
Is Meta making your Instagram account follow Trump? Do you believe the experts and your own eyes that Elon Musk did a Nazi salute twice at the US presidential inauguration? Do you think that it’s normal that TikTok sent a simpering pop-up to 170 million US users thanking Trump for vowing to break the laws he just swore to protect? It’s time we wrap up our time on state-affiliated social media.
It’s all spiralling quite quickly. Our most formative modern method of communication with each other has declared itself explicitly far-right and is willing to do whatever it takes to stay in Donald Trump’s good graces. Each of these apps has become a dangerous place to be that does not care about the damage it does and they are no longer pretending that is not the case.
At the inauguration, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Sundar Pichai sat in front of Trump’s Cabinet nominees during the ceremony after donating $250 million to the event. As TikTok is under scrutiny for national security concerns in the US, the app’s CEO Shou Zi Chew sat next to Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence. The message was clear; the tech billionaire oligarchs leading the social media platforms we all now spend on average over two hours a day looking at have a more important position in the US government than the proposed democratically elected officials they were sitting in front of.
Here’s what’s happening on our main social media apps as Donald Trump has become the 47th President of the US. Meta went MAGA a week before the inauguration by changing it’s policies to allow hate speech against women, LGBTQIA+ people and disabled people, getting rid of fact-checkers, recommending more political content across the platforms and moving it’s content-moderation teams to Texas. Today, Meta appears to have enforced millions of users to automatically follow Trump, vice president JD Vance and US First Lady Melania Trump. Users are finding that even unfollowing these accounts isn’t working. Meta says this is because users were previously following the POTUS and various White House accounts that have changed ownership with the new president and that they are also working to resolve an issue with Instagram that means that users receive a “results hidden” message when searching for terms related to the Democrats.
X, the platform owned by Elon Musk, the richest man in the world and Trump’s new right-hand man has long been amplifying far-right voices and views. After Musk bought Twitter and renamed it X, he reinstated the accounts of Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Tommy Robinson and more rightwing figures, allowing the accumulation of pro-Nazi accounts on his platform where he posts far-right memes and conspiracy theories. Many non-experts say his two Nazi salutes at the inauguration were actually awkward gestures and not Nazi salutes by the man who came out in support of the far-right populist Alternative for Germany party and whose father says they named him after a character in a Nazi sci-fi book about colonising Mars and that Elon’s grandparents were Nazis.
What about TikTok? As the app has been fighting the federal law that bans it in the US unless it was sold, the app went “dark” for users on Sunday, which Biden’s White House called a “stunt.” The app stopped loading for US users on Sunday and around 12 hours after shutting itself down, TikTok thanked Trump for his support with pathetic flattery built into a pop-up for its 170 million American users: “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the US!” TikTok’s CEO Shou Chew filmed a thank-you video to Trump, paid a visit to Mar-a-Lago and took his seat of honour next to Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence at the inauguration on Monday, an interesting seating plan when TikTok’s US ban was based on national security concerns.
So is it time we come off the apps? We already know social media has been infiltrating our elections, selling our data, making us lonelier, damaging our mental health and exploiting our children. Where do we go from here? The pros no longer outweigh the cons. In its happiest early days, social media could open you to new ideas, your business to a new audience, make it easy to communicate with friends and family, entertain us and inform us. The remaining voices of reason on the platform are no longer loud enough. Today, social media has long been a mess of misinformation, hatred, privacy concerns and a path to violence, addiction, radicalism, depression, social isolation, sleep disruption and endless time wasting, and now an unchecked tool of democratic decline shaping political discourse. Is our morality a high enough price to pay for likes?