Technopopulism and the Online Class War

The 2020 election revealed Trump’s most formidable enemies to be, not the Democrats who sit in the Senate or the House of Representatives, but the CEOs of major corporations of Silicon Valley. As election season approached, the political motives of these tech lords–and the extent of their power–began to emerge more clearly. When the New York Post published an article detailing evidence of corruption in the Biden family, social media companies like Twitter and Facebook responded with shameless censorship, making clear whose “side” they took in the coming electoral battle. When the election itself finally came in November, and Trump began to make accusations of election fraud, the tech giants didn’t hesitate to fact-check his claims on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and so on.

Yet the most striking and unprecedented act of coordinated censorship came in the wake of the assault on Capitol Hill. The images of crazed Trump supporters, in MAGA hats and theatrical costumes, overwhelming the police and forcing their way into the Capitol, shook the nation. The riot was the escalation of a massive protest that Trump himself had arguably encouraged (without explicitly calling for any violence), with the intention of pressuring Congress into rejecting the election results. It failed miserably, though not without many injuries and several deaths.

The media immediately characterized the whole event as an attempted coup d’etat. Trump had clumsily given them the perfect reason to portray him as the fascist villain they have always claimed he was; an instigator of violence, a threat to American democracy. Suddenly, the tech companies could seize the opportunity to discredit and disempower him, with an apparently good reason to do so. Thus, they went in for the kill, banning him on practically every major social media platform. Donald Trump, still the sitting President of the United States, was now completely disabled from making his Presidential voice heard in America’s public sphere. Nominally still in office, he was no longer in power.

This was the real coup: a technological coup—one accomplished behind the scenes by the omnipotent technocrats who manage the digital network that is effectively America’s commons.