The Right’s Triumph Over Social Media

The red tide that swept across the nation in our recent election marked many things. One of them was a right-wing triumph over social media.

Under heavy pressure from the right, and with the help of X owner Elon Musk, the leading tech platforms opened the floodgates for propaganda to spread unchecked. The result was a flood of lies and distortions flowing through our social media feeds. That led to possibly the most misinformed electorate we’ve ever seen.

Many voters headed to the polls convinced that border crossings are higher than ever before (they are not), violent crime rates are rising (untrue) and inflation is soaring (ditto). We will never know how much this garbage may have swayed voters, but we do know it influenced one side significantly: conservatives.

Combine this lowering of guardrails with the tech chief executives’ obsequious public congratulations to President-elect Donald Trump after his resounding win, and it’s hard not to see this striking turnaround in political terms. “In Trump, Silicon Valley got what it wanted: a president that will kneecap antitrust efforts, embrace deregulation and defang labor laws,” the journalist Brian Merchant wrote in his newsletter, Blood in the Machine.

And with Mr. Trump soon in office, the landscape may get worse before it gets better. Brendan Carr, tapped by the incoming president to be the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, posted on X after securing the nomination a call to “dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.”

Even if the companies weren’t actively trying to game the election, a flood of right-leaning misinformation certainly was the natural outcome of a lack of intervention in this polarized moment. It was unrealistic to expect profit-driven social media companies to act as good-faith gatekeepers to facts that challenge power. After all, the excavation and marketing of facts are often dangerous and rarely lucrative. And yet, without them, we lack a shared understanding of reality that is needed to participate in a democracy.