As the liberal U.S. bosses escalate their attacks on tech giant Facebook (now rebranded as “Meta”), their pretense of “protecting democracy” against “domestic terrorism” is in fact an exercise of state control and capitalist dictatorship. As the U.S. accelerates toward more open fascism and global conflict, their rulers must first and foremost discipline their own class.
When whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked thousands of documents to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), she revealed what were mostly open secrets: Facebook’s sexist body-shaming of teenaged girls on Instagram; its open market for sex trafficking of women and children; its callous promotion of click-bait racism (CNN, 10/28). This is business as usual in the maximum-profit world of social media. What’s new is the liberal bosses’ urgency to crack down on billionaires like Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and force them to fall in line with the rulers’ agenda.
To understand the liberals’ move toward fascism, the natural response of capitalism in crisis, we must look at the deepening split within the U.S. ruling class. The Big Fascists, the finance capitalists representing the wealthiest bosses and most powerful multinational corporations, are the architects of an imperialist world order they’ve dominated since World War II. The Small Fascists, the opposition wing mobilized by Donald Trump, make most of their profits domestically and oppose higher taxes for the next big war. At stake is the future of U.S. imperialism.
With their empire in decline, the Big Fascists won’t give up world dominance without a fight—most likely with capitalist archrival China. To prepare for war, rulers turn to fascism—first to discipline and unify their own ranks, then to control the working class. To defend their system from internal and external threats, they must use every instrument in their state apparatus, including the internet and social media. The U.S. government investigations of Facebook are a step toward organizing all of society while building patriotism and nationalism for imperialist war. That is why Progressive Labor Party fights to win our class to reject fascism and fight for a communist alternative.
The hammer of discipline leads to fascism
While Zuckerberg leans toward the Big Fascists, his short-sighted individualism makes him unreliable. He donated $419 million to turn out the Democratic vote in 2020 (NY Post, 10/14) and funded the failed Newark charter school initiative, a pet project for the liberal bosses. But most of all, Zuckerberg is for Zuckerberg. He’s the controlling shareholder of a company valued at more than $900 billion. Facebook’s algorithms are engineered to generate maximum likes, shares, attention, and ad revenues. Given the racist, sexist essence of capitalist society, it was inevitable that racists and sexists—representing fascists big and small—would dominate the platform.
For the liberal U.S. rulers, reining in tech kingpins is nothing new. In 1998, under President Bill Clinton, the Department of Justice brought an antitrust suit against Microsoft to force Bill Gates into finance capital’s tent. Now social media are the ones under the gun. In the 2016 presidential races, the liberal bosses stood helpless as Trump expanded and weaponized his following through Twitter. They were infuriated when Facebook enabled Russian hackers to help throw Trump and the Small Fascists the election. They are determined not to let it happen again.
The Big Fascists’ quandary is that social media is much harder to tame than the old media of TV networks and  newspapers like the New York Times. After the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol in Washington, the rulers squeezed Twitter and Facebook to kick Trump off their platforms. From the evidence of last month’s Congressional hearing, where Haugen was the star witness, more aggressive moves are coming.
Social media hurts working class
Under capitalism, everything that might have been a social good, like being able to stay connected with people far away, turns into its opposite. As a tool for profit, social media:

• Generates racist violence For many workers, Facebook IS their internet—and their main source of news. Along with WhatsApp, it has fomented ethnic cleansing in Ethiopia (harvardpolitics.com, 4/19), violence against Muslim workers in India (Slate, 10/26), and genocide against the Rohingya working class in Myanmar, a campaign that “has led to murder, rape and forced migration” (New York Times, 11/6/18).
• Trafficks women workers In Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, Facebook knowingly serves as a market for enslavement: “the recruitment,...buying, and selling of domestic workers” (BBC, 9/23).
• Spreads anti-scientific lies and conspiracy theories “Facebook has facilitated the spread of misinformation [including anti-vaccination falsehoods], hate speech, and political polarization” (The Atlantic, 10/25). Regarding “combustible election misinformation,” a former employee noted that “we amplify them and give them broader distribution” (NYT, 10/26).
• Fuels sexism and alienation “Passive consumption of sexually objectifying content on social networking sites...result in lowered body satisfaction and self-esteem, particularly in women” (Frontiers in Psychology, 8/25). Teens who regularly use social media are three times more likely to feel socially isolated (NPR, 3/6/17).
• Represses fightback Following the kkkop murder of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, police used social media platforms to map, identify, and arrest protesters (The Verge, 10/11/16). They did the same after the summer 2020 rebellions. As fascism rises, militant workers and communists in particular will be targeted and attacked. Clearly, we cannot use online organizing to replace real-life base-building and immersion in workers’ lives.

Fascism and inter-imperialist rivalry
The imperialist bosses in China (and Russia) hold a big advantage over the Big Fascists in the U.S.: a unified ruling class that rigidly controls social media, and media in general.
So how could the U.S. bosses’ slap-down of these rotten social media be a danger for the international working class? The enemy of our enemy is not our ally. Just as the finance capital main wing fights to shut down Small Fascist content, they will also shut down any dissent at odds with their patriotic war agenda—including CHALLENGE. The attack on Facebook is a precedent for a much broader assault upon the working class.
From chaos comes fascism but dark night shall have its end
We cannot afford to be complacent. A weakened U.S. is not an automatic opportunity for the working class. Out of the bosses’ desperation comes fascism. Workers must arm ourselves with communist politics, a mass Progressive Labor Party, and a fighting red army. As we raise our red flag high, we raise it with CHALLENGE in hand! Only a communist revolution—the final conflict—will liberate our class. Long after the Zuckerbergs of the world and their billions have been ploughed under, it is a story we will tell ourselves, with communist media run by and for the working class.