As many of us were showing up this past Saturday for our local No Kings marches, with over 3,000 of them underway, the movement’s organizers suddenly found themselves locked out of their Instagram account for hours.

Meta blames it on a software glitch or something close to that, but that episode illustrates exactly the concern progressives and anti-fascists have been voicing for years: that Big Tech and the billionaires behind it have way too much power, and that they are using it to control public opinion to their own benefit.

Then on Tuesday morning, Christiane Amanpour announced that after reporting for CNN for 43 years she’s leaving the network. While she didn’t mention nepo-baby David Ellison who now owns the network, she didn’t have to: back in May at a journalism summit in London she said she was “concerned” about Ellison ownership and how it might bring about the same kind of “ideological realignment” that he’d already imposed on CBS News.

What we’re seeing here with these two companies in microcosm is that the men who own the social media digital square where a near-majority of people get their news, and the people who own the TV networks and papers like The Washington Post, are the same handful of billionaires with political and financial axes to grind that fit nicely with Trump’s vision of a strongman state run by a ruling elite.

Whether it turns out that Meta did something for politics or it was just an error doesn’t change the fact that one company run by one man can switch off a national movement’s megaphone and doesn’t legally owe anybody an explanation.

(The good folks at Indivisible have a shocking list of egregious political insertions and manipulations by Facebook over the years that you can read here.)

Down in Brazil, Facebook deactivated one of lefty Lula’s Facebook pages just before the election, leading a top judge in that country to rule that Meta can’t throttle political content, restrict searches, or remove posts in ways that create a political imbalance. Meta denies bias, but the AP notes they never explained why Lula’s channels were getting beat down on Facebook’s algorithm.

Here at home, after Trump worked out a TikTok deal with an investor group led by Larry Ellison, Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office said it had “independently confirmed instances” of suppressed content there critical of Trump.

TikTok says it’s a glitch, but a study published in Nature in May found TikTok’s algorithm had systematically favored Republican content in three swing states during 2024 when the Chinese—who Trump is courting—still largely owned the platform. Another Nature study this year found X’s feed measurably pushes users to the right so quickly that it just takes a few weeks of exposure to happen.

And this is nothing new. Back in 2017, Google rolled out a change to the news and opinion websites they were pointing people to that caused AlterNet, then one of the biggest progressive sites in the country, to lose 40 percent of its search traffic almost overnight, about 1.2 million readers a month, along with progressive sites Common Dreams, Truthout, and a dozen others.

No announcement, no hearing, no appeal.

After throttling comes self-censorship, which I watched Sunday night on CNN as a host gave a warm, friendly interview to a Republican congressman who told several easily debunked naked lies and she never called him on a single one. No memo from Ellison was necessary; Timothy Snyder calls it “anticipatory obedience.”

I’ve lived through this movie before. In late 2006, as Mitt Romney was leaving the Massachusetts governorship to run for president, his company, Bain Capital co-led a $26.7 billion leveraged buyout of Clear Channel, the radio network that carried Air America programming to around 90% of American households.

I helped start the network, wrote its first business plan, and was on its air, regularly beating Limbaugh in the ratings, and we helped get Obama into the White House. But when Bain took it over they started dropping us off their stations until, in 2010, we couldn’t sell enough advertising to stay in business. I can’t prove this was a sneaky trick by Romney or Bain, but that’s the point; we have virtually no rules or regulations to require disclosure to protect our public square.

Why are billionaires so interested in owning our social, on-air, and online media? Because regulating the conversation Americans can see and hear protects everything else they own.

Lewis Powell laid it out for the Chamber of Commerce in his 1971 memo, telling corporate America that television “plays such a predominant role in shaping the thinking, attitudes and emotions of our people” that business had better take it over.

It took them fifty years, Project 2025, and the internet to finish the job, but here we are.

— Zuckerberg paid Trump $25 million for having suspended his account after the January 6th attempt to end our democracy. Then when Trump came into office again Zuck scrapped fact-checking, and has been a regular visitor to the White House ever since. Common Dreams reports the Justice Department, just by coincidence of course, has since halted a federal probe of Zuck’s company.

— ABC paid Trump $15 million, Paramount paid $16 million over a 60 Minutes edit, and in June Trump approved the Ellisons’ $110 billion merger without demanding a single change. Even Gavin Newsom caved on that one, presumably for fear of offending the billionaires.

— Meanwhile Trump’s FCC chairman, Brendan Carr, has openly threatened broadcasters’ licenses over coverage of Trump scandals that he calls “news distortions.”

This is not only wrong, it’s ahistoric. From the founding of America, we’ve treated information systems as a public trust. George Washington’s administration, via the Postal Service Act of 1792,........

© Common Dreams