Liberals are left out in the cold as social media veers right
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If the US election underscored anything about the internet, it was how far social media platforms had moved to the right.
PHOTO: UNSPLASH
SAN FRANCISCO – After Donald Trump won the election in November, his supporters gravitated to a panoply of online destinations to celebrate.
Hundreds of thousands of posts lauding Trump’s victory filled Truth Social, the social platform that the US President-elect owns.
Speculation about what the new administration would accomplish ran rampant on social platform X, which is owned by Mr Elon Musk. Gab, Parler and other right-wing social media sites were flooded with thousands of memes glorifying Trump.
No similar spaces existed for the left. Meta’s Instagram, Threads and Facebook publicly de-emphasised politics leading up to the election.
Mr Musk transformed Twitter into X and shifted it to the right. And no other tech platform gained momentum as a public square for liberals.
“It has become starkly evident that the left, the Democrats, do not have the same social media platforms to push their agenda,” said Mr Phillip Walzak, a political consultant based in New York. “It has left Democrats in a huge deficit.”
If the election underscored anything about the internet, it was how far social media platforms had moved to the right.
While Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other sites continue to be popular gathering places for entertainment and meme-making, political discourse online has increasingly shifted to an array of mostly right-wing sites that have built up their audiences and stoked largely partisan conversations.
The change was an unintended consequence of a series of decisions made by some of the biggest social platforms nearly four years ago.
After the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Facebook and Twitter booted Trump and his far-right supporters from their platforms.
In response, Trump and his allies, who accused the tech companies of censorship, flocked to or started their own social media sites that promoted conservative causes.
By the time the mainstream platforms allowed Trump and other right-wing figures to return, they had increased their online followings and influence.
That has left Democrats at a major disadvantage, just as Republicans are set to take control of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House.
Inside the Democratic Party, some have discussed the lack of tech platforms available to push their agenda, said two Democratic strategists involved in the confidential conversations, who were not authorised to speak publicly.
Some have debated how they squandered years in which they should have built their own answer to Truth Social, the people said.
The online disparity was evident on Nov 5, when US Vice-President Kamala Harris and Trump shared messages on social media urging people to vote.
Trump’s posts were more widely shared and liked than those by Ms Harris and her campaign, according to a New York Times review of social platforms.
Assistant Professor Joan Donovan from Boston University and the founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute, which studies how the internet is used to disrupt democracy, said Ms Harris and her campaign operated in a hostile environment on many of the platforms, including X.
“(Those on) the right were very clear in establishing their media spaces,” she said. “It was a very savvy and intentional effort by the right to fuse their party and political viewpoints with specific platforms.”
Meta, Truth Social, Parler and X declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment.
In an e-mail, Mr Andrew Torba, Gab’s chief executive, said: “The right will continue to use our own tools and ecosystem to mobilise. Nothing and no one can stop us.”
Representatives for the Democratic and Republican parties declined to comment.
Since the election, there has been a steady exodus of the left from X, said Dr Renee DiResta, an associate research professor at the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy, who studies social media platforms.
Among the recent departures were Mr Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor who sued X after a video streaming deal with Mr Musk fell through, and the newspaper The Guardian.
Several sites have emerged as X alternatives, including Bluesky and Mastodon. Bluesky, which launched in February 2023, has added more than one million users since the election, said Ms Emily Liu, a spokeswoman for the platform, bringing its total to 15 million.
On Nov 18, Democratic representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lauded Bluesky as a welcoming place.
“A thing I like here is it’s okay to have moments of happiness in public without being broadly scolded, and I believe that sustaining this kind of humanity will be very important as we resist fascism,” she wrote.
Still, Democrats have work to do, said Mr Walzak, the political consultant.
“Nobody is going about actually doing something to give Democratic Party supporters a social media space,” he said. “Nobody is building something for Democratic causes which can actually do what the current infrastructure does for Republican causes.” NYTIMES