Following the inauguration of Donald Trump as the 47th American president in January 2025, a noticeable change has seeped through the country, predominantly on the internet. As tech billionaires Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Shou Chew (TikTok), Sundar Pichai (Google), and Elon Musk (X) sat front and center as Trump was sworn into office, behind closed doors massive changes were being put into effect on each of their respective platforms.
TikTok
In a believed political stunt, TikTok went down in America for approximately 24 hours as the result of an over two-year battle, coming back online shortly after the shut off with the message, “As a result of Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” Despite this sentiment, Trump had little to do with the reinstatement of TikTok, seeing that he had not even been inaugurated yet. In the days that followed, users were quick to point out a noticeable difference with the app; much of the political content that the app hosted that leaned to the left has seemingly been censored, with users unable to access results to common searches such as “#democrat” and “Donald Trump rigged election.” Instead, users were met with a surprising message that read, “No results found. This content may be associated with behaviour or content that violates our guidelines.” Although these searches seemed to be blocked on the app, searches that were more right-wing, such as “#republican”, showed results just as they had before the ban.
Another user, in a now-viral video, pointed out that by blocking accounts such as Instagram, Meta and X, their feeds seemed to be restored to a more tailored ‘For You’ page. In further research, the user found that under the ‘Terms of Service’, the app is not allowed to market ads towards users who have the owner of those ads blocked. Many have pointed out other red flags such as restricted live streaming, restricted direct messaging of certain content, and ‘propaganda’, noted by both users and journalists.
Instagram has, unfortunately, suffered a similar fate to TikTok. Many users pointed out, following Mr. Trump’s entrance to the White House, that they were automatically following his new presidential account, the vice president’s account, and in some cases, the first lady’s account. Meta attempted to curb the concerns of users by releasing a statement that stated that anyone following the 46th president, Joe Biden, would automatically have their following transferred over. Although a plausible explanation, eagle-eyed researchers pointed out that this was a new account created, and not just a transfer of ownership. Many celebrities, including Gracie Abrams and Demi Lovato, posted publicly that even after attempting to unfollow these accounts, they would mysteriously be refollowing them moments later.
Like TikTok, many terms, including “Democrat” and “Democrats”, were reported to have their posts hidden from users. When searched, the message that appeared was, “We’ve hidden these results. Results for the term you searched for may contain sensitive content.” On the other hand, terms such as Republican garnered around 3.3 million search results. Although this issue has been fixed, Meta did not provide an official explanation.
Facebook may be the most concerning technological redesign. Following the 2016 election, a rare joint senate hearing in 2018 saw Mark Zuckerberg admit that Facebook had not done enough to prevent its site from being used to incite harm, which he cited as fake news, foreign election interference, hate speech, and data privacy. As a promise to be better, Zuckerberg then committed to hiring around 200,000 people to work on “security and content review.”
In an ironic but somewhat predictable turn of events, a day after his appearance at Donald Trump’s Inauguration, Zuckerberg announced that he would be firing all fact-checkers to “restore free expression.” The move was highly denounced by Facebook users with many in the comments expressing disappointment, including comments such as one from user @srwahlin, who wrote, “…money seems more important to you than integrity.” Weeks later, Meta reinstated Trump’s platforms on their sites.
X
Although little has been remodelled in the past year on X since the major changes brought following its acquisition by Elon Musk, an algorithm tweak has drawn concern from users. On Jan. 4th, Musk posted to his account that “too much negativity” was being pushed on the platform, and that algorithmic changes were to be put in place to change this. Although a seemingly harmless change, X users were quick to point out issues with the timing, such as Ed Krassenstein, an AI expert on the platform, who wrote, “Elon Musk just announced that X will start penalizing negativity and propping up posts that are positive. This is definitely interesting timing, given the fact that X essentially rewarded negativity when Biden was president but is shifting to penalize negativity under Trump.” Following a 2024 study that found Musk was tweaking the algorithm to boost both his posts and Republican-related content, users should expect to be shown more right-wing themes than anything else. X also does not have fact checkers, so the content presented to users is a Musk-led free-for-all.
As changes on these platforms and others continue to be quietly implemented, tech billionaires hide their political influence in plain sight. Be aware of propaganda and censorship in this new era of social media, and use these sites with a sense of wariness.