Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) claimed on Sunday afternoon that “the right wing” has taken over the major social media platforms, citing the reversed TikTok ban in the United States to back her argument.
TikTok’s availability in the U.S. was briefly halted on Sunday before getting restored after the platform reached a deal with President-elect Donald Trump, with TikTok specifically thanking Trump for standing up for the First Amendment as well as “arbitrary censorship.” Ocasio-Cortez suggested that social media companies typically do not thank specific politicians and that TikTok’s decision to thank Trump was “signaling” the platform is “privately collaborating” with the president-elect and his administration.
“Now, I want you all to put all the pieces together, because what this effectively means is that every mass social media platform in the United States has been taken over by the right wing,” Ocasio-Cortez said in an Instagram story on Sunday afternoon. “With the exception of Bluesky, but Bluesky’s still very small, relatively.”
Bluesky is a social media platform that launched in February 2023 after Tesla CEO Elon Musk purchased Twitter, which he rebranded as X. Since the 2024 election, Bluesky has seen a spike in users, with Ocasio-Cortez becoming the platform’s first user to hit 1 million followers.
The “Squad” Democrat went on to state how Musk “took over Twitter” and that it is “pretty obvious” the platform has had its algorithm reworked to “boost right wing content.” She then pointed to how Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who owns both Facebook and Instagram, has recently said Meta would drop its fact-checkers, which she characterized as “bending the knee to Trump.”
Ocasio-Cortez also claimed that, ahead of Trump’s inauguration on Monday, the U.S. is on “the eve of an authoritarian administration” and that the changes to social media reflect “what 21st century fascism is starting to look like.” She then pointed to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and how he leads Hungary to see how the Trump administration would try to “control” the media, as Republicans “really model themselves” after Orban.
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On Saturday, the congresswoman recalled how the possibility of banning TikTok was brought up in Congress last year due to it being “a national security issue.” However, she argued “what was presented” to lawmakers voting to ban TikTok was not “compelling” nor “convincing.”
Trump has pitched the possibility of keeping TikTok operational in the U.S. through a joint venture, with the U.S. having a 50% ownership position.
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