TOAs Democrats think about how to counter the Trump administration, they must accept a very simple lesson from the past eight years. Big Tech and Big Business are part of the political opposition working on behalf of Donald Trump, not Democrats’ allies working against Trump and Trumpism.
It should not seem necessary to point out what appears to be an obvious fact. Still, there are some Democrats who are trying to stay close to Big Tech or downplay antitrust policy when it comes to authoritarian risks. For example, a few days ago, Priorities USA, the largest Democratic party, Super Pac, held a large resistance strategy session organized by “our friends from google”.
As another example, Adam Jentleson, a political writer and former chief of staff to U.S. Senator John Fetterman, wrote a recent piece for the New York Times which, among other things, criticized the fight against monopolies as a “niche issue.” He argued that there is a dichotomy between table issues and the challenge to corporate power, and that we should focus on the former.
The belief that Big Tech, and Big Business more broadly, is helpful to Democrats has already been tested and found to be false.
When Trump was elected in 2016, a central pillar of the Democratic resistance involved the use of big tech platforms as a counterweight. If you remember, the CEO of Google even joined the anti-Trump protests. Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Twitter before Elon Musk were reprimanded for using technologies that enabled extremism, but instead of acting aggressively to regulate algorithmic design, change accountability rules, or dissolve them, Democrats focused on pushing platforms regarding editorial policy.
They were supposed to be able to be grouped into the “right” set of editorial practices, which would help defeat Trump and Magaism, and limit the reach of his rhetoric in the short term. This was the context in which the “disinformation and disinformation” framework was born.
We use these phrases all the time now, but it’s worth reflecting on how strange they are. Sometimes disinformation refers to unintentional lies, and disinformation describes deliberate lies, but sometimes the terms encompass factually correct but misleading information, or as Barack Obama argument in 2022, “suppression of true information” if such suppression was done for, among other things, “political benefit” or “targeting those you don’t like.”
These new categories not only infuriated those trapped in broad and confusing definitions, but they diverted Democratic attention from issues of power. The disinformation framework fits perfectly with the union with big technology as an anti-fascist alliance. “We,” science-based Democrats, would successfully work hand-in-hand with the world’s largest technology companies to protect America.
Eight years later, Democrats have lost the White House, the House of Representatives and the Senate. Large technology platforms are flooded with extremist content. Big tech should no longer seem like an ally. Not only is Musk fully ensconced at the head of the power table, right next to Trump, but the CEOs of Meta, Alphabet, Apple and Amazon reached out to Trump before the election, perhaps taking him seriously. his threat imprison Mark Zuckerberg if he opposed him, perhaps simply because he realized that Trump is a deregulatory giant.
Musk supposedly joined a recent phone call between Trump and the CEO of Google. We can anticipate dozens of such meetings at the highest level and the birth of strong relationships. And rather than repeatedly insisting that the tech titans have too much power, we have spent eight years arming them with language that can be used to suppress dissent.
Repeated vote has shown that voters actually hate corporate monopolies and antitrust policies are extremely popular. I don’t want to overstate the point: antitrust policy disappeared in the United States during the 30 years between 1980 and 2020, and it’s fair to argue that antitrust policy, especially against Big Tech, may need more experimentation in the way we talk about it . However, in terms of substance we should be very concerned.
Facebook, Google and Amazon have destroyed the true bulwark against autocratic leaders – local journalism – while accommodating real autocracy. They now control the digital advertising industry. According to a recent research report, if news organizations were paid what they earn from acting as intermediaries between readers and writers, will deliver between 12,000 and 14,000 million dollars one year. The same journalists and news organizations we rely on to investigate and fact-check are afraid of being shadowbanned—Jeff Bezos’ fear of Trump is Exhibit A of how that can affect editorial content.
Fortunately, a court has officially labeled Google an illegal monopoly, thanks to the work of the Department of Justice under Deputy Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, and other antitrust cases involving Facebook and Amazon are working their way through the court system. But even if Google is forced to ditch Chrome, which seems possible, the failure of the Democrats in power to bring serious legislation to a vote destroying the technology now seems grotesque. It seems like we’re not even trying to stop the incoming power couple of Trump and technology.
As pundits try to parse the lesson of how Kamala Harris lost what seemed like a winnable election, we would do well to look further back and remember the true lessons of 2016: joining the big tech oligarchs is joining the big tech oligarchs. destruction of the democratic party and democracy.
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Zephyr Teachout is a professor at Fordham Law School and author of Break ‘Em Up: Recovering Our Freedom from Big Ag, Big Tech, and Big Money.