my experience with Tik Tok, which involved being shadow banned for the sin of creating a video with a college professor who proclaimed that America is both a democracy and a republic. This hardly controversial, milquetoast video inspired squads of right wing, anti-democracy trolls to deliberately target and flag my account.
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On another occasion, an unnamed Tik Tok executive intervened to veto the restoration of one of my videos by the company’s appeals team. Shortly thereafter I was shadow banned with no explanation.
This is how the crooked system works at these all-powerful, speech-curtailing social media corporations. Non-MAGA writers and content creators are unceremoniously banished into an abyss and never informed of what infraction caused the death of their free expression. Any effort at clarification or adjudication is met by a byzantine maze of epic gaslighting.
Once blacklisted, your voice is clipped and it’s nearly impossible to compete or succeed. For example, Steve Schmidt is a former mainstream Republican operative and uber-talented polemicist. His newsletter, The Warning, is a daily refutation of MAGA, which apparently the social media companies aren’t happy about. In a Nov. 27 email he wrote:
It is extremely difficult to grow The Warning’s subscriber base through social media platforms. On X, Elon Musk has chosen to prioritize right-wing political content. In the case of Facebook and Instagram, they have chosen to limit political content that users see in their feeds.
As a result, the only way that we can continue to build The Warning’s subscriber base is through word-of-mouth, so if you appreciate the content that our team produces, I would be grateful if you would share The Warning with your family and friends.
If someone with Schmidt’s enormous talent, drive and notoriety is hobbled by oppressive social media restrictions, what hope do lesser known, less-affluent, non-MAGA content creators have at succeeding?
In flagrantly choosing winners and losers, based on conservative corporate preferences, social media companies distort the free marketplace, dictate the flow of commerce and destroy meritocracy. This is why top-tier non-MAGA creators often struggle, while ignorant, middling right-wing “talent” become wealthy online “personalities”. (As long as they never deviate from the Party Line. If they do, they are quickly deplatformed and lose their livelihoods, which explains the mind-numbing uniformity of their messages)
If a vulgar conservative commentator, who can barely articulate a coherent thought, is favored by X’s algorithm, he will experience exponential growth. Meanwhile, liberals or moderates with superior talent—such as Schmidt—are reduced to relying on “word of mouth.” How is this a fair fight in the marketplace of ideas?
This phenomenon has led to liberal and mainstream non-profit organizations and writers unable to achieve sustainable online growth. To survive they are forced to frantically mine their existing email lists for larger gifts—and doing so against increased competition by those stuck in the same miserable boat of diminishing returns. This is a key reason why your email inbox is stuffed with an avalanche of unusually desperate fundraising emails that are groveling for donations or subscriptions.
With non-MAGA voices largely silenced online, the right has turned their attention to eliminating mainstream media. They have done so by creating zombie news corporations like Fox News, at the national level, and Sinclair Broadcasting locally. These fraudulent entities are made to look, sound and feel like real news—but they are as bogus as a fake rubber houseplant. They exist not to deliver real information, but to disseminate conservative disinformation to unsuspecting viewers who don’t realize they are being manipulated.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk is engaged in an obsessive campaign to extinguish what he derisively calls “legacy media”. His crusade started in earnest when the oligarch greedily removed automatically generated headlines from news articles. This reduced the online traffic for news sites, leading to less ad revenue and eventually staff reductions. With fewer news reporters to search for truth and fewer readers, the media’s stature is decreased and their ability to effectively gather news is curtailed.
“Although Elon Musk has framed this as a decision informed by aesthetic considerations, it can be seen as part of a larger trend toward making Twitter/X more difficult for news organizations to use,” said Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, a journalism professor at Cardiff University. “It is likely to have a significant adverse impact on click-through rates, because platform users will no longer have the necessary context to understand the content of links — and therefore little reason to click on them.”
Then, a fixated Musk, trained his X message machine to heap incessant criticism on respected news organizations. In unrelenting waves of critical posts, the world’s richest man demeans their work as “fake news” and intimates they are obsolete. Immediately following Donald Trump’s 2024 election victory, Musk Tweeted to his more than 200 million followers, “You are the media now.”
Except neither Musk nor his legions of bootlickers are news reporters who interview subjects or gather new information. What Musk has created is the world’s largest peanut gallery, where uninformed fools regurgitate opinions, spoon fed by overpaid right wing pundits, who gained influence through Musk’s algorithm.
Musk has created a parasitic business model that relies wholly on fresh information provided by “legacy media”, while simultaneously trashing those who have done the hard work to gather facts. The online blowhards hooked on X, are totally reliant on these reporters for their bloviating, propagandistic commentaries.
If Musk can leverage his billions to sink the media, he can completely control the narrative by eliminating facts and obscuring truth. Creating this Kafkaesque world would render Musk the arbiter of reality and far more powerful than even the President of the United States. We see existing versions of this model, to varying degrees, in Iran, Russia, China, Hungary and North Korea.
With so much power over our communications, it’s easy for social media titans to promote ideas that are dangerous and delusional. Exhibit A is the recent elevation of Curtis Yarvin, a pseudo-intellectual crackpot who is the darling of right-wing luminaries, including Vice President JD Vance, Peter Thiel, Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson and Marc Andreessen.
Detailing Yarvin’s extremism, The New York Times reported:
He believes that government bureaucracy should be radically gutted, and perhaps most provocative, he argues that American democracy should be replaced by what he calls a “monarchy” run by what he has called a “C.E.O.” — basically his friendlier term for a dictator.
When asked if women should have the right to vote, Yarvin replied, “I don’t believe in voting at all.” His views on the Civil War are chilling: “It is very difficult to argue that the Civil War made anyone’s life more pleasant, including that of freed slaves.”
Until recently, Yarvin’s tripe was considered backward and batshit crazy. Thanks to the hijacking of social media, his ramblings have been boosted by social media algorithms and mainstreamed, through repetition, for the masses. Before you know it, eliminating the right to vote, in favor of a CEO dictator, will be considered “reasonable” positions that are worthy of debate by “serious people”.
This process is precisely how we risk losing America to radicalized extremists and ending the democratic experiment. When outlandish messages dominate the online space, what used to sound sick eventually seems sane. How do you think we, once more, ended up with insurrectionist, sexual abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump as president?
Andy Borowitz is a satirist whose content was recently challenged by Facebook on specious grounds. He fought back by publicly sharing the corporation’s attempt to silence him. Embarrassed and exposed, Facebook representatives responded to Borowitz by admitting “overenforcement was a problem.”
Fortunately, Borowitz seems to comprehend what’s happening. He wrote in his newsletter, The Borowitz Report:
Never one to shrink from a good social media throwdown, I offered this rejoinder to Zuck’s semi-literate henchman: “You are not ‘over-enforcing’ pro-Trump posts, or rightwing misinformation. They’re running rampant on Facebook. Zuckerberg’s statement (and donation to Trump’s Inauguration) make Meta’s agenda very clear.”
At this point, our toxic social media sites are beyond redemption or repair. They must die a rapid death, or democracy is on the fast-track to perishing. Democratic billionaires must step-up to fill the void and create new, more ethical social media companies, or they can have the pleasure of living in an autocracy with the rest of us. Well, at least until Donald Trump seizes their assets, the same way Putin did to disfavored oligarchs in Russia.
There is no turning back: Either civilized society or right-wing social media will prevail. The winner will determine the future of your children and the planet. So, ask yourself, what kind of world do you want to live in?
P.S. Please spread this article via word of mouth. I don’t think social media companies will like it.