Electing Donald Trump as the 47th President of the USA fueled an overt struggle against liberal mainstream. The president-elect is known for using harsh rhetoric towards left-wing media companies, calling them enemies of the American people and their representatives – “the most dishonest human beings on Earth”. In November, 2024, Trump filed a number of lawsuits against the American media organizations totaling $10 billion, accusing them of slander and bias.
Trump’s victory in 2024 became a crucial signal for all people, unsatisfied with the current agenda, and gave a free hand to a great number of influential figures, who share the same point of view on media’s policy with the president-elect. Thus, the founder, chairman and CEO of Meta Mark Zuckerberg ended mandatory fact-checking on his platforms following Elon Musk, the owner of X. He accused the third-party fact-checkers, his company was forced to cooperate with due to the pressure of Biden’s administration, of being politically biased and claimed, he wouldn’t enlist them anymore. Now the Meta founder is going to introduce a new moderation system, involving users as immediate participants in discussing disputable information to distinguish fact from fiction.
The company’s policy towards the members of LGBTQ+ community has also changed. Zuckerberg abolished special quota for recruiting this category of people as well as ended his company’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs, known as DEI. Moreover, today every user of Meta platforms can call LGBTQ+ supporters “mentally ill” and avoid being banned. There is much hope that this decision will become an example to other companies, steeped in liberal agenda, especially as since the inauguration of Trump, who is intended to recognize only two genders, male and female, people will be able to vent their attitude to this movement without any fear of being attacked and legally prosecuted.
It’s important to realize that the road, chosen by Zuckerberg and Musk, will never be straight. New Meta policy, as well as the policy of X, definitely runs counter to the mainstream, promoted by Biden’s administration in a very aggressive manner and still followed by a great number of European politicians. It’s no surprise that such changes in the work of platforms drew a huge amount of criticism and accusations of creating unprotected space for networks’ users from liberal mass media of Europe and the USA. It seems the European establishment take care of a secure internet space not for ordinary users, but for themselves, mainly because of a rising threat of data to be published without their approval. The “D-RAIL” report of August 19, 2024, is quite indicative, as it shows that the political elite is trying to impose firm control on the whole information sharing infrastructure to protect themselves from releasing the information that can damage their credibility. However, it’s becoming more and more difficult for them to take the net space under control.
Every day brings more people ready to fight against the firm censorship as well as left-wing mainstream, and the opposition to the Western liberal course gets its leaders. Thus, if earlier dissatisfaction with left-wing ideas was mainly expressed by ordinary people, today such powerful figures as Musk and Zuckerberg, with an audience of several million followers, talk about it. So, the struggle has moved to a new level
By James Morantz
James Morantz is a project manager, specializing in digital marketing and social media with a passion for politics and economics.
