The address given on Jan. 15, 2025, by outgoing president Joseph Biden similarly warned of an ominous reality, a tech-industrial complex dominated by wealthy oligarchs who have targeted a free press and instead deploy new tools of communication to push a dangerous political agenda. He cited the end of fact-checkers and the pervasiveness of misinformation and disinformation.
Here is what he said: “An oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power, and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy. I’m equally concerned about the potential rise of a tech-industrial complex. Americans are being buried under an avalanche of misinformation and disinformation, enabling the abuse of power.”
At this point, everyone can read between the lines. Two years ago, the main information channels in the United States were heavily controlled and getting more so by the day. It started years earlier with the banning of talk about lockdowns and extending to doubts about mandatory injections, and eventually hit issues like gender-reassignment surgery and climate change. At some point, millions gave up on an entire suite of social media platforms.
All of this happened under the Biden administration. We know this from tens of thousands of court documents, and now from the direct testimony of Mark Zuckerberg, the head of Facebook who now says he is done with censoring users. This follows the example of Elon Musk, who took over Twitter and exposed and then unplugged its censorship machinery that was built at the behest of the Biden administration.
We don’t have to believe that Zuckerberg had a genuine conversion to the ideals of the First Amendment to appreciate the steps he is taking with Facebook. For years, the platform has been heavily controlled and heavily skewed in its political intentions, which arguably made a huge difference in the outcomes of the 2020 and 2022 elections. That aside, countless numbers of media venues, businesses, and groups were targeted and canceled, often with devastating financial consequences for those most affected. His sudden conversion to the cause of free speech is likely a move to assure his industrial survival.
Let us not forget that after Musk took over Twitter and turned it into the free-speech platform called X, Zuckerberg started a Twitter competitor called Threads. It was advertised as censored like the old Twitter, and, for some strange reason, there was a perception that there would be a market demand for the product. There was not. It is today mostly a ghost town and a small echo chamber with lots of pictures of pets and food.
The new freedom to speak about which I’m writing is now only a year in progress, following some five years of intensifying control. Still, as of this writing, there has been no word from the most powerful of all tech platforms, namely Google/YouTube, which is still busy curating search results in ways that are obviously political, while the video platform takes down content by the minute. There have been no efforts to loosen up or liberalize either.
It’s hard to cobble together a better description of the meaning of the term tech oligarchy than that. And this is precisely what came together over the years 2020 through 2024 if not further. We are only seeing defectors from this system due to the profit opportunities afforded by the idea of free speech. As I said, Musk was first with others following. It means that the Biden administration’s hard work to heavily control all content on the internet has been set back a bit.
For those of us who depend on free speech as the essential foundation for all our work, the promises, threats, and growing realities of 2021-24 were worrisome most of the time and even terrifying some of the time. We could feel the walls closing in daily. When Musk took over Twitter, federal agencies came after him and corporations ganged up hard to accuse him of unleashing disinformation and hate. Indeed, those of us who actually use the platform saw something else: other points of view, and for the first time in years.
As we listened to Biden’s speech of warning, I couldn’t help but think about how the administration presided over changes in the algorithmic operations of the internet itself, accelerating its move from a free platform curated by user behavior to becoming a distributor of stakeholder priorities that shut out vast numbers of users from any substantial traffic. We lived it and saw it. The documentation of government involvement in this operation is vast. Courts will have the last word.
Now we suddenly find ourselves living in different times when a new group of “tech bros” are ascendent with the Trump administration. So far, there is zero evidence that the new cool kids have the intention of using government power to skew our information infrastructure in the opposite direction. That is to say, there is no evidence at all that we have anything to fear from a restoration of free speech. All the fear runs in the other direction. We know where we have been and don’t want to go back to that.
That said, there are many remaining problems. The platforms that are still dominant are still continuing to work hand-in-glove with regulators and other powers-that-be to manipulate the public mind. We are not out of the weeds yet. The fact-checkers might have been fired by Facebook but they are still taken seriously by the world’s largest search engines.
The message: the world of information cannot and will not be free so long as this gang has anything to do with it.
That’s not to say there is nothing about which to worry in these new times. Replacing one set of oligarchs with another is not a good idea either. The difference this time is that we are onto the game and more sensitive than ever before to how to spot violations of the First Amendment and how to litigate to keep our rights.
There really can be no going back to the bad old days.
The real threat is not misinformation and disinformation; the real threat is the information curated by oligarchs who think they know what we should and should not be told. That’s not how the Founders set up this country and not how a truly free press works.
