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Joan Donovan, an assistant professor at Boston University and the founder of the Critical Internet Studies Institute, which studies how the internet is used to disrupt democracy, said Ms. Harris and her campaign operated in a hostile environment on many of the platforms, including X. (Are you kidding, everyone dislikes her not because she's democrat, but she's a lying dictator that would destroy our country)
“The right was very clear in establishing their media spaces,” she said. “It was a very savvy and intentional effort by the right to fuse their party and political viewpoints with specific platforms.”
Meta, Truth Social, Parler and X declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment. In an email, Andrew Torba, Gab’s chief executive, said: “The right will continue to use our own tools and ecosystem to mobilize. Nothing and no one can stop us.”
Representatives for the Democratic and Republican Parties declined to comment.(because this is stupid and hypocritical)
The rise of right-wing platforms and the reorientation of existing social media companies began after the Jan. 6 attack, when Facebook, Twitter and others removed the accounts of militia groups that had participated in the riot and other far-right supporters of the “Stop the Steal” movement. Mr. Trump’s personal accounts on Facebook and Twitter were frozen.
Angered by the treatment, many conservatives migrated to platforms that billed themselves as safe spaces for the right,including Gab and Parler. In the year after the Jan. 6 attack, Gab’s traffic jumped 800 percent, and it doubled its registered users to 3.4 million, Mr. Torba told NPR. In February 2022, Mr. Trump’s media company, Trump Media, debuted Truth Social, adding to the mix of right-wing sites.
Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, became less political (???). In January 2020, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, told investors that he was “considering steps” to reduce political content on Facebook. Over the next four years, he disbanded the company’s election integrity team, which focused on securing information around elections, and removed tools that allowed researchers and reporters to track misinformation.
In February, Adam Mosseri, who oversees Threads and Instagram, reinforced that stance when he said theplatforms would “avoid making recommendations that could be about politics or political issues.” In August, Mr. Zuckerberg sent a letter to the House Judiciary Committee saying he wanted to be “neutral” and not “even appear to be playing a role” in the elections.
During this period,Mr. Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X — then swiftly turned it into an engine for Mr. Trump’s political agenda. Mr. Musk’s own X accountbecame the most followed on the site by a wide margin, allowing him to drive the conversation and bolster Mr. Trump.
Since the election, there has been a steady exodus of the left from X,said Renée DiResta(spy and designer of destruction of conservatives) associate research professor at the Georgetown McCourt School of Public Policy, who studies social media platforms. Among the recent departures were Don Lemon, the former CNN anchor who sued X after a video streaming deal with Mr. Musk fell through, and the newspaper The Guardian.
Several sites have emerged as X alternatives, including Bluesky and Mastodon.Bluesky, which launched inFebruary 2023, has added more than one million users since the election, said Emily Liu, a spokeswoman for the platform, bringing its total to 15 million.
On Monday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, lauded Bluesky as a welcoming place.
“A thing I like here is it’s okay to have moments of happiness in public without being broadly scolded, and I believe that sustaining this kind of humanity will be very important as we resist fascism,” she wrote.
Still, Democrats have work to do, said Mr. Walzak, the political consultant.
“Nobody is going about actually doing something to give Democratic Party supporters a social media space,” he said. “Nobody is building something for Democratic causes which can actually do what the current infrastructure does for Republican causes.”
Sheera Frenkel is a reporter based in the San Francisco Bay Area, covering the ways technology impacts
https://archive.is/Xyg9s