Martyn Rhisiart Jones and the Good Strat Editorial Team, Madrid, Sunday 29th March 2026

Have you noticed,  and I know you have, because if you hadn’t you wouldn’t be reading this, you’d be doom-scrolling some algorithmically approved cat video while the world burns in 4K,  how the very thing that was sold to us as the great democratising miracle has turned into the most efficient instrument of political control since the Stasi upgraded from index cards to spreadsheets?

I’m talking about social media, that glittering cluster of shiny new panopticons run by a rogues’ gallery of superficially democratising shysters, grifters, totalitarian fluffers and liberal authoritarians who wouldn’t recognise actual democracy if it turned up at their door wearing a flat cap and demanding a union ballot. Facebook, X, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Instagram, Medium, TruthSocial,  the whole rancid bouquet. They laude “business interests” the way medieval kings once lauded God: as an unarguable, mystical force that must never be questioned, while anything that actually threatens their profits, their power or their carefully curated public image gets memory-holed faster than a Trotskyist at a Stalinist dinner party.

And don’t give me any of that “both sides” bollocks. This isn’t left versus right; this is capital versus the rest of us, with the owners playing both teams like particularly cynical croupiers. Mark Zuckerberg,  that dead-eyed, permanently startled lizard in a grey hoodie,  sits in his Hawaiian bunker plotting the next phase of the Metaverse while his “fact-checkers” (a private army of hall monitors with better dental plans) decide which inconvenient truths about surveillance capitalism or election meddling get to exist today. Rumours have swirled for years that he’s been in and out of the White House like a particularly ambitious intern, offering to “moderate” content in exchange for not being broken up by antitrust regulators. Complaints from whistle-blowers, Frances Haugen, and the Cambridge Analytica lot paint a picture of a man who views democracy as just another user-engagement metric to be optimised. Suspicions? That Facebook’s real product isn’t connection, it’s control: selling your outrage to the highest bidder, whether that bidder wears a red tie or a blue one, so long as the ad revenue keeps flowing.

Then there’s Elon Musk, the self-styled “free speech absolutist” who bought Twitter (sorry, X,  because rebranding is what visionaries do when the share price is tanking) and immediately started playing favourites like a Victorian mill owner deciding which workers get Christmas off. One minute he’s ranting about government censorship; the next he’s grovelling to advertisers, tweaking the algorithm so that pro-Musk content floats to the top like particularly pungent effluent while actual critics find themselves shadow-banned, ratio’d or simply disappeared. Rumours abound about his little dinners with world leaders,  Starlink deals here, regulatory sweeteners there,  while the man simultaneously cosies up to authoritarian regimes and American politicians who’ll do his bidding on tax breaks and space contracts. Capitalist interests? He is the capitalist interest. Tesla pumps, Dogecoin pumps, government subsidies pump, and anyone pointing out that the emperor’s new clothes are made of orbital debris gets labelled a “hater” by the very platform he owns. It’s not free speech; it’s speech that’s free for him and expensive for everyone else.

And the others? LinkedIn, Microsoft’s beige little surveillance state for LinkedIn-profiled careerists, quietly removes posts about union-busting or gig-economy precarity because nothing must interrupt the sacred flow of “personal branding.” Bluesky, the great decentralised hope cooked up by the same people who gave us the original Twitter, already showing the same cliquey moderation creep that turns “community guidelines” into a polite euphemism for “don’t upset the venture capitalists.” Instagram,  Meta’s visual opium den,  shadow-bans anything that might make the beauty-industrial complex or the endless scroll of aspirational consumption look a bit, well, shit. Medium, where every third “thought leader” is either a grifter or an AI, quietly buries anything too left-field because heaven forbid the paying subscribers get ideas above their station. TruthSocial? Trump’s personal cry chamber, where the only thing more heavily moderated than criticism of the dear leader is the truth. All of them, every last one, superficially democratising shysters who turned the public square into a shopping mall with bouncers.

The trick,  and it’s a beautiful, evil trick,  is that they’ve convinced us this is our fault. We’re too polarised, too extreme, too prone to “misinformation.” So the platforms must step in as neutral arbiters, guided only by the pure, disinterested hand of “community standards” and the invisible hand of the market. Meanwhile, the owners jet between Davos and Washington, trading favours with politicians the way normal people trade Pokémon cards. Rumours of back-channel meetings where Zuckerberg or Musk or whoever’s running Bluesky this week promise to dial down criticism of a particular war, a particular bailout, a particular billionaire tax dodge. Complaints from inside the machine,  leaked memos, and former employees who suddenly find themselves unemployable speak of explicit policies to protect “partner” brands and “key stakeholders.” Suspicions that the whole edifice is designed not to foster debate but to contain it, to fragment it, to turn potential solidarity into endless scrolling rage so we never quite organise against the people who actually own the algorithm.

It’s the same old story, really. The barons used to own the newspapers, the railways, and the mines. Now they own the means of discourse itself. And just like the old barons, they’ll tell you it’s all for your own good. “We’re empowering voices!” they coo, while the voices that say “maybe you shouldn’t have quite so much power” get algorithmically disappeared. Real criticism of the platforms themselves? Vanished. Questions about data harvesting, about the mental-health experiment we’re all unwitting subjects in, about the way these companies have become de facto arbiters of truth for billions of people? Labelled “conspiracy theory” and buried under a pile of sponsored content from the very corporations doing the burying.

I’m not saying any of this is new. Power always finds a way to launder itself through the latest technology. But there’s something particularly galling about watching the same people who once preached “information wants to be free” now charging rent on the information, policing the conversation, and then having the sheer brass neck to call themselves “liberal.” Liberal authoritarians. Totalitarian fluffers. The lot of them. They’ve taken the dream of a connected world and turned it into the most sophisticated system of control capitalism has yet devised,  one that doesn’t need secret police because we’ve all volunteered to carry the tracking device in our pockets and pay monthly for the privilege.

So next time you see some billionaire tech bro on a stage somewhere telling you how social media is “the marketplace of ideas,” remember: the marketplace has a bouncer, the ideas have a price tag, and the only thing that’s truly free is the contempt these bastards have for the rest of us. They can censor, cancel, shadow-ban and platform-wash all they like. But some of us still remember what actual free speech sounds like. And it doesn’t come with a terms-of-service agreement attached.

Many thanks for reading.