Even as Joe Biden takes a fire extinguisher to the still-burning embers of the Trump presidency, the dividing lines of the future are already being drawn. Several of Trump’s children and extended family are actively planning political careers. Ivanka is said to be eyeing a senatorial career ahead of a future presidential run, but it’s Donald Jr.’s role as ‘a meme general in the meme wars’ that is most ominous.

The Republican Party is increasingly the party of the conspiracy theory and the dog whistle. While this has been true for some time, it has intensified around and under Trump. Most of all, they are the party of the internet. This may seem odd for a grouping largely made up of septuagenarians, but in other ways it makes sense.

The primary goal of the Fox News project – and before it, the right-wing shock jock station – is to convince the viewer that the reality they see around themselves is not true. This gradual erosion of trust and truth has resulted in countless examples of parents – always parents – completely twisted beyond recognition. There’s no other word for it than brainwashed.

Those on the right talk about the political elite and media bubbles. But the reality is that they are the bubble. Consumers of right-wing media are consistently less-informed than those of more mainstream outlets like CNN and NPR. While it’s no use pretending that this divorce between fact and fiction wasn’t present in the Obama years – indeed, hyper-partisanship has its roots in the 1990s – it has been intensified by the explosion of social media.

Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp are increasingly the main news source for those of us living in the west. With that comes a sifting effect; your news is delivered to you by your friends and those you choose to follow. You see what you want to see – and you don’t see what you don’t want to see. As the effect intensifies, you end up not even being aware of what you don’t want to see. In these spaces, there are no independent fact checkers, no editorial guidelines, no sense of journalistic duty or integrity – just men and women with a smartphone.  

Trump rightly saw social media as his biggest weapon. Through Twitter and Facebook – particularly Twitter, although Trump’s Facebook page was the biggest single media source in the 2020 election -he had a direct line to millions in a way that no other has had before. One of the innovations of Nazi Germany was propaganda through mass media – millions tuned in on their radios to hear Hitler speak. But for Trump, every single thought was tweeted and every single conspiracy, lie, and hoax retweeted. Misinformation flooded our newsfeeds and our minds. Fact checkers fought in vain to research his claims, but it was too late; he’d already moved onto the next one. Goebbels had the Big Lie; Trump had the unstoppable machine gun of little lies. We all knew he was lying, but the reinforcement of lies is a powerful thing.

Trump is now permanently banned from Twitter and Facebook, and like night follows day the new favourite word of right-wing hacks like Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley is ‘Orwellian’. Hawley’s suggestion that his losing a book deal after encouraging a coup d’état is ‘cancel culture’ and Orwellian is particularly amusing. Included in the Bill of Rights is not the right to have your book published by Simon & Schuster. These people are still free to lie and deceive, but freedom of speech is not freedom from consequence. Performative it may be – but private companies have no obligation to host you and your ideas.

And so, led by Five-Star Meme General Donald Trump Jr. comes the right-wing assault on Big Tech – and naturally, Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is invoked by people who’ve never read it. Trump Jr.’s newfound hatred of Big Tech – had he ever mentioned that phrase before Twitter started slapping milquetoast warnings on Trump’s tweets? – has arisen only because Big Tech has now got in his way. What’s a meme general without a battlefield to fight on?

Because that’s what’s truly Orwellian. Orwell, hateful of totalitarianism and untruth in all its forms, feared the radio as a modern conveyer belt of propaganda fed directly into our homes. Social media is today’s radio without the safety rails. There’s no filter, no up or down, and complete anonymity if you want it. Devoid of context and responsibility, misinformation floats ready to latch onto an unwitting victim – and then to be sent on and shared, infecting even more. What is ‘going viral’ if not infecting the masses? What is a meme if not a repeated claim or idea, true or not? Does it matter whether it’s true if it’s funny, if it sounds true, if people you like are sharing it, if you’re sharing it ‘ironically’?

The idea that social media companies banning ‘right-wing thought’ is Orwellian – as claimed by Donald Trump Jr., prominent right-wing leader, on Twitter – is itself Orwellian. Put more simply, it is a lie. Donald Trump should never have been allowed an untrammelled platform to propagandise for the last five years. Twitter cowered under special exemptions protecting world leaders before banning him before his term ended anyway. Truth and reality are not, as Mark Zuckerberg believes, a choose-your-own-adventure game. Facebook and Twitter should not be a marketplace in which snake-oil salesmen compete to pitch their wares to weary and confused travellers, free from oversight and consequence. The truth is the truth, and it matters.

The real issue is not whether Twitter is too powerful. The idea that the company has silenced a president is laughable; a president can walk out of the Oval Office and find tens of cameras and journalists swarming them within minutes, eager to broadcast their every word. Conventional presidents typically use their press secretaries or release statements when they want the world to know something. Twitter can never take that away.

No, the real issue is the utter failure of social media companies to reign in misinformation, lies, and abuse. The owners of these companies do not care. They answer only to their shareholders. Hillary Clinton has commented that negotiating with Mark Zuckerberg is like negotiating with a foreign power. If Facebook is a nation then it is a nation of 2.7 billion. If Twitter is a nation it is a nation of 330 million. Not all of these users will be susceptible to misinformation, but how many is too many?

We haven’t yet worked out social media’s effect on society, politics, and public discourse. Arriving like a wave in the last ten years, we’ve been enveloped too quickly and too comprehensively to truly understand it. While the Trump experiment has finally ended, the contributing factors aren’t going away. As we drift further apart from each other, the baseline of fundamental truth is beginning to ebb away – and that’s what Orwell was truly afraid of.