Original article by Ari Paul republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

There was a time, not terribly long ago, when the right claimed that the big social media companies weren’t just skewed to the left in terms of moderation, but that they were actually acting in the direct interests of the Democratic administration (House Judiciary Committee, 5/1/24).

When right-wing billionaire Elon Musk bought Twitter, eventually rebranding it as X, the right believed that he’d show the world that the popular site was a tool of the Democratic agenda (New Yorker, 1/11/23). The move increased Musk’s profile as a conservative crusader against social progress and economic populism before his brief stint as President Donald Trump’s federal jobs hatchet man in 2025 (Roosevelt Institute, 5/29/25).

Before a forced sale by its Beijing-based parent company, TikTok was attacked by both Democrats and Republicans because of its ownership, with both sides claiming that this not only gave the Chinese government the ability to spy on Americans, but also to skew political discourse away from Washington’s interests (FAIR.org, 11/13/23, 5/8/24, 1/3/25).

At Meta, founder Mark Zuckerberg quickly tried to distance his company from the notion that it acted in tandem with the Biden administration. Politico (8/26/24) reported:

Mark Zuckerberg says he regrets that Meta bowed to Biden administration pressure to censor content, saying in a letter that the interference was “wrong,” and he plans to push back if it happens again.

Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan (Joe Rogan Experience, 1/10/25) that the Biden administration had been “calling up the guys on our team and yelling at them and cursing and threatening repercussions if we don’t take down things that are true.” He asserted that Meta, and especially Facebook, “had gone too far in complying with such requests, and acknowledged that he and others at the company wrongly bought into the idea” (Axios, 1/10/25).

Meta ‘in bed with the regime’

ICE List founder Dominick Skinner (Daily Beast, 1/27/26): “I don’t believe that it’s somehow an accident that a company so deeply ingrained in this regime is suddenly blocking a website that actively fights against it.”

If you took these claims at face value, you would expect that we would have a more neutral and less government-controlled social media in 2026. Instead, we have a social media oligarchy that is now working directly in the interests of the Trump administration’s national police state.

X converted from a free-wheeling social media site into a 24-hour online MAGA rally (Guardian, 1/4/25; NBC News, 2/16/25) a long time ago. But there are new developments involving other platforms. All of Meta’s social media sites—Facebook, Instagram and Threads—are blocking access to ICE List, a website that lists names of Homeland Security agents (Wired, 1/27/26).

Politico (1/27/26) reported that the website’s founder, Dominick Skinner, “questioned Meta’s policy against posting links to websites that contained people’s personal information.” Politico said he added “that Meta’s platforms had no issues with posting people-finder websites such as White Pages that shared individuals’ phone numbers and family members.”

Skinner told the Daily Beast (1/27/26):

I believe that Mark Zuckerberg is in bed with the regime. He was sitting behind Trump at the inauguration. His algorithms have worked to shape people into right-wing followers.

“Meta donated to the Trump Ballroom,” he pointed out—which is also true of other tech firms such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google (Fortune, 10/26/25).

TikTok now free to censor?

“We have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefield in which we engage, and the most important ones are social media,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told pro-Israel influencers last September (Al Jazeera, 1/29/26). “The most important purchase that is going on right now is…TikTok.”

The TikTok deal is now final, with its Chinese former parent company, ByteDance, holding about a fifth of the network, with a major bulk controlled by tech giant Oracle, Silver Lake and the Abu Dhabi investment firm MGX (Reuters, 1/23/26). The sale was celebrated as a win against Chinese infiltration into the US media market, but the Washington Post editorial board (1/23/26) believed this wasn’t good enough:

ByteDance will maintain ownership of TikTok’s coveted algorithm and license it to the spinoff. The announcement emphasizes that the algorithm’s recommendations will be stored in Oracle’s US cloud system but also that the two companies will retain “global product interoperability,” with ByteDance maintaining control over e-commerce and marketing. That sounds like much less of a breakup than Congress intended.

FAIR (3/14/24, 9/27/24, 1/3/25) has long been skeptical of the US government move to force the sale of TikTok, as it was often based on dubious claims about data mining, and awash with McCarthyist fearmongering. Worse, Oracle’s co-founder is Larry Ellison, another right-wing tech billionaire (FAIR.org, 9/19/25; All Things Considered, 10/6/25), making the TikTok sale eerily reminiscent of the Musk takeover of Twitter.

Right after the deal was finalized, “users were raising concerns that the company is ‘censoring’ videos, including ones critical of President Donald Trump, ICE or mentions of Jeffrey Epstein,” AP (1/27/26) reported. “The complaints were enough for California Gov. Gavin Newsom to announce…that he is launching a review into whether TikTok is violating state law by censoring Trump-critical content.”

It reportedly wasn’t just censorship about ICE and Epstein. “Award-winning Palestinian journalist Bisan Owda has said she has been permanently banned from TikTok,” Al Jazeera (1/29/26) said, “days after the social media platform was acquired by new investors in the United States.”

Cripple social media to crush protests

Apple pulled an ICE alert app from its online store as “defamatory, discriminatory or mean-spirited content.” CNN (10/3/25) noted: “Apple and its CEO Tim Cook have in recent months sought to strengthen the company’s relationship with the White House, amid policy changes from Trump that could threaten its business.”

Wealthy capitalists buy social media companies for the same reason they buy newspapers and radio stations: They want to use media to sway the political discussion toward policies that meet their economic and political interests. Musk taking over Twitter isn’t much different from Amazon titan Jeff Bezos taking over the Washington Post and turning its opinion section into a right-wing propaganda machine (Golden Hour, 9/15/25; New Republic, 11/3/25; Press Watch, 12/12/25; FAIR.org, 1/22/25, 1/28/25) and putting its news operation on life support (The Hill, 1/27/26).

But given growing street resistance to the state terror perpetrated by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol in cities around the US, these reports about social media blackouts are alarming, reminiscent of reports out of Turkey (Reuters, 9/8/25) and Iran (New York Times, 1/25/26).

With Zuckerberg, Musk and Ellison all showing their allegiance to the administration in various ways, this is all just more evidence that regime-adjacent social media are working in the interests of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. And this has been brewing for some time. A few months ago, CNN (10/3/25) reported, Apple “removed ICEBlock and similar apps that allow people to alert others nearby about sightings of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in their area,” after receiving “a request from the US Department of Justice.” The Electronic Frontier Foundation (11/20/25) sued the DoJ and Department of Homeland Security over this and similar instances of platforms removing “apps that document immigration enforcement activities in communities throughout the country.”

‘A really troubling thing‘

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (1/27/26) commended the news social media platform UpScrolled “for pledging to protect the free flow of ideas on its platform, including both support for and opposition to the Israeli government’s human rights abuses.”

In an interview with FAIR, EFF senior counsel David Greene said there are several problems at play. One is that

there’s still a great deal of concentration in the direct-publishing social media space, so any decision that gets made by Meta or YouTube or TikTok is going to affect a ton of people who use their services to get their information.

But there is also tremendous pressure by the government to keep immigration enforcement, and all the expanded policing around mass deportations, in the shadows by keeping agents’ identities anonymous. “That’s a really, really troubling thing,” he said.

Greene also stressed that “if Meta or TikTok are doing this just to curry favor with the administration, or because they ideologically agree with it, that’s not illegal; they have a First Amendment right to curate their sites.”

Illegal, no, but still a critical problem. We aren’t looking at a totalitarian form of speech control, where the state and ruling party directly control various forms of media. Rather, we have a clan of oligarchs aligning themselves with authoritarian government goals because they benefit from being close to the regime.

While many activists have shown dismay at these developments, others have said the challenges inspire hope. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (1/27/26) said in a statement that “young people censored on TikTok have no intention of giving up their activism,” as they have “have repeatedly shown that they will not allow politicians, corporations or colleges to censor their speech.”

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Original article by Ari Paul republished from FAIR under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

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