SAN FRANCISCO — After Donald Trump won the election this month, his supporters gravitated to a panoply of online destinations to celebrate.
Hundreds of thousands of posts lauding Trump’s victory filled Truth Social, the social platform that the president-elect owns. Speculation about what the new administration would accomplish ran rampant on social platform X, which is owned by Elon Musk. Gab, Parler and other right-wing social media sites were flooded with thousands of memes glorifying Trump.
No similar spaces existed for the left. Meta’s Instagram, Threads and Facebook had publicly de-emphasized politics leading up to the election. Musk had transformed Twitter into X and shifted it to the right. And no other tech platform had gained momentum as a public square for liberals.
“It has become starkly evident that the left, the Democrats, do not have the same social media platforms to push their agenda,” said Phillip Walzak, a political consultant based in New York. “It has left Democrats in a huge deficit.”
If the election underscored anything about the internet, it was how far social media platforms had moved to the right. While Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and other sites continue to be popular gathering places for entertainment and meme-making, political discourse online has increasingly shifted to an array of mostly right-wing sites that have built up their audiences and stoked largely partisan conversations.
The change was an unintended consequence of a series of decisions made by some of the biggest social platforms nearly four years ago.
After the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Facebook and Twitter booted Trump and his far-right supporters from their platforms. In response, Trump and his allies, who accused the tech companies of censorship, flocked to or started their own social media sites that promoted conservative causes. By the time the mainstream platforms allowed Trump and other right-wing figures to return, they had increased their online followings and influence.
That has left Democrats at a major disadvantage, just as Republicans are set to take control of the House of Representatives, the Senate and the White House. Inside the Democratic Party, some have discussed the lack of tech platforms available to push their agenda, said two Democratic strategists involved in the confidential conversations, who were not authorized to speak publicly. Some have debated how they squandered years in which they should have built their own answer to Truth Social, the people said.
The online disparity was evident Nov. 5, when Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump shared messages on social media urging people to vote. Trump’s posts were more widely shared and liked than those by Harris and her campaign, according to a New York Times review of social platforms.
On Facebook, Trump’s most popular Election Day post asking voters to stay in line and cast their ballot was liked nearly 160,000 times and shared by more than 15,000 people. Harris’ most popular Facebook post was liked 18,000 times and shared by 1,500 people.
On Instagram, an image that Trump posted Nov. 5 with his “Make America Great Again” slogan was liked over 2.1 million times. Harris’ most popular post that day, which celebrated Generation Z’s first-time voters, was liked 569,000 times. And on X, Trump’s most popular post calling on supporters to vote was liked over 1 million times, while Harris’ most popular post was liked just over 318,000 times.
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 Harris and her campaign operated in a hostile environment on many of the platforms, including X.
“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 CEO, 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.
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. 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%, and it doubled its registered users to 3.4 million, Torba told NPR. In February 2022, 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 CEO, 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 the platforms would “avoid making recommendations that could be about politics or political issues.” In August, 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, Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it as X — then swiftly turned it into an engine for Trump’s political agenda. Musk’s own X account became the most followed on the site by a wide margin, allowing him to drive the conversation and bolster Trump.
Since the election, there has been a steady exodus of the left from X, said Renée DiResta, an 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 Musk fell through, and the newspaper The Guardian.
Several sites have emerged as X alternatives, including Bluesky and Mastodon. Bluesky, which launched in February 2023, has added more than 1 million users since the election, said Emily Liu, a spokesperson for the platform, bringing its total to 15 million.
On Monday, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., 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 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.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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