Right-wing tech platform takeover Trump ‘victory’ Bluesky ‘public happiness’ new space
As the right wing took over the big tech platforms in the US, the right wing won the Trump election, the progressive space was weakened, and ‘Bluesky’ is creating a new space with ‘anti-fascism’ of ‘public happiness’.
After Trump’s Republican camp won the presidential election this month, Trump’s supporters flocked to various online spaces to celebrate, and the New York Times covered this in detail.
Hundreds of thousands of posts praising Trump’s victory filled Truth Social, a social platform owned by the president-elect, while speculation about what the new Trump administration will accomplish is rampant on Elon Musk’s X, and thousands of memes praising Trump are overflowing on right-wing social media sites such as Gab and Parler.
The New York Times reported that, unlike the right, “there was no comparable space on the left; Meta’s Instagram, Thread, and Facebook did not openly emphasize politics in the run-up to the election; Musk shifted Twitter to the right by changing it to an X; and no other tech platform gained traction as a liberal public square.”
“It became clear that the left, the Democrats, did not have the same social media platforms to push their agenda,” New York-based political consultant Phillip Walzak told the Times. “That left the Democrats in a huge deficit.”
The biggest change in the internet this election year is whether social media platforms have shifted completely to the right.
While Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and other sites that used to dominate online opinion have become popular gathering places for entertainment and meme creation, online political discourse has increasingly shifted to right-wing sites that build audiences and spark partisan conversations, the Times diagnosed.
This change, a complete reversal from the US presidential election four years ago, came after Facebook and Twitter kicked Trump and his far-right supporters off their platforms following the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and in response, Trump and his allies, who had accused the tech companies of censorship, flocked to or started to use their own social media sites promoting conservative causes.
Twitter announced on January 8, 2021, that it was permanently banning Trump from its service “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” saying that “the personal @realDonaldTrump account, which has over 88 million followers, will be immediately terminated.”
Twitter said at the time that two tweets Trump posted on Friday — one calling his supporters “patriots” and another saying he would not attend the inauguration on January 20 — violated its rules against glorifying violence.
Twitter said the tweet “is very likely to encourage and inspire people to reenact the criminal acts that occurred at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021,” pointing to the storming of the Capitol by a mob of Trump loyalists.
Twitter’s move effectively blocked Trump from his favorite megaphone to reach the public and limited a series of measures taken by mainstream sites to limit his online reach.
By the time mainstream platforms allowed Trump and other right-wing figures to return, they had grown their online following and influence.
“This puts Democrats at a significant disadvantage as Republicans look to take control of the House, Senate and White House,” the Times reported. “Some within the party are discussing the lack of a technology platform to push their agenda,” two Democratic strategists involved in the confidential conversations said.
Some Democratic strategists told the Times they debated how they had wasted time formulating a response to Trump’s Truth Social.
The online divide was starkly revealed on November 5, when Democratic Vice President Harris and President Trump shared messages on social media urging voters to vote, with Trump’s posts being shared and liked more widely than those from Harris and her campaign, according to a New York Times review of social platforms.
Trump’s most popular Election Day post on Facebook, asking voters to line up to vote, was liked nearly 160,000 times and shared by more than 15,000 people, while Harris’s most popular Facebook post was liked 18,000 times and shared by just 1,500 people.
The image that President Trump posted on November 5 with the slogan “Make America Great Again” was liked over 2.1 million times on Instagram.
On the same day, Vice President Harris’ most popular post was a post celebrating Generation Z’s first vote, which received 569,000 likes, a fourfold difference.
On X, President Trump’s most popular post urging his supporters to vote received over 1 million likes, while Vice President Harris’ most popular post received over 318,000 likes.
“Harris and her campaign were operating in a hostile environment on many platforms, including X,” Joan Donovan, an assistant professor at Boston University and founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute, which studies how the internet is used to subvert democracy, told the Times. “The right was very clear about establishing their own media space. It was a very clever and deliberate effort by the right to conflate their party and their political views with a particular platform.”
The rise of right-wing platforms and the reorientation of traditional social media companies began four years ago, after Trump’s Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, when Facebook, Twitter and others removed the accounts of militias and other far-right supporters of the “Stop the Steal” movement, and the former president’s personal Facebook and Twitter accounts were frozen at the time.
Many conservatives, angered by this treatment, migrated to platforms that billed themselves as “right-wing safe spaces,” including Gab and Parler.
In the year since the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Gab’s traffic has surged 800%, and its registered users have doubled to 3.4 million.
In February 2022, Trump Media, the former president’s media company, launched Truth Social, a massive slate of right-wing sites.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, has begun to distance itself from politics.
In January 2020, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told investors that he was “considering steps” to reduce political content on Facebook. Over the next four years, he disbanded the company’s election integrity team, which had focused on election-related information security, and removed tools that allowed researchers and journalists to track misinformation.
In February, Adam Mosseri, head of Threads and Instagram, doubled down on that stance, saying the platforms would “not make recommendations about politics or political issues.” In August, Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee saying he wanted to be “neutral” and “not appear to play a role” in the election.
During this time, Musk acquired Twitter, rebranded it as X, and quickly turned it into an engine for Trump’s political agenda.
Musk’s X account exploded in the run-up to the election.
Musk posted more than 3,000 times to the site in October, according to a November 3 count by the Times, campaigning heavily for Trump.
Musk shared dozens of “unsubstantiated” claims about the election on X, including that votes for his preferred candidate would be rigged.
In fact, all of Musk’s posts have traveled farther and resonated more widely than ever before as the X account has come to dominate the platform, effectively establishing itself as the host of Musk’s own social media site, the Times reported on March 3.
The Times said in an “independent study” that Musk’s account has become by a significant margin the most popular on X, with more than 202 million followers, dominating the platform’s daily conversation and swaying the debate to the right, with engagement on his posts, including likes and reposts, already doubling in the past year, according to X metrics.
“There has been a steady exodus of leftists from X since the election,” Renée DiResta, an associate professor at Georgetown’s McCourt School of Public Policy who studies social media platforms, told the Times. “Recent departures include former CNN anchor Don Lemon, who sued X after a video streaming deal with Musk fell through, and the Guardian newspaper in the U.K.” Bluesky, a rival service that gained more than 1 million new users in the first day after Trump’s election in the US, has become an alternative.
Bluesky, which started as a project of Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in 2019, is one of several challengers that have experienced explosive momentum since Musk acquired Twitter in February 2022 and subsequently rebranded it.
“The majority of new users are in the US, Canada and the UK,” Bluesky spokeswoman Emily Liu said in an emailed briefing on Monday, adding that “we are seeing increased activity levels across all of our different forms of engagement.”
“What I like about this is that it’s okay to have happy moments in public without being widely criticized,” Liu wrote in the briefing. “I believe that maintaining this kind of humanity is going to be critical as we resist fascism.”