In January 2025,
Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire and CEO of Meta,
the company that owns Instagram, Facebook, Threads, and WhatsApp,
announced that the corporation was changing its moderation policies:
ending fact-checking
and being more lenient with hate speech.
These changes allow for example
gender and sexuality dissidents to be treated as mentally ill.
Zuckerberg went further
and ended the diversity policy within his companies
and openly repeated the misogynistic discourse of red pill antifeminists.
- Masculine energy... I think is good.
Having a culture that celebrates agression a bit more
has its own merits that are really positive.
He also fostered the erasure of queer people
by removing terms that referred to the LGBTQIA+ community
from the themes of their apps.
In practice,
Meta is making its platforms safe spaces
for hate speech
and aligning itself with Donald Trump's fascist agenda.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk,
owner of X, Tesla, and SpaceX,
has been openly supporting the far right around the world.
Every billionaire is our enemy.
Their fortunes are the result of our daily suffering,
the devastating exploitation of the planet,
and they depend on our submission and control
to maintain the current unjust order of things.
Our liberation is a threat
to their power and wealth.
Zuckerberg and Musk's alignment
with the far right matters
because the social networks they control
are by far the most widely used and influential
in much of the world,
such as in the territories occupied by the Brazilian state.
Their apps on our smartphones
track us and collect all kinds of information
about our lives and behavior.
Who we talk to, what we like, what we share,
our location, our movements,
how long a video can hold our attention,
among other metrics.
This data may end up in the hands of the state,
or it may be sold to anyone who can pay for it.
But it is also used by the networks' own algorithms
to filter and select content
that will encourage us to stay glued to our screens,
that will provoke outrage, anger,
anxiety, and insecurity,
even if it means compromising our mental health.
Meta has already admitted to manipulating
the emotions of 700,000 Facebook users
without their consent
in an experiment that suppressed
all positive or negative posts from their feeds
and analyzed how this impacted them.
But beyond that, algorithms can be used
to manipulate our perception of reality for political purposes.
Whether it's to discourage struggles against capitalist domination
by making us feel powerless and depressed,
or to encourage discontent
against a regime, government, movement,
or group of people that stands in its way.
Several studies have already shown
that the algorithms of Meta, X, TikTok, and Google
actively expose people
to far-right content.
On corporate social media,
fascists benefit from the engagement
of the very people who want to fight them.
To do this, they constantly create false controversies,
spreading moral panic and misinformation
to gain visibility
and thus increase their power and political capital.
Their posts mobilize both those who agree with what is being said
and those who disagree
and want to express their opposition.
And all interaction with content we want to fight against
further increases its reach.
On top of all this,
these platforms let people with money
pay to get more views for their posts.
For example, from 2020 to 2024,
the far-right docu-maker Brasil Paralelo,
funded by billionaire Jorge Gerdau,
spent 22 million reais on ads and boosts
on Meta platforms.
On the other hand,
the mere presence of certain words in a post
can cause the algorithm to reduce its visibility
and take away monetization.
This conditions individual behavior
and leads many political profiles
to self-censor their content in advance.
Whether by refraining from using certain words
or even moderating their discourse
so that their publication has more reach.
Content that encourages radical social change
and the end of techno-capitalist domination
will not be favored by algorithms,
nor will it receive funding from billionaires.
And, as much as people appreciate this type of content,
it will never have as wide a reach
as the discourse that attacks minorities
and appeals to moral panic
used by the far right.
And that's when radical profiles aren't summarily banned,
as were dozens of anarchist and anti-fascist pages
banned from X and Meta's platforms.
Given all this,
it's hard swallow the claim
that social movements don't know how to use corporate social media
as well as the far right.
These platforms are designed to favor hate speech,
fascism, and intolerance.
While we manage to reach and communicate with a dozen people,
the far right recruits three times as many.
The fact that fascism has been growing worldwide
since the popularization of corporate social media
is not a coincidence,
it is by design.
We pay a high price
for using corporate social media
as collective spaces for debate,
information exchange, and affection.
These platforms subtly manipulate
our perception of reality.
To keep using them
is to allow them to continue spreading hatred
and concentrating in the hands of sociopathic billionaires
a power capable of destabilizing and overthrowing governments,
of influencing the behavior
of billions of people around the world.
Including ours.
Even so,
many advocate that we should stay on these platforms
to counter the flood of fascist content
and dispute the narrative.
They argue that abandoning these platforms would leave a vacuum
that would be filled by our enemies.
In fact, using these corporate platforms creates and maintains
what's called the network effect.
When people use a platform
because that's where everyone else is,
and their presence there
encourages others to stay there too.
This creates a vicious cycle
and legitimizes these platforms
as the only viable options.
Those who defend the dispute of narratives on corporate social networks
repeat the same rhetoric
we see during election periods.
That our participation in these spaces is crucial
to prevent the right wing from taking over unhindered.
Disregarding the fact that these spaces
actively block deep and radical changes
and that our presence is precisely what legitimizes
and makes these platforms so powerful.
They benefit from being seen
as diverse and democratic,
when in fact they are tools of manipulation,
dissemination of fascist sludge,
and maintenance of capitalist domination.
And, just as in bourgeois elections,
by trying to compete with the far right in these spaces,
we are strengthening what we wanted to fight.
And we are getting further and further away
from the radical changes we dream of.#
In 2025, Donald Trump
returned to the presidency of the United States,
with the support of tech billionaires
and an even more authoritarian and violent government.
In September 2025,
he classified antifa as a terrorist organization,
which will lead to even greater restraint
on radical accounts on social media,
especially on platforms that are based and operate
in territories stolen by the United States.
We cannot allow billionaires and corporations
that are openly on his side
to decide what information we receive,
to control our communications
and the ability to define discourse.
We cannot continue to hand over data
that will be used to repress and control us.
If Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg
still allow us to voice our perspectives
and challenge their fascist policies on these platforms,
it's only because they're gaining more than they're losing.
If our adversaries own these platforms
and get to decide what people see on them,
we lose merely by being there.
There are attempts to regulate social media platforms,
and while this may help to some extent,
it is far from solving the problem.
Our communication will remain in the hands of these capitalists
who will continue to profit from our data
and manipulate us with their algorithms.
It also comes with the serious risk
of concentrating even more power of surveillance and repression
in the hands of the state.
Joining yet another corporate social network isn't the solution.
In these networks, profit will always come before the common good,
and even if they are owned by well intentioned people,
they can be bought out by unscrupulous corporations or individuals at any time.
Our best chance is to ditch these corporate platforms
and actively participate in building networks
that are under our control and serve our interests.
Imagine social networks that, instead of being owned
by a handful of billionaires,
belonged to all of us.
Imagine if, instead of being stored
in giant data centers owned by corporations,
these networks were spread across hundreds of thousands of servers
around the world.
Each one autonomous,
with its own policies and moderation teams.
If, instead of being owned
by profit-driven corporations,
they were managed by the community itself,
by people you can talk to directly.
And where you receive in your feed
what you have actually chosen.
No obscure algorithms,
no ads.
Many people ask themselves:
Well, they already exist.
Everyday more and more people are migrating to Fediverse,
a network that brings together different platforms
that communicate through a federated system.
It's like if you could use your Instagram account
to interact and follow
people on X, Facebook, or Blue Sky.
There are different types of platforms on the Fediverse.
From microblogging
to photo sharing,
video streaming,
music and podcasting,
forums, and more.
And they all communicate and interconnect.
With an account on one of them,
you can follow people who are on the others.
They are decentralized networks;
that is, instead of everyone creating an account
on the same server controlled by a single corporation,
you can create your account on any
of thousands of servers spread across the planet,
created and maintained by individuals like us.
Each server has its own rules and moderation.
These are networks created for us to communicate with other people,
not to capture and sell our attention
and profit from our data.
That's essential,
because platforms should serve us,
not the other way around.
They should streamline our communication,
help us organize,
and spread ideas
to enhance our collaboration,
coordination, and actions outside of them.
Unsurprisingly,
these networks have become the target of reprisals by Meta,
which has deleted links
to decentralized networks from its platforms.
But capitalism spares no resources
to seduce us into using and remaining on its platforms,
even if that is not the best choice for us,
for our communities and territories,
for our future and that of the planet.
But change is happening
through our collective effort and commitment.
We need to decide whether we passively accept
technologies designed to manipulate and control us,
or whether we will act to promote and spread technologies
that reflect our values and worldview,
that put control back in the hands
of our collectives and communities,
that foster exchange, cooperation, and horizontality.
And above all,
we must make strategic use of digital social networks,
even if they are decentralized and under our control.
Studies show that outrage on social media
reduces the effectiveness of collective action.
At a time when the world is collapsing around us,
with a flood of bad news on a global scale,
it is more important than ever
to break the isolation and individualism to which screens confine us
and look at the ground we are standing on,
at the people beside us,
and organize ourselves together to collectively resist
the threats that are approaching.