With donald trumpFollowing Tuesday’s election victory, many Democrats and their allies feel scared, demoralized or deeply frustrated. But fascism feeds on shattered dreams. Therefore, immediately afterwards it is important to take the time to evaluate the conditions that brought us here and begin working to make them more equitable and empowering.

That means addressing what seems to me to be the biggest problem plaguing the United States: the control that social media platforms (and their Trump-friendly operators) have over the public.

Trump’s campaign was successful in part because he had the help of major social networks and Big Tech platforms. that helped promote (or couldn’t stop) Intolerance, extremism and far-right conspiracism.. Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos Everyone celebrated Trump’s election victory on Tuesday. And while Musk is the only one to officially endorse him, it’s worth noting that each of them oversees a massive platform (multiple platforms in Zuckerberg’s case) that has become a hotbed of bias, misinformation, and pro-Trump conspiracies. .

Musk, who invested millions of dollars to elect Trump, essentially turned X (formerly Twitter) into what NBC News called “pro-Trump echo chamber” where pro-Nazi accounts can purchase verification to obtain their abject racism prioritized throughout the site.

Zuckerberg, who said that look at trump’s face after the July assassination attempt was “one of the rudest things I have ever seen”: monitors Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, all of which have been pointed out by experts as sources of far-right propaganda and extremism. For example, this technology policy articleabout the spread of disinformation on WhatsApp in Spanish, seems especially prescient in light of the exit polls that showed Latino men turned to Trump in significant numbers in this election. On MSNBC Wednesday, María Teresa Kumar, president of Voto Latino, said misinformation played a key role in Latino support for Trump. Kumar said he spoke to several voters who cited online misinformation that Kamala Harris had imprisoned parents for their children’s truancy.

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

For years, the ReidOut blog has been shedding light on the people and organizations dedicated to exposing Big Tech as a vector of conservative propaganda and extremism: people like Nina Jankowicz and Kate Starbird and organizations like Media issues, onyx impacthe Center for the fight against digital hate and others. It should come as no surprise that researchers tracking the spread of misinformation on social media platforms have come under fire from conservatives. That alone indicates how central misinformation and social media manipulation is to the current conservative project, and why liberals need to confront this imbalance more energetically – with reporting and, eventually, regulation – if we want a political system based on the truth and the facts.