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.
After Mr. Trump’s surprise upset in 2016, buoyed in part by a covert Russian social media campaign and sneaky use of Facebook data by Cambridge Analytica, the tech platforms vowed to do better. Facebook set up an oversight board to help decide which dangerous content should be taken down. Twitter offered cash bounties to hackers who could find bias in its algorithms. A crop of misinformation researchers popped up at universities and nonprofits. In their efforts, the social media companies even went so far as to suspend Mr. Trump’s accounts when he wouldn’t stop posting lies about the election being stolen.
A conservative backlash ensued. In 2022, Mr. Musk bought Twitter with the explicit goal of molding it to his political interests. He immediately set about dismantling Twitter’s content moderation team and relied instead on a crowdsourced fact-checking system that researchers have found wanting. Soon, Twitter — which he renamed X — was increasingly complying with censorship requests from the Indian government that it had previously resisted and letting known harassers and lie-purveyors it had previously banned back onto the platform.
At the same time, Republicans began working the refs, launching a legal and political campaign against what they said was tech platform censorship of conservative speech. After gaining control of the House of Representatives in 2022, they used their newfound power to issue a flurry of subpoenas and requests for documents to fact-checkers and disinformation researchers, forcing them to hire expensive legal counsel and spend countless hours responding.
Republicans passed laws in several states to prevent tech platforms from censoring conservative speech, even though the bans were often prompted by violations of longstanding platform rules against things like harassment, hate speech and incitements to violence. This past summer, the Supreme Court declined to overturn those laws, but sent them back to state courts for further adjudication.
The platforms caved. Soon, Meta declared it was getting out of politics altogether — the realm of the most contested facts — by suppressing political speech on Facebook and Instagram and reportedly scaling down its labeling of false posts. YouTube said it would stop taking down videos with some election lies. Independent misinformation researchers who were targeted by subpoenas dialed back on their work.
While nobody can say for sure what this did to our election, one thing we do know is that the opening of the social media floodgates benefits one side more than the other. A comprehensive study published last month in Nature found that conservatives shared more false information online in 2020, and therefore even neutral enforcement of platform policies against misinformation would disproportionately target conservatives.
The wave of fake news was so bad that in the days leading up to this month’s election, the F.B.I. issued five press releases warning the public about lies circulating online — including fake claims about F.B.I. election monitoring activities and two rare joint statements with other intelligence agencies warning of Russian online efforts to influence elections.
Now we are in a situation where it is clear that the tech platforms are not going to risk their profits or their political power to protect high-quality information. And it’s equally clear that the Republicans will continue to push for fewer guardrails against falsehoods.
If we want a quality information environment, we have to build a new one beyond the walls of the existing Big Tech social media platforms.
We can do that by funding people who do the hard work of collecting facts (a.k.a. journalists) and by finding new ways to reach audiences beyond the grip of social media algorithms that are designed to promote outrageous content rather than sober facts. There is also a new movement brewing that aims to break open the gates of the closed social media platforms.
You may have noticed that a whole bunch of new social media platforms have popped up in the past few years with names like Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky. These may look like X on the surface, but under the hood they are wholly different beasts than the social media platforms we grew up on. They are part of a movement called the fediverse, which some sources say derives its name from “federation” and “universe.”
It’s early days for the fediverse — which has around 200 million users collectively compared with the billions on Facebook and X — although Bluesky is growing fast, more than doubling in the past 90 days to over 15 million users. The goals of the fediverse are simple: to allow you to post to all the social media platforms from a single account.
Currently, if you want to reach Threads users, you need to set up a Threads account and work slowly and painfully to recreate the network you had already built on Twitter. But in the fediverse, you can use your Threads account to post directly to your other social media accounts as well. The fediverse also allows users to become their own social media gatekeeper, choosing their own content moderation standards.
It’s not a silver bullet for truth — plenty of people will still fall for lies and misleading content. But by seizing control of our social media environment, we can give the truth a chance.
The post The Right’s Triumph Over Social Media appeared first on New York Times.
