Prometheus Unhinged

Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid Wednesday 25^th February 2026

Martyn Jones: Welcome to this week’s In The Frame, brought to you by the BBC, TVG, ETB, RTVE, NRD, CNN, S4C, FT Weekend and RTE.

This week’s panel consists of Annie Tusk, senior correspondent at The Guardian, Sir Afilonius Rex, Jilly Penn, columnist of the Financial Times, Martyn Jones of Goodstrat, the highly respected Alice Sauzgatillo of Spain’s RTVE, the veteran great, King Larry, and Juliette Brioche of LeCanard Enchainé.

Our theme for today is centred on the promise and realities of social media, including LinkedIn, X, Facebook, Truth Social, BlueSky, and many more.

My first question goes to Sir Afilonius. Sir Afi, what, in your opinion, are the key differences between the promise of social media in terms of freedom, liberty, and democracy, and the present realities of companies such as X, Facebook, and Truth Social?

Sir Afilonius: [Leaning forward, smiling thinly, the kind of smile that promises no mercy]

Let me begin with an anecdote, as all proper curmudgeons do.

Back in the salad days, say, 2006, when Zuckerberg still looked like a startled undergraduate, and Twitter was just a quirky way to broadcast what you had for lunch, social media sold itself as Prometheus unbound. Fire for the mortals! Democratized speech, flattened hierarchies, the end of gatekeepers. No more bowing to newspaper barons or television commissars. Every voice equal, every idea a spark that could ignite revolution, connection, truth. The promise was intoxicating liberty reborn in code, democracy rebooted pixel by pixel. We were told the network would set us free.

Fast-forward to 2026, and what do we have? Not liberation, but a new feudalism with better UX.

Look at X, once the chaotic town square, now a gilded echo chamber owned by a single man who plays emperor with the block button and the algorithm. Dissent? Shadow-banned. Inconvenient facts? Deboosted or drowned in a sea of blue-check astroturf. Truth Social? A digital bunker for the paranoid, where “free speech” means speech that flatters the Dear Leader and his flock. Facebook? A retirement home for boomers and a surveillance mall for everyone else, where your data is harvested, your feed curated by invisible priests, and your outrage monetised in neat quarterly reports.

Annie: And what about platforms like LinkedIn?

Sir Afilonius: I’m glad you named LinkedIn, the most insidious of the lot. Professional networking, they called it. A place to “build your brand,” “connect meaningfully,” “share thought leadership.” What it actually became is corporate Versailles: a performance space where everyone is simultaneously courtier and monarch, posting humblebrags disguised as insights, virtue-signalling career moves, and performative grief for whichever cause is trending. Step out of line, criticise the company line, question the DEI ritual, or (God forbid) mock the latest jargon fad, and the polite knives come out. Connections severed. Endorsements rescinded. Invitations to “coffee chats” quietly withdrawn. It’s totalitarianism with a smile and a recruiter emoji. The panopticon wears a suit and tie.

The authoritarian tics are everywhere, and they’re not bugs; they’re features.

Martyn Jones: Such as?

Sir Afilonius: Such as:

• Algorithms that reward rage and conformity over nuance (because anger keeps you scrolling, and agreement keeps the advertisers happy).
• Shadow moderation that disappears you without trial or appeal.
• Terms of service longer than the Magna Carta, granting owners god-like discretion to silence, amplify, or erase.
• The cult of metrics: followers as vassals, likes as tribute, virality as divine favour.
• The chilling effect of self-censorship, people pre-emptively softening edges, hedging opinions, or simply shutting up because they know the machine punishes deviation.

We were promised chains broken. Instead, we got new ones, forged in silicon and gamified for maximum compliance. Liberty has given way to surveillance capitalism, where free speech is limited to what is profitable or acceptable.  Real dissent, the kind that actually threatens power, isn’t banned outright (too obvious); it’s algorithmically starved, socially ostracised, or buried under an avalanche of sponsored content.

Prometheus didn’t steal fire to hand it to venture capitalists who then ration it through paywalls, blue ticks, and behavioural nudges. He didn’t envision a world where “community guidelines” function as secular blasphemy laws, enforced by underpaid moderators in Manila and billionaires in Palo Alto.

So yes, the promise was radiant. The reality is a glittering authoritarianism, smiling, addictive, and oh-so-professional.

LinkedIn may not have stormtroopers, but it has HR departments that do the same job more efficiently and with less paperwork.

The panel can debate definitions of “deliberate” all day. I’ll settle for one: deliberate is recognising the con for what it is, logging off when the mask slips, and refusing to play courtier in someone else’s digital kingdom.

Martyn Jones: Jilly, what do you make of the authoritarian and hypocritical Elon Musk and his involvement in social media and “arranging”?

Jilly Penn: [Adjusting her glasses, with a sharp, knowing grin]

My take is this: Elon Musk struts about as the self-anointed messiah of free speech, buying Twitter for $44 billion in 2022, rebranding it X, and promising a digital utopia where ideas flow unchecked. “Free speech absolutist,” he crowed, vowing to dismantle the “woke mind virus” and let truth prevail. Fast-forward to 2026, and the emperor’s new clothes are threadbare hypocrisy.

Authoritarian? Absolutely. Musk runs X like his personal autocracy. Critics get shadow-banned or suspended. Remember the 2024 purge of journalists slamming Israel’s Gaza campaign? Or how he sued Media Matters for exposing ads next to neo-Nazi drivel, then roped in Republican AGs to pile on? That’s not free speech; that’s SLAPP suits to bankrupt dissenters. He bows to real dictators, complying with Turkey’s censorship in 2023, India’s content takedowns in 2025, while railing against Brazil’s election safeguards as “tyranny.” Hypocrite much?

His arrogance is galactic. Algorithm tweaks force-feed his own rants (209 million followers can’t be wrong, right?), while gutting moderation lets hate speech and deepfakes flourish, hello, AI-generated porn scandals via Grok. Financially, it’s a dumpster fire: X’s value cratered by 70% by 2025, advertisers fled, yet Musk played the whiney runtish victim, begging users for “upbeat” vibes in late 2024. Meanwhile, he pumps millions into Trump PACs, turning X into a MAGA megaphone, spreading election lies and doxxing foes.

Prometheus? More like Icarus with a rocket. Musk didn’t liberate speech; he weaponised it for ego and empire. If this is “arranging” the future, manipulating platforms, politics, and public discourse, we’re all paying the price in eroded trust and amplified chaos.

Martyn Jones: Over to you, Annie, or perhaps King Larry for the veteran view?

King Larry: [leaning back, gravelly chuckle, old-school journalist squint]Listen, folks, I’ve been watching these platforms since they were garage dreams and now they’re empires run by emperors who think they’re gods. Facebook? Zuckerberg owns it lock, stock, and soul. Meta’s his personal fiefdom, $1.3 trillion market cap last I checked, and he still holds majority voting control with those Class B shares that give him Superman voting power. He can fire the board, rewrite the rules, and decide what billions see every day. Free speech? Only if it doesn’t threaten the quarterly earnings call. Remember when he apologised for the Cambridge Analytica mess, then quietly tightened the screws on political ads and “misinformation” while letting election-denial farms run wild until the backlash hit? Hypocrisy with a hoodie. He preaches connection while turning loneliness into a profit centre. Ownership means control, and Zuck controls the narrative harder than any state broadcaster ever did. Fuck the Zuck!

LinkedIn’s the same song, different verse. Microsoft bought it in 2016 for $26 billion in cash, and it’s been Nadella’s quiet cash cow ever since. No flashy Musk-style drama, just cold corporate ownership. They own your resume, your network, and your carefully curated professional persona. Step too far outside the approved script, say something too spicy about layoffs, union-busting, or the latest ESG theatre, and suddenly your “visibility” drops, recruiters ghost you, and that nice “People You May Know” suggestion vanishes. It’s not censorship with a capital C; it’s algorithmic suffocation dressed as “community standards.” Microsoft owns the platform, so Microsoft decides what’s professional. And, these days, professional means compliant.

Both of ’em? Ownership isn’t just equity, it’s the power to shape what you say, who hears it, and how much it costs you in mental bandwidth. We traded barons of print for barons of bytes. Same game, shinier servers.

Your move, Juliette. What’s the French take on these digital feudal lords?

Juliette Brioche: [lighting a cigarette with theatrical flair, exhaling slowly, Parisian drawl dripping disdain]

Mon cher panel, let us be brutally French about this farce.

These platforms, Facebook, LinkedIn, X, promise the liberté of the Enlightenment, yet deliver the surveillance of the Ancien Régime with better lighting. Zuckerberg? A boy-king who bought an empire and now rules it like Louis XIV in a hoodie. He owns the algorithm, the data, the very architecture of attention. Every post, every like, every quiet unfollow feeds the machine that decides who is seen and who is erased. He lectures on “community” while his Meta empire profits from division, from the slow poison of comparison and outrage. Hypocrisy? Non, c’est du capitalisme pur, smiling while tightening the noose.

LinkedIn is worse because it pretends to be civilised. Microsoft owns it, yes, Nadella’s quiet vassal state, but the real tyranny is internal. It is the perfect panopticon for the bourgeoisie: smile for the camera, post your “journey,” applaud the corporate gospel, or vanish into irrelevance. One ironic remark about endless “synergies” or performative allyship, and poof, your network contracts like a nervous sphincter. Ownership here is not just shares; it is the power to enforce conformity under the guise of professionalism. In France, we call that la pensée unique dressed in business casual.

And the grand illusion? They all claim to democratize discourse while centralising control in fewer hands than Versailles had courtiers. Musk screams “free speech” as he plays censor-in-chief; Zuck preaches connection as he harvests souls; Microsoft whispers efficiency while demanding obedience. The promise was a republic of ideas. The reality is a collection of digital absolutist monarchies, each with its own Sun King.

We French know what happens when power concentrates without accountability: revolution brews. Perhaps the next one will not be in the streets, but in mass log-offs. One can dream.

À vous, Annie. What does the Guardian’s resident idealist make of this digital ancien régime?

Annie Tusk: [sitting up straight, voice measured but edged with quiet fury, the classic Guardian tone, principled, probing, unflinching]

Thank you, Juliette. You’ve captured the aristocratic rot at the heart of these platforms perfectly. But let’s add the democratic deficit, because that’s what truly stings.

We were sold social media as the great equaliser: a space where the powerless could speak truth to power, organise, expose, and connect across borders. Instead, ownership has concentrated in the hands of a handful of billionaires who treat these networks as private estates. Zuckerberg at Meta/Facebook, absolute voting control, endless data extraction, and a moderation regime that’s opaque, inconsistent, and conveniently flexible when it suits shareholders or political winds. One day, it’s cracking down on “misinformation” to appease regulators; the next, it’s amplifying divisive content because engagement equals ad revenue. The hypocrisy is baked in: he talks community while engineering addiction and polarisation.

LinkedIn under Microsoft? It’s subtler but no less controlling. Nadella’s empire doesn’t need Musk’s bombast; it enforces corporate orthodoxy through quiet algorithmic nudges and “professional” norms that punish anything too raw, too critical, too human. Question: endless-growth rhetoric or call out greenwashing in a post? Your reach evaporates. It’s soft authoritarianism, conformity disguised as career advice. Ownership here means the power to define what counts as “professional,” and that definition always bends toward the status quo.

The deeper scandal is how this centralisation erodes the very promise of a plural public square. When a few men (and yes, they’re mostly men) own the pipes, the algorithms, and the rules, democracy doesn’t flourish; it withers. We see it in election interference scandals, in the amplification of far-right noise, and in the suppression of inconvenient journalism. These aren’t neutral tools; they’re power structures with trillion-dollar incentives to keep us scrolling, compliant, and divided.

The illusion persists because we still need these platforms to reach audiences. But need isn’t consent. It’s time we demand real accountability: transparency in algorithms, genuine user ownership of data, decentralised alternatives that aren’t just another billionaire’s playground. Until then, we’re not citizens in a digital republic, we’re tenants on someone else’s land, paying rent in attention and outrage.

Over to you, King Larry, or perhaps Sir Afilonius for one last devastating bon mot?

Martyn Jones: Alas, our script comes to an end here. Maybe if there is interest, I will expand and conclude this long-read article.

Many thanks for reading.

Many thanks for reading.

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