The second Trump administration has been breaking records from its first hour, accomplishing more in its first six months than most administrations accomplish in their entire terms. But there’s one piece of unfinished business that needs to be prioritized before it’s forgotten again – and before it’s too late.
In the first Trump term, it quickly became obvious that as social media had overtaken traditional media, it had also become dangerously politicized. Private companies like Meta, Twitter, and Google were taking advantage of their power as distributors of communications, picking winners and losers in the arena of public speech.
President Trump knew it was a problem, but he was overwhelmed with saboteurs in his ranks, and had to pick his battles carefully. He let this one go, and lived to regret it, as he himself was deplatformed by Twitter as his first term came to a close. An outrage, but he could do nothing about it, as he was leaving office.
Midway through the four-year train wreck of the Biden regime, Elon Musk bought Twitter himself and started the kind of an intense, internal audit that no government could have accomplished. What he discovered became known as The Twitter Files, as he personally released treasure troves of communications between the federal government and the previous owners of Twitter, proving not only incredible violations of the First Amendment but many other crimes as well (most of which still haven’t been prosecuted, and the statutes of limitations are ticking away). The federal bureaucracy, under the direction of the Obama regime and their plants, was controlling the public discourse through the cooperative weasels of big tech.
Now that President Trump is back in office, it is time to return to this issue, quickly, before the 2026 elections are upon us.
When we sit down to our laptops or cellphones and fire up our Facebook or X, we don’t go in completely blind; we know this expensive communication engine is free for a reason. They give us a way to talk with our friends, to publish our rants, observations, cat pictures, and jokes, and in exchange, they have our personal likes and dislikes to sell to advertisers.
Instead of paying a subscription fee, we get these pages for free, and we put up with these ads. If we post about redoing our kitchen, we’ll see cabinet ads. If we post about our car breaking down, we’ll see dealership ads. Post about food, and we’ll see commercials for restaurant chains.
It’s worth it to us – because this enables us to see our friends’ posts for free too. Our newsfeed includes the commentary of our friends and heroes, the celebrities we follow and the thinkers we respect. As with the free television channels we grew up on, a few commercials are a small price to pay for all that free content.
But the longer we participated, the more we learned about this deal. We began to find that these characters – especially Facebook – had been abusing this power.
We assumed there was no order involved in the posts we would see. If we had 100 friends, or 500 or a thousand, our newsfeed would show those friends’ most recent posts, with paid ads peppered throughout.
But Facebook – and others, too, but especially Facebook – installed algorithms that hide some of our friends’ posts, even the very posts that we like most about those friends. Sometimes, especially those.
Turns out that Facebook likes photos, but doesn’t like jokes. Facebook likes liberal politics, but doesn’t like conservative politics. Facebook likes to facilitate the ads it sells, but hates the ads other sites sell.
So, if you post a picture of your cat, it will show up in your friends’ newsfeed. But if you post a link to a column or news story outside Facebook, which would take the reader outside this Meta world, even if only for a moment, they’ll reduce the exposure of that post, while boosting the exposure of the harmless pictures of pets.
A personal example, Gentle Reader, from yours truly: If I post a link to a column I’ve written, then post a photo of one of my cats, the cat picture will appear in most of my friends’ news feeds immediately, and the column will only appear in a few. (And No, in case you’re wondering; it doesn’t matter in which order they are posted.)
Facebook doesn’t like outside links, conservative issues, conservative people, or conservative publications. Now try combining these four, and see what happens when you post a link to an article about a conservative issue, written by a conservative writer in a conservative publication. It will show up in just enough of your friends’ newsfeeds so Facebook can claim it wasn’t hidden, but a cat picture will get ten times the visibility unless you purposefully go to the writer’s own page.
The other sites have similar issues; we are all most familiar with the ones we ourselves use. Search engines like Google have been caught burying the best results of common searches if they disagree with the politics of the best matches. YouTube demonetizes companies that it once invited in, wiping out private businesses and bankrupting them, when YouTube (which is owned by Google) realizes they don’t agree with the users’ politics.
Raise issues like the Wuhan virology lab or the illegal mandates of the Covid vaccine in a way that draws notice, and you’re out for weeks, months, or even permanently. Post about things that were once known as conspiracy theories and were later proven beyond a doubt, like the Clinton email scandal or the outrageous “Endangerment Finding” of 2009, and your business is gone in an instant, without appeal.
Before we say “well, that’s the free market, there’s nothing to be done about it” – remember what these engines are replacing, and how they sold themselves to the public – and to the regulators – when they were conceived.
People used to communicate on telephone calls, or by sending letters back and forth in the mail, or talking while sitting around the bar at the corner tavern. Today, we have these conversations on Facebook or other social media in addition, or increasingly, instead of those.
Facebook, X, MeWe, Gettr, and all these other tools are replacements for the mail, the telephone, and the corner tavern. They have sold themselves to us as such.
Now imagine the mailman going through your mail, and deciding to hold back the letters he just doesn’t think you should get. Or imagine the phone company, listening in on your phone calls and disconnecting you whenever your minder disagrees with the subject matter of your conversation.
This is the stuff of Stalin’s Russia and Castro’s Cuba.
Such behavior in the U.S. Mail or the phone company would never be tolerated.
And it should not be tolerated here either.
What should the government do about these outrageous travesties, from the outright deplatforming of Facebook jail and the demonetization of YouTube accounts to the subtler techniques like Facebook shadow-banning?
It’s simple enough, especially in light of the information that Elon Musk released when he bought Twitter:
The federal government must remove the ability of these operators to meddle with their users this way, applying the same hands-off rules that public utilities like the U.S. Mail and private carriers like UPS and the phone companies have always happily lived under.
They can still sell ads; they can still make billions. But they don’t have a right to stifle our personal conversation. In the eyes of the law, they are a platform, not a publisher.
This takes congressional action to be permanent, but some executive action could take care of it temporarily, at least until reasonable Congressional majorities are increased.
The elections of 2026 and 2028 will be earth-shaking in their consequence, and only a fool would imagine the Left would fail to take advantage of the tools that have helped them deceive the public in the past.
Candidates are already filing petitions for the campaigns of 2026. If we want good candidates to have the same opportunities to get their message out that their opponents do, the marxists of social media need to be forced to take their thumbs off the scales.
There’s no time like the present.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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