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The Billionaire Chokehold Over Social Media

A rant about how centralized and controlled social media has become through their billionaire owners

CyberSage
13–19 minutes

There has been a lot of really concerning news lately in regards to social media, and it is important to discuss it. I had initially wanted to just go over my complaints with Bluesky and its decisions as of late, but some recent developments involving TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram really made me reconsider. I am not all that attached to Bluesky these days, but the first bit of news that got my attention was that Facebook and Instagram have been suppressing a President in Brazil on their platform during a high stakes election. Instagram was caught suppressing the No Kings Platform. TikTok had banned the account of the company that is releasing that Musk documentary in some theaters. All of this really shows just how centralized these platforms have become through their billionaire owners as well as the desperate need to break up companies, especially in the tech industry and the entertainment industry.

So with that, I would like to go over some recent news involving social media and AI chatbots. This will focus on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.

Twitter

Honestly, looking at what happened with Twitter from the past year alone has got me feeling like this:

Scene from Community where Glover walks into a room on fire

It’s honestly just baffling looking at how shit the app has become, and the toxic as hell bubbles that it puts everyone on. Now, Twitter by no means unique on this front, but it does feel astonishing how badly things look at this point in time, and how much worse I fully expect the app to get within the next two years alone.

In late August 2026, Ars Technica reported that a lawsuit is alleging that Space xAI literally used CSAM to train Grok models, which…is just so horrendous on so many levels that I struggle to describe it. How anyone thought it was a good idea to give people the ability to publicly alter images of real life people on social media? A lot of backlash came from governments, so they decided the best way to avoid more outrage would be to just make it not available in public. If you use Grok on Twitter use the Grok app itself, you can just go past this restriction. This is arguably even more insidious, as Space xAI is monetarily incentivized to continue this platform, just not under the prying eyes of the public. Reuters has also reported as recently as the 14th of October, 2026, the UK’s media regulator, Ofcom, still has issues with this:

X met targets agreed with the regulator for reviewing reports of suspect content more quickly, according to the company’s first quarterly performance report submitted to Ofcom.

However, the regulator said ​in a statement on Wednesday it had “ongoing concerns around the effectiveness of X’s response to taking down ​illegal hate and terror content”.

The regulator said it would continue examining the data submitted by ⁠X and compare it with its own testing, adding that the company would need to maintain its current performance.

All of this information alone would be more than enough for me to just never make another account on the blasted app ever again. Even if I were to ignore this massive elephant in the room, the app is also just full of bigoted weirdos who sniff their own farts and that stuff is immediately pushed to you if you make a new account. Bots and AI generated nonsense is everywhere, and everyone on the app just seem to be in endless drama. You could say, well, that’s any big social media app these days, and while I would sadly agree with you, Twitter feels particularly bad. Even if you go out of your way to mute anything to do with current day politics, people will still bring up stupid political views on movies and games all time. Remember the Odyssey crap all over social media this Summer? Yeah, that’s just one example. I sympathize with creators who are just trying to advertise and go over their works online, but recent examples like the Gatchakuta author, Kei Urana, Gooseworx with The Amazing Digital Circus, and Goodbye Lara show the downsides of that. I’m not saying you have to particularly like or dislike any of these works, as I am personally rather mixed on TADC’s ending for example, but still. Outrage over those things feel super forced most of the time.

I haven’t even talked much about Elon Musk himself, who is just about the most embarrassing and dangerous rich twat in a field full of embarrassing and dangerous rich twats. I could spend an entire article going over Elon but that would take ages so I’ll just go over two recent examples I haven’t gone into. One example is that Musk wants people allow Grok to use their credit cards for purchases, which is such a financial and security concern that multiple news sites and individuals have mocked the idea.

X users added a community note to the credit card post:

“xAI explicitly warns users not to include personal information in prompts, yet credit card photos may contain such information.”

The note added that Grok Bot’s terms let SpaceXAI store user data and credentials in its cloud. Financial transactions also need human review under those terms.

One user replied that Amazon was blocking the agent. Musk answered that Grok “will find another way to buy stuff.” He said it had just bought him Lego from the Lego website.

Beyond the obvious security concerns with letting a bot do all of your purchases, including others being able to alter your order. This is what people immediately did with Elon when he was buying lego sets with it as a publicity stunt.

However, the far more concerning example is the recent news regarding Ukraine and Russia. To oversimplify, the war of unprovoked aggression started by the US and Israel on Iran ever since the 28th of February, 2026, has irreparably fucked the gas and oil market to the point where consumer gas and diesel are extremely high. This is on top of the fact that reserves are also at their lowest since records of it began in the 80s.

National Average Gas Prices in the US
Weekly US Ending Stocks of Crude Oil Graph

What does this have to do with Ukraine and Russia? Well, Trump announced that he made a deal with Putin to flow diesel into the US in exchange for sanctions relief. He did all of this just so that Trump can say he’s “fixing” the problem that he directly caused by starting this stupid war with Iran to begin with. This, predictably, pissed off Ukraine, but Trump declared an “energy ceasefire” where the two would stop bombing their own oil infrastructure. Did that work? Well, no it didn’t. Ukraine initially respected the ceasefire, but they later announced that they were gonna ignore this ceasefire declaration because Russia was still bombing Ukraine.

This is where Elon comes into the story. Elon has Starlink, which is SpaceX’s commercial internet service that Ukraine uses for civilian and military communications, and Starshield, which is more military oriented and therefore has stronger encryption and better internet speeds. Starshield is provided through government contracts from the US to Ukraine and the Ukrainian military and government use both, to the point of being reliant on the technology. Starshield is built on infrastructure that Starlink is based on, but otherwise, they are separate.

After this controversy began, Ukrainian officials reported that connections were being lost with their drones at a certain speed, as in, anything traveling about 161 km/hr, or about 100 mph have been affected. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy accused Elon and Trump of this intentional slowdown, which both of them have denied, though given their track record, I wouldn’t be inclined to believe Trump or Elon at all. This is just one pressing example of a massive tech mogul intentionally using their services to further their own geopolitical ends. This situation with Ukraine being extra concerning given the context of an actual war that has gone on for nearly half a decade now. Trump is doing this to seem like it’s a solution to a problem he directly caused to look better in the midterms. All of this being facilitated by the infrastructure owned by a manchild who allows his platform to be a Nazi filled cesspool, contributed by the Twitter accounts owned by the US Government.

Facebook & Instagram

This next section will go over two social media platforms, both of which are of course, owned by Meta, which is owned by Mark Zuckerburg.

Recently, Brazil has had the extremely consequential first round of elections, where President Lula is currently seeking a fourth term as the country’s president. Lula can generally be described as a progressive in matters of domestic policy and non-aligned in matters of foreign policy. This would include the Amazon rainforest, which has seen the lowest rate of deforestation in close to 40 years. He and his party also push for worker’s rights, and the recent reform where Brazil’s congress has approved an end to the 6-day workweek and reduced it to the standard 40-hour work week. That is to say, there are things you can definitely critique Lula for, but these are genuine improvements, ones that will almost certainly be thrown out if Flávio Bolsonaro, son of the previous President, Jair Bolsonaro, wins the upcoming election. Flávio won the first round but didn’t get the 50% threshold required to avoid a second round, so he and Lula will go up against one another again on October 25th.

So what does this have to do with Facebook? For weeks now, including Meta’s own employees as per Reuters’ latest report, were heavily suppressed.

According to Lula’s party, some of his posts appeared without a ​share button, suffered ​reduced reach, and ⁠had stories that prevented reactions and sharing, in addition to appearing without audio or playing at ​accelerated speed.

Now, Meta itself has stated that these were just technical issues, but that is about as believable as aliens being the ones to make the ancient pyramids in Egypt. You mean to tell me that Facebook and Instagram just so happened to have these problems for just one party while the opposition reported no such issues? Are we being serious? This is a questionable bit of election interference, which the US has proven itself to continue to do in Latin America ever since Trump’s second term in office. Colombia and Honduras being some of the more obvious examples before Brazil. Brazil is also the largest country in Latin America in terms of size and population. As such it has massive influence in the region and has a large amount of ties to China in terms of economic growth and political cooperation. Lula’s attempt to balance the country’s relationship with the US and China made sense before Trump, but after? It hasn’t. If Lula does win somehow in October 25th, he must be as aggressive as possible towards the US.

Speaking of the US, as of October 17th, we’ve had more No Kings Protests. Which are pretty lukewarm compared to the massive chaos going on in other countries like France, Albania, and India, as well as the protests in Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Italy, Chile, and yes, Brazil. However, they are still protests against the current government. So what did Meta do? Well, Meta took down the No Kings Coalition’s Instagram account during their vote early campaign. They reported taking hours to regain access.

Instagram post from League of Women Voters
No Kings Coalition regaining their Instagram account

Regardless of anyone’s opinions on the No Kings Protests, this really should serve as an example of just how pervasive and centralized control Zuckerberg has through Meta. All of this doesn’t even mention the significant restrictions and bans Palestinians have faced amidst Israel’s genocide of Gaza as well how suppressed dissent about that genocide have become on these platforms. On top of all of this, Meta’s ad programs are all over the internet, which allows massive amount of tracking for those users. Bots and AI slop also infest both Facebook and Instagram, you can barely escape any of it.

TikTok

Finally, we have to go into TikTok. As you probably recall, there was a massive push to ban the app during the Biden administration. It didn’t really pick up steam until the Gaza genocide and people’s adverse reaction to that on social media, especially TikTok. You see, the US side of TikTok is used throughout the world barring China. TikTok was owned and developed by the Chinese company ByteDance. This alone was used to push for a sale or ban of the app in the US, but again, it didn’t really gain steam until after October 2023. Now sure, China does have far more leverage over tech companies within its own boarders, and they do collect a ton of data. This isn’t limited to ByteDance, but social media apps like Instagram and Facebook also collect a ton of data on users for advertising purposes, and none of them are forced to stop. These concerns were more so focused on trying to control or get rid of this one social media app that didn’t do a large amount of repression of Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices. The app was set to be banned in Jaunary 2025, but Trump halted the ban and caused the sale of the app to US investors. The largest investor is Larry Ellison, owner of US tech giant Oracle and massive donor to the IDF.

What happened next wasn’t really be a shock, as the app began to suppress political content and was more willing to describe certain content as “this may be inaccurate”, particularly in relation to Israel. One notable example of repression is how Bisan Owda, an award winning Palestinian journalist, had her TikTok account permanently banned on January 2026. This happened days after TikTok was taken over by US investors, with the Ellisons at the head of it. The account was restored only after a large amount of anger was directed at the platform over it.

All of that isn’t even going into the recent controversy, which is what has really hit the news running. Elon doesn’t own TikTok, but news came about that the Hollywood Reporter was banned for political content that violated their terms and services, but guess what? No such specifics on what they violated were even mentioned in the initial ban. All of this really reeks of more suppression of content that these ghouls do not like. Oh, and TikTok is filled with ads constantly promoting “prediction markets”, aka gambling, on the app, regardless of what kind of user you are. There are other kinds of ads, but these feel the most pervasive, even if you block Kalshi and accounts that promote the blasted thing. The documentary is currently in some theaters and it’s supposed to come to HBO Max. HBO Max is owned by Warner Bros, which is now also owned by David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son. Now, I haven’t seen the documentary yet, so I have no opinion on it for now, though it is apparently very critical of Elon and it’s rather thorough since it’s 4 hours long. Regardless, this is another example of the most insecure people with the deepest pockets suppressing shit cause they don’t like it and want to promote their agenda. The “muh free speech” of the past decade from these kinds of people was always bullshit.

Conclusion

Overall, what we have been seeing throughout social media has been a situation of control by the richest in our society, and those within the government being more than willing to facilitate it. Of course, both the federal government and state level governments in the US has proven again and again that they are willing to look the other way. What can be done about any of this? Of course, none of us really have the ability to directly stop these different mergers and it is true that people rely on these platforms to stay afloat. What I would recommend would be to diversify your options. Private messaging platforms like Signal and other independent options would be best to have as a backup, especially for more sensitive conversations. I also recommend being around your specific community more for your own goals, be it financial, political, and generally personal relationships. With that, I would wish the reader luck, cause it’s pretty rough out there.

If you enjoyed my write up, please share and comment below. My articles are free for anyone to read, but if you’re interested, I have a Ko-Fi you could use if you feel so inclined to donate. Also, my sources are listed below if you would like to look more into any specific topic I talked about.

Sources

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