The election showed the dangerous power of Big Tech oligarchs

Of Donald TrumpAfter Tuesday’s election victory, many Democrats and their allies are feeling scared, 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 circumstances that got us here and start working to make them more just and empowering.

That means tackling what feels to me like the biggest problem facing the United States: the hold that social media platforms—and their Trump-friendly operators—have over the public.

Trump’s campaign succeeded in part because it was helped by major social media and Big Tech platforms that helped promote (or couldn’t stop) far-right bigotry, extremism and conspiracy. Elon Musk Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos all celebrated Trump’s election victory on Tuesday. And while Musk is the only one officially backing him, it’s notable that each of them oversees a massive platform (multiple platforms in Zuckerberg’s case) that has become a hotbed of pro-Trump bias, disinformation and conspiracies.

Musk, who poured millions of dollars into Trump’s election, essentially turned X (formerly Twitter) into what NBC News called “pro-Trump echo chamber‘where pro-nazi accounts can purchase verification to their outrageous racism priority across the site.

Zuckerberg – who said it look at Trump’s face after the July assassination attempt was “one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen in my life” – monitors Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, all of which have been identified by experts as sources of far-right propaganda And extremism. For example, this technology policy articleabout the spread of disinformation on the Spanish-language WhatsApp, seems especially prescient in light of the exit polls that showed this Latino men swung for Trump in large numbers this election. On MSNBC Wednesday, Maria Teresa Kumar, the president of Voto Latino, said disinformation played a key role in Trump’s Latino support. Kumar said she had spoken to several voters cited online disinformation that Kamala Harris had jailed parents for their children’s truancy.

And as for Bezos: researchers found that Amazon’s algorithm, through recommendations and search autocomplete, can steer users looking for certain types of books toward pro-Trump extremism, such as content promoting QAnon conspiracy theories. (This makes Bezos’ claim in his Washington Post op-ed that the media is mainly responsible for it losing public confidence all the more ironic.)

For years, the ReidOut Blog has shined a light on the people and organizations doing the work to label Big Tech as a vector of conservative propaganda and extremism: people like Nina Jankowicz And Kate Starbird and organizations such as Media matters, Onyx impactthe Center for Combating Digital Hate and others. It should come as no surprise that such researchers who track the spread of misinformation on social media platforms have come under fire from conservatives. That alone tells you how central disinformation and social media manipulation are to the current conservative project, and why liberals must address this imbalance more forcefully—with reporting and ultimately regulation—if we want a political system based on truth and facts.