We Must Defend and Build a True Opposition Media

Donald Trump is moving our country at breakneck speed towards personalist rule. “Woke Corporate Capitalism” has given way to a “parade of CEOs visiting Trump in Florida.” When in the terrifying hours after the January 6 insurrection, Twitter and Facebook banned Trump and hosting companies banned conservative social media site Parler, today Twitter’s owner is a member of the Trump administration and Facebook’s CEO has kissed the ring. Many media outlets who took a more overtly adversarial tone towards the first Trump administration have taken to normalizing his unprecedented and indefensible behavior, either out of fear of retaliation or a perception that their prior approach will generate as much revenue as it did the first time, or both. Some, like the owner of the LA Times, see a greener pasture in embracing Trumpism. Others, like Politico, have been acquired by Trumpist true believers.

It is imperative that we establish a large voice for oppositional media. Every authoritarian knows the importance of crowding out all dissenting voices, through a mix of magnifying their own and suppressing their critics. One common misconception is that the sole or even the main way they accomplish this is through direct censorship. In fact, the tools can be quite varied. In Alberto Fujimori’s regime in Peru in the 1990s, intelligence officer Vladimiro Montesinos made extensive use of bribes. As the political scientist Xavier Márquez put it in Non-Democratic Politics:

One of the striking findings uncovered by analysis of Montesinos’ careful records was the importance he placed on controlling television; bribes paid to TV stations were more than a hundred times the amount paid to politicians, for the simple reason that information that became public via television was the most powerful means of mobilizing opposition. (page 141)

A mix of strategies is always necessary. For the largest media channels, an authoritarian may nationalize them outright, seek to shutter them and replace them with their state-run equivalent, or use legal and extra-legal threats to make them hesitant to be openly critical. Online platforms require a different strategy entirely; while Venezuela or China cannot nationalize the biggest online platforms, they can “pollute the information commons and monitor potentially dangerous people” (page 141) to render them unsafe spaces for coordinating opposition.

In the case of China and regimes that take similar strategies, since the volume of online posts makes it quite impossible to stop all criticism per se, they focus on suppressing criticism that specifically encourages “collective expression.” In short, the sort of expressions that are likely to lead to actual mobilization are targeted, while expressing frustration in even very blunt and vulgar terms is allowed.

The biggest internet platforms in the world are run by companies incorporated in the United States, and the largest share of their revenue by far comes from users that live here and advertisers that spend here. An American authoritarian government therefore has many more options than even the Chinese government has to apply pressure to these platforms. While Elon Musk’s platform was always the smallest of the top social media sites, Zuckerberg’s rapid moves to show submission to Trump is much more alarming. The two together make for a powerful channel of regime propaganda, and “voluntary” moderation on behalf of the regime. In spite of all the fanfare around Project 2025 and the learning that has occurred between the first and second Trump terms, I do not think anyone in his administration is sophisticated enough to take a Chinese-style approach to censoring social media. I do believe that Meta itself has the institutional knowledge to do so.

An opposition must oppose. We must protect media spaces with large audiences where no-holds-barred criticism of the Trump regime is shouted from the rooftops. Here at Liberal Currents, we will continue to do just that. We are joined by a wide variety of niche publications who are just as committed in their adversarial stance. The problem is precisely that we are niche. Montesinos would not have paid a penny for any of us; he didn’t even bother with the newspapers of his day, focusing mainly on television. Those of us willing to take this stance must grow larger, much larger, seizing the market opportunity abandoned by the now-timid larger institutions of media. 

But we must also exert pressure on larger institutions than our own, and on politicians. The way that this is accomplished is twofold. First, though we may be smaller than a New York Times, or a CNN, if our audience includes people who work at those companies, we may be able to persuade them to change what they are covering and how. Second, small publications since at least the days of the original blogosphere have formed a kind of farm system for stories that potentially get picked up by larger outlets. This can be either because some people employed by the latter keep an eye on the minor publications to see if anything worth covering has shown up there, or because a story from niche publications has gone viral among a large audience, making it too salient for most big outlets to ignore.

To that end, sympathetic spaces such as Bluesky are crucial. Bluesky as it currently exists is vulnerable at the level of governance, so we can’t assume it will remain useful forever. But it is useful today and we must use what we can today. Beyond that, we need to encourage the users there to continue to keep channels of communication open with people who do not use it; to send articles written by opposition media to friends, family, and colleagues over email, group messaging, or whatever channel you might use. Keeping opposition voices accessible among at least a third of the voting age population is critical to avoiding the typical competitive authoritarian scenario.

We will continue to do our part, here at Liberal Currents. If you would like to participate in that, please pitch us at writers@liberalcurrents.com, or support us. Beyond the Liberal Currents community, support others like us, start your own, reach out to your elected officials regularly and build relationships with journalists at big news organizations. All of us must do what we can.

Below is a non-exhaustive list of publications that, at the time of this writing, have remained adversarial in their stance:

• ProPublica
• Mother Jones
• The Philadelphia Inquirer
• Rolling Stone
• HuffPost
• The New Republic
• The American Prospect
• Talking Points Memo
• Dissent
• The Nation
• The UnPopulist
• The Bulwark
• The Contrarian
• 404 Media
• More Perfect Union
• Techdirt
• The Appeal
• Lawfare
• The Handbasket
• Teen Vogue

Featured image is Censorship Board