This piece originally appeared in Persuasion.
Social media platforms have long influenced global politics, but today their entanglement with power is deeper and more fraught than ever. Major tech CEOs, who once endeavored to appear apolitical, have increasingly taken far more partisan stances; Elon Musk, for example, served as a campaign surrogate in the 2024 U.S. presidential election, and spoke out in favor of specific political parties in the German election. Immediately following Trump’s re-election, Meta made radical shifts to align its content moderation policies with changing political winds, and TikTok’s CEO issued public statements flattering Trump and praising him for his assistance in deferring enforcement of regulation to ban the app. Both Meta and X chose to settle lawsuits that had been widely seen as easy wins for them in the courts, with their CEOs making donations to Trump’s presidential library, in presumptive apology for their fights over his post-January 6 deplatforming. Outside of the United States, there is growing tension between platforms and EU regulatory bodies, which Vice President JD Vance has opportunistically framed as concern about “free speech” amid increased European calls for “digital sovereignty.”
While companies have always sought to maintain favorable relationships with those in power—and while those in power have always sought to “work the referees”—the current dynamics are much more pronounced and consequential. Users’ feeds have long been at the mercy of opaque corporate whims (as underlined when Musk bought Twitter), but now it is clearer than ever that the pendulum of content moderation and curation can swing hard in response to political pressures.
It is users, regardless of where they live or their political leanings, who bear the brunt of such volatility. Exiting a platform comes at a high cost: we use social media for entertainment, community, and connection, and abandoning an app often means severing ties with online friends, or seeing less of our favorite creators. Yet when users try to push back against policies they don’t like—if they attempt to “work the referees” themselves—they are often hindered both by a lack of relative power and the lack of transparency about the internal workings of platform algorithms. Without collective action significant enough to inflict economic consequences, user concerns rarely outweigh the expediencies of CEOs or governments. Unaccountable private platforms continue to wield disproportionate control over public attention and social norms.
