Let’s face it: on November 5th, 2024, the world entered a new era. With the election of Donald Trump, the tired, zombified face of neoliberalism crumbled as disenfranchised Democratic voters stayed home. In its place has risen something darker: a far right authoritarian populism, funded and endorsed by a handful of the wealthiest individuals to ever walk the planet – individuals who control access and flow of information for nearly everyone on earth.
The capitalist class, sensing the shift away from liberalism, has rallied behind the Trump banner, with CEOs and mainstream news anchors (CNN) making the pilgrimage down to Mar-A-Lago to kiss the ring of Donald Trump. Elon Musk, owner of social media platform X/Twitter, spent at least USD$277 million to get Trump elected, and now acts as if he is the Shadow-President, shooting down legislation he doesn’t like via tweetstorm, as reported in CBC. Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and real-life Lex Luthor, has taken an active role in censoring content that might offend the new administration, preventing a Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris from being published prior to the election. Business Insider reports that Bezos wrote Trump a small loan (rather, a bribe) of $1 million for his inauguration according to- as did Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google. Most recently, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerburg, once threatened with jail time by Trump, announced sweeping changes to his platform’s speech and censorship policy to align with the new MAGA “mainstream”, parroting far Right talking points on immigration and gender. The rapid realignment of these billionaires, once considered “woke” by the standards of the far Right, represents a definitive shift away from the hollowed-out shell of democracy to a more overt and aggressive form of oligarchy and authoritarianism.
“But the US was already an oligarchy!” I hear you cry, to which I would say of course; since Citizens United (a 2010 supreme court ruling defining money as free speech) political bribery has been legal in the United States. But Big Tech’s consolidation around Trump means that a new form of oligarchy has emerged, one that controls the flow of information to billions of people worldwide. They can boost what they like, and censor what they don’t, and suffer no consequences. The new Trump administration, packed with more con-artists and billionaires than any cabinet in US history can now perform their obscene corruption and destruction of the non-partisan US civil service (part of the ominous Project 2025) in broad daylight with no fear of significant flak from the media, mainstream or social. In 1988, sociologists Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky put forward a “propaganda model” that illustrated how corporate media could be used to manipulate populations and manufacture political consent. The first of the “Five Filters” they identify necessitates the “concentrated ownership, owner wealth, and profit orientation of the dominant mass-media firms”. This has never been more true than the world we live in today.
The implications of this consolidation are stark. While the Right’s presence on social media was already overwhelming (using Facebook as a trans person in 2024 was effectively an exercise in self-harm), with the richest men in the world giving them carte blanche to say whatever’s on their mind, their corrosive ideology is likely only going to become more mainstream. Zuckerburg’s recent review of his platform’s terms of service, on top of removing fact checkers, explicitly says “[w]e do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality”. This stunningly straightforward and brazenly queerphobic policy change is effectively a codification and endorsement of what was already the case on Facebook for years; a space for transphobic and homophobic disinformation to proliferate until the cows come home. How many millions of people each day will open their phones to be greeted with some borderline 1930’s-style antisemetic caricature of a trans person, or to see some hateful chud’s infographic confidently asserting that being transgender is a sign of sociopathy? How many more will slowly find themselves nodding along in agreement, with the absence of a counter-narrative? Bezos, too, has removed all reference to support for LGBTQ+ rights from Amazon to appease the far right, according to Metro Weekly. To call these developments worrying would be a spectacular understatement.
Why are these tech billionaires, who five-and-a-half minutes ago were puffing out their chests as champions of progressive values, capitulating en masse to the far right? As Herman and Chomsky’s First Filter states, it comes down to profit (and saving their own necks). They recall Trump’s sweeping 2017 tax cuts in his last administration. They recall his aggressive anti-regulation austerity agenda, and see that he wants to take it to the next level this time around (see the new Department of Government Efficiency). They see a quick buck to be made by appeasing the beast, so they jump on the bandwagon – democracy and minority rights be damned. Left-wing users and values present a direct threat to their profits, hence Musk purging left-wing journalists from X and censoring pro-Palestine voices while boosting actual anti-semetic conspiracy theories, as reported in CBS, and placing ads on white nationalist profiles. Ultimately, this shift comes down not to any change in the values of these oligarchs (as they held none to begin with), but to material interests. Like in Weimar, if capitalists have a choice between surrendering maximum potential profits or aligning with fascists, they will choose the fascists every single time.
All this so far might seem quite doom and gloom, to which I would say: hasn’t that been all news the past four years? Regardless, this consolidation of media and political realignment of these tech oligarchs provides a severe structural barrier to left-wing organizing and the proliferation of left-wing ideas online. Never before in history has there been so much propaganda power held in the hands of so few. So what can we socialists do?
The answer remains to make our ideas about our ideas loudly and openly in all the platforms available to us – in the streets and public spaces, at our workplaces, and online, for as long as we can. To make our presence undeniable in our communities, and to make sure as many people as possible hear our solutions. The tech oligarchs might have the power to censor left-wing voices on their platforms, but all the censorship in the world won’t be able to stop folks from noticing that their livelihoods are only getting worse; and when they realise this, socialists need to be there to fill the vacuum.
So let your ideas be known! Shout them from the rooftops. Glue them to lampposts and alley walls. Drop them in mailboxes and share them with your coworkers and members of your community. Every conversation matters. Talk, talk, talk, and never shut up.
Photo caption: Migrant rights protest against Donald Trump in St. Louis, USA. Feb 2025.
Photo credit: Brian Munoz, St. Louis Public Radio.
