Now the Democrats Are Paranoid

The #Democrat and #Democrats hashtags, on Instagram, are affixed to a lot of low-quality content: a crying Statue of Liberty; Elon Musk with a Hitler mustache; other, worse memes that aren’t even decipherable. But for a short time last week, these posts were blocked from view. Donald Trump’s second presidency had only just begun, and suddenly—suspiciously—any platform search for #Democrat or #Democrats returned an error message: “We’ve hidden these results,” it said. “Results from the term you searched may contain sensitive content.”

TikTok, too, was soon accused of censoring anti-Trump dissent, and of changing up its algorithmically generated feeds to favor right-wing content. Back on Instagram, and also on Facebook, many people said that their accounts had auto-followed Donald Trump and J. D. Vance, while posts from abortion-pill providers were getting blurred out or removed from search results. To some, this pattern was as unmistakable as it was malicious: Social media was turning against Democrats.

For years, such worries went the other way. Right-wing figures groused that their views were being hidden, or moderated more heavily than their rivals’. It seems like only yesterday that Donald Trump Jr. was reposting copypasta on Instagram in an effort to suss out whether he’d been shadowbanned. That was around the same time as the former Twitter regime’s botched management of a radioactive news story about Hunter Biden, which gave rise to an enduring symbol of anti-Republican censorship. Now the roles are reversed, and Democrats are feeling paranoid.

Then and now, the particulars have never really matched people’s sense of persecution. Despite some high-profile incidents that suggested bias, Republicans do not appear to have been intentionally and broadly censored by the major social-media platforms. Last week’s incidents have been similarly overinterpreted. For starters, the funny business with the #Democrat hashtag was almost certainly a technical glitch (as Meta told reporters). (If Instagram really meant to launch a crackdown on left-leaning speech, would it choose to block just two generic hashtags?) And TikTok users should not have been surprised to see “Free Palestine” videos suppressed in their TikTok feeds: That platform has often erred on the side of minimizing the visibility of even lightly controversial political issues. (TikTok denies having changed any policies or algorithms since the inauguration.) As for the auto-following of Trump and Vance, that was just a product of the transfer of official president and vice-president accounts to the new administration. Meta acknowledged that some of the blocked abortion-pill content had resulted from “over-enforcement.” A spokesperson told several news outlets, including The Atlantic: “We’ve been quite clear in recent weeks that we want to allow more speech and reduce enforcement mistakes.”

[Read: Why Hunter Biden’s laptop will never go away]

This doesn’t mean people are wrong to say that something feels different. Much has been written about the tech world’s recent warming to President Trump. It was on full display at the inauguration, where Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, and other famous tech-world figures stood together with the Trump family. This visual—accompanied by sizable donations and kind words—stands in contrast to the reception that the industry gave Trump when he was first elected, in 2016, or when he tried to stay in power after losing in 2020.

Official policies are changing too. Zuckerberg has made a number of significant management decisions in the past several months: He got rid of Meta’s DEI team; he ended fact-checking on Facebook and Instagram, explaining that the checkers had become too politically biased in favor of liberals and the left; and he overhauled his company’s hate-speech rules to “get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender” that were, as he put it, “out of touch with mainstream discourse.” On Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg described the “journey” he’d been on for the past eight years, from disillusionment with the media during the first Trump administration to a loss of faith in the federal government during the Biden administration. Both, he claimed, had tried to force his hand and make his platforms more censorial.

Zuckerberg hasn’t indicated any desire to interfere with Instagram moderation at a granular level, or do any other editing of political speech. Still, users are right to wonder whether his personal political views may influence the operations of the multiple enormous platforms over which he has nearly unfettered control. The same reasonable doubts apply to TikTok. This was never a free-speech-oriented platform, but its users could hardly avoid being made aware of the company’s new coziness with Trump. “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!,” they were told by the app on January 19, after it had been very briefly banned. (The same evening, the company sponsored a glitzy party for social-media influencers who had aided the Trump campaign.) And X, of course, is run by one of Trump’s most enthusiastic backers. An ongoing user exodus from that platform saw another burst last week amid the controversy over whether Musk did or did not intend to give a Nazi salute at the inauguration.

How the CEO of a social-media company thinks and acts may be taken as a clue to how their platform operates. (Until recently, Zuckerberg was known as a Millennial liberal, and an ally to mainstream Democrats. Jack Dorsey, the former CEO of Twitter, had a similar reputation.) But these signals only go so far: The actual maintenance of a social network unfolds behind the scenes; what rules exist aren’t nearly as important as how they get enforced, which has always been opaque.

Social-media users today are just as in the dark as ever. We know only what we’ve been told, and even then, we don’t know whether we should believe it. A kind of folklore has emerged around what’s really going on, flavored by anxiety and dread, and shifting with the news. The specific stories may be changing, but their overarching paranoia has some basis in the truth. There is no great conspiracy to bottle up a hashtag—but the people in charge of social media can do whatever they want.