Fighting tech billionaires
Scotland/UK/Europe need to control their social media
I recently read the article What can the Western left actually do to fight the fascist tech billionaires? on the r/LabourUK subreddit.
While I don’t necessarily agree with all of it, it did make good points about how powerful Big Tech is, and how that’s not good for Britain or democracy. So with the permission of the author, I’m republishing it below:
I realise my title is very clickbait, but I was just reminded of the fact that Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, a major donor to the IDF and close personal friend of Benjamin Netanyhu is potentially going to shortly have the keys to US Tiktok, including the algorithm. Tiktok has 150 million active users in the US - whether we like it or not, it’s a huge cultural force and a major sources of news information for millions of voters in the most powerful country on earth. Obviously there’s an element of chicken and egg here, but it’s worth noting that research from Northwestern University showed that there was a 17:1 pro Palestine to pro Israel post ratio on Tiktok https://news.northeastern.edu/2025/10/10/tiktok-palestine-posts-israel-hamas-war-research/
This has coincided with a younger generation of America’s views being massively more pro Palestine than any other generation in history https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/04/02/younger-americans-stand-out-in-their-views-of-the-israel-hamas-war/ . Much like the way that the Vietnam War changed the way that a generation of Americans viewed war by being able to see it’s effects on TV, seeing Palestinians live streaming bombings, starvation, and indeed IDF soldiers livestreaming ransacking houses including Palestinian women’s underwear drawer, has been part of a shift in attitudes of a generation.
If you want to get a flavour for Larry Ellison’s behaviour, he/Oracle recently acquired Paramount, which is the parent company of CBS, whose news division is one of the most respected in the US. He immediately appointed staunchly pro Israel right wing journalist Bari Weiss as head of CBS news - one of her most recent controversies was yanking a 60 Minutes piece investigating an El-Salvador prison where Trump was sending deported Venezuelans, which has been accused of committing serious human rights violation. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/20/cecot-el-salvador-venezuela-prison-trump-deportations
So soon yet another hard right censorious billionaire will likely have control of not only one of the most historically respected mainstream news organisations in the US, but also the algorithm of one of the most important and influential social media apps. But it’s not just Ellison to worry about -- as we all know Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, and we can already see the hideous effects it’s having on UK democracy. While X has never been a widely used app among the public in the way that Tiktok, Instagram and Facebook have, Twitter was very important in forming elite opinion. Journalists, politicians, policy wonks and celebrities would all come together as part of a digital town square. Twitter rows became columns, politicians would wade in, including a Tory minister accusing journalists of calling his wife a prostitutes (IYKYK) and policy discussion and disagreements became significant. Much of the UK gender critical movement started on Twitter, and we can see that’s where ie JK Rowling and Graham Linehan were radicalised.
When Musk took over though, he did it with the specific aim of influencing elite opinion across the world (especially the West). And we see it in our own country. The term ‘Boriswave’ was originated by hard right Twitter accounts, and has now become common parlance once it was picked up by journalists. There’s a saying for this ‘posting to policy pipeline’. The issue is that due to X’s takeover by Musk, the ‘posting’ that most UK politicians and journalists are being pushed by the algorithm is far right sewage. This why we’re now in a situation where Dominic Cummings, who 3 years ago was the most influential political adviser in the country is using the niche 4chan term ‘troon’ to describe trans people. Obscure hard right memes become common language among a network of right wing politicians and journalists, to the point where Suella Braverman is herself now saying that she cannot be English.
And yet despite it all -- the government still stays on X. A controversy erupts this week alone of Grok posting AI porn of children -- and it will barely move the needle. Elon Musk calls for the dissolution of Parliament at a far right protest in the heart of our capital - and the most robust political riposte to him comes from Ed Davey posting a Spongebob meme on... X of course.
And this is all before we get on to Palantir. Led by Peter Thiel and Alex Karp, the latter who said that pro Palestine protesters on American campuses should be sent to ‘North Korea’ have set up one of the most chillingly invasive data companies that has facilitated mass surveillance in some of the worst circumstances, including helping ICE in the US in their mass deportations and enabling AI targeting for Israel in their genocide in Gaza. There have been reports in the New York Times that they want to compile a sort of ‘super database’ as a way of enabling the Trump administrations mass surveillance of the population, which could further facilitate his mass deportations as well as punish or silence critics.
In 2023 NHS England was awarded a 7 year contract with Palantir, to build a new NHS “federated data platform”, as well as recently meeting with Shabana Mahmood when she was Justice Secretary, to “discuss ideas to help solve the crisis in prisons and probation, from inserting tracking devices under offenders’ skin to assigning robots to contain prisoners.”
These men and their companies are dangerous - power hungry, bigoted and in some case opposed to the cornerstones of democracy itself including privacy and civil liberties, and with more than God they are taking control of our information sources, our communication, our data, and even much of our cultural output. They are gaining or have gained the power to censor, distort, spy and control. They are a threat to the continued existence of liberal democracy itself - and I don’t see how it survives unless they can be thwarted or effectively challenged.
I don’t know what the answer is to any of this, as regulation of the internet is impossible, especially with the Trump administration in power. Some ideas I’ve seen floated include developing European alternatives, but in the short term some starting answers could include:
the government leaving X immediately, and as many other left of centre parties following
Working with the EU to insist on stricter social media regulations - if ie X won’t moderate itself properly, then the UK and EU will have to ban it entirely
End all contracts with Palantir
My reply to the article is in two parts:
how to beat tech oligarchs
what would good social media look like
How to beat the tech oligarchs
If you want to fight powerful people and win, you have to be powerful yourself.
All politics is coalitional and to be powerful you want to build the biggest coalition. This is why I want to make Europe strong again: democratic, militarily strong, and politically united (the last is necessary so it can take quick decisive action in a crisis and not just be an impotent talking shop). This could be done either by reforming the EU or creating a new organisation.
Social media allows its owners to control what people think: either by hard censorship or more typically by the soft censorship of artificially raising/lowering the visibility of content according to its politics.
Thus, the tech oligarchs want to control it, to increase their power. In a democracy it is necessary that social media is not controlled by one person of a small cabal of people with oligarchic power.
What would good social media look like?
The new United Europe should create its own social media platforms which will all be decentralised, open source, and you’ll see the users/channels you choose to subscribe to, not what the rich think you should be seeing. You, the user, will be in control, not big tech or big government.
They should all federate using ActivityPub or similar protocols.
Anyone should be able to set up their own server, e.g. on a Raspberry Pi plugged in to their home router, and that server would be treated equally with the big boys.
Legacy platforms such as X could either agree to do this or be blocked.
As I understand, it a variety of of such open source federatable systems and services already exist, such as Mastodon. But they haven't won out in the market, with most users going to the proprietary networks instead.
What's your theory about what governments can or should do to induce people to want to use these services?