how the right wing took over social media
Right wing content has a major advantage on social media. But we can do something about that with a very simple change in our habits.
If you listen to pundits across Fox News and manosphere podcasts, every media outlet and social platform is basically a bastion on communist propaganda, and the patriotic voices of American conservatives are being silenced. Which is why all these voices are blaring out of every speaker, or every podcast, channel, and social feed at all hours of the day. It's a cliche so old that the video made to parody it feels like it's more than a decade old, despite being posted in 2020. Hell, at this point, "getting cancelled by the woke mob" is a fantastic career move.
Researchers have tackled the thorny problem of political bias on social media for years now and have more or less uniformly concluded that right wing sources and accounts just do better on today's social and news platforms. Nearly two thirds of political posts across Meta apps are right-leaning. When Twitter was still the bird app, it was boosing right wing accounts while MAGA users screamed censorship. Under Musk, it will actively try to recruit you to right wing causes.
None of this means that this kind of content is well liked, just that it generates a lot of engagement and makes it easier for platforms to include it in feeds as their algorithms segregate us into ideological bubbles. The perfect social media post is full of incendiary content with low quality links, playing into deep, rabid, gut-level political sectarianism in which the goal is explicitly to pick a fight with the other side.
Think of these platforms like you'd think of reality show producers looking to boost ratings and chatter by getting the contestants to pick fights with each other. Just like in low brow TV, the heels are kept around to keep the drama going for as long as possible. Right wing accounts deliberately bating people to engage are those heels, giving the platform every possible reason to boost them.
Today's posts coded rightward play on emotions, presenting an us vs. them world with zero nuance, and a worldview that can be summed up by a bumper sticker slogan. It's meant to be inflammatory or accusatory. The movement's entire identity today can be summed up as "if the libs are triggered, it's good" and treats voting the same way most of us treat cheering for our favorite sports teams. It's loud, empty, and tribalist. In other words, it's perfect for social media ran by an algorithm instead of a timeline in reverse chronological order.
So, the end result is that rather than somehow being censored, the right is constantly amplified. They just complain bitterly about being suppressed or censored because a) they often don't like the feedback they get, and b) like to behave as if they are scrawny outcasts and underdogs, and not, you know, the deafening roar of a political party with an iron grip on the nation and its discourse, one we are all forced to listen to by every major media outlet in the country.
Okay, fine, so right wing content rules social media because it's more or less hyper-optimized to do exactly that. What about other content? What if we wanted to get it noticed and start to overtake increasingly angry, violent, and fascistic rage bait? Well, we'd need to actively engage. We'd need to make it a point to like, share, promote, and respond to content we actually like and want to see more of so the algorithms know we'll spend more time on their platforms if they show us more of something else.
We'd need to coordinate and form active communities and have creators who are not in the rage bait end of the social media pool to do more collaborations, boost each other, and give new creators a chance to grow and learn. It's fun to hate the heel and throw the digital equivalent of rotten tomatoes at them, but all it does is tell the producers that you want more of the heel to hate on. So, find someone for whom you want to cheer and – this is the critical part – actively show your support for them. Otherwise, the platforms will never learn.
