the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
the Voice of
The Communist League of Revolutionary Workers–Internationalist
“The emancipation of the working class will only be achieved by the working class itself.”
— Karl Marx
May 11, 2025
We translated the following article from one that appeared in Lutte de Classe #248, published by comrades of the French Trotskyist organization, Lutte Ouvrière, May 2025.
“He’s a great guy, he saved freedom of speech,” said Donald Trump about Elon Musk, in gratitude for the tens of millions of dollars Musk poured into his presidential campaign. The boss of X is indeed putting a lot of energy into presenting himself as the defender of absolute freedom of speech. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the boss of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc.), who conveniently rallied behind Trump, have announced that they will remove moderators from their social networks. These workers are responsible for monitoring content posted by users and deleting the accounts of those who violate the rules laid down by the platforms.
In the world of social media, expression seems free, accessible via cell phones: no need for start-up capital or investment in sophisticated equipment. This de-materialization is presented as the foundation of a democracy that is absent from traditional media. But behind the appearances and the love of freedom proclaimed by the wealthy owners of social networks, there are hard cash interests and the intent to influence opinion, an intention shared by all capitalists who invest in any kind of media.
At the heart of social media, we often forget, there is a very heavy infrastructure. The sharing of information and data around the world, on which the internet and social media are based, relies in particular on the laying of underwater cables. Today, nearly 450 cables criss-cross the planet, totaling 1.2 million kilometers, nearly thirty times the earth’s circumference.
The ships that lay this equipment on the ocean floor belong to large corporations, which are the only ones capable of making such an investment. In September 2021, a consortium formed by Orange, Google, and Facebook financed an extension of the world’s largest cable: 45,000 kilometers between Europe, Africa, and Asia. Just recently, Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, announced a multi-billion-dollar project: a 50,000-kilometer cable. This equipment, which connects the entire world and carries 99% of global communications, belongs, like any other merchandise, to those who pay for it, i.e., the multinationals that install it.
And when it’s not ocean-floor cables, it’s satellites, such as the Starlink network, launched in 2018 by Elon Musk and currently being rolled out.
The networks also need data centers, huge buildings containing servers on which data from around the world is stored. There are around 7,000 of them worldwide, including 1,200 in the United States and around 300 in France. These storage centers require enormous amounts of electricity: their consumption is expected to triple by 2030, according to McKinsey. In Europe, this could represent up to 5% of the continent’s total consumption. In the United States, data center projects launched by digital giants represent 92 gigawatts, nearly half of the country’s domestic consumption of electricity.
We should also take into account the human labor required to implement these means of production: from engineers constantly designing new algorithms and devising new functions, to the low-paid workers in poor countries who are responsible for training new artificial intelligence models.
None of this could come about without significant resources. Private ownership of the means of production gives their owners exclusive use of them. This fundamental law of capitalism applies to intellectual production as well as industrial production. As a result, those who invest in the infrastructure necessary for social media and the internet in general have exclusive use of it and use it to defend their interests.
In reality, the freedom of expression promised by digital capitalists is first and foremost a highly profitable business. Anyone can create a social media account for free, but in doing so, they agree to allow the platform to exploit their personal data. In other words, the platform will use the data it collects when the user is active, either for its own purposes or to sell to other companies. Platforms know exactly how much time users spend on social media, what they have viewed, who they have interacted with, the type of videos they watch most often, and more. This data is purchased by companies, which can then tailor their marketing, send targeted advertising, and influence purchases.
An entire commercial strategy is deployed on social media to keep users connected for as long as possible, so that they view as many advertisements as possible. On some platforms, the interface is designed so that videos play continuously in a loop: users can spend hours scrolling through them. Algorithms—the computer programs defined by the platforms—select the most emotionally powerful content to keep users “hooked.”
In 2022, Meta’s revenue, among others, amounted to 116 billion dollars, of which 113 billion came from advertising. 97% of Zuckerberg’s platform’s revenue comes from selling advertising space to companies, which can then capture users’ attention and, ultimately, their wallets. On March 31, 2025, TikTok even launched a new feature: online shopping directly from the app.
Influencers also play an important role in brands’ commercial strategies. These men and women are very active on social media and sometimes have hundreds of thousands or even millions of followers. Major brands ask them to promote their products. According to Challenges magazine, in 2023, brands had spent more than 32 billion dollars on influencers, who have become digital sales representatives. In 2022, a French influencer with ten million followers took part in the launch of Dior’s Saint-Honoré bag.
It is of course difficult to assess the commercial impact of this practice—how many users go on to buy a product from the brand? But it is clear that if companies are spending so much, it must be because the profits are there.
It must be said that the market is huge, estimated at five billion users: 400 million of them for X, three billion for Facebook, and 1.7 million for TikTok. That’s a lot of potential consumers, who are targeted by capitalists through social media.
Social media is not primarily intended to allow people to express themselves freely. It is first and foremost a means of understanding and influencing markets, of selling as effectively as possible by increasingly targeting users’ personal tastes. But social media also has political significance. Under the guise of freedom of expression, digital platforms and capitalists seek to influence public opinion. They are free to choose who can express themselves on their platforms, and under what conditions.
After taking control of Twitter in 2022 and transforming it into X, Elon Musk reopened Trump’s account, but sought to ban the use of certain words he considers to be part of “wokeness,” such as “cisgender,” which is used by the LGBT community and considered by the billionaire to be an insult.
Similarly, an individual account can be suspended at any time, arbitrarily, and challenging this procedure is very complicated. A BBC investigation shows, for example, how Meta made various Palestinian media outlets invisible after the attack on October 7, 2023, leaving the field open to Israeli state propaganda. According to former employees, all it took was a change to an internal algorithm to delete certain accounts and content. (See Ahmed Nour, Joe Tidy and Yara Farag, “How Facebook restricted news in Palestinian territories,” BBC news, December 18, 2024.)
From this point of view, social media are not very different from traditional media such as television, radio, and print media, which are owned by a handful of capitalists, either directly or through their shares in intermediary companies. Among them are the big names of French capitalism: the Bettencourts, Arnaults, Dassaults, Bollorés, Pinaults, Bouygues, Lagardères, and Saadés; bankers such as the Rothschild family; and more recent capitalists who have made their fortunes with the rise of digital technology, such as Xavier Niel. Their portfolios include major national newspapers such as Le Figaro, Le Monde, Les Échos, Le Parisien, Paris-Match, numerous regional titles such as La Provence, bought by Saadés in 2022, as well as radio stations such as N.J., RTL, Europe 1, RMC, and television channels such as W9, M6, TF1, LCI, BFM TV, and more.
Of course, these big bosses do not intervene directly in their media outlets, or at least very rarely, even if an ultra-reactionary billionaire like Bolloré openly defends his anti-worker ideas. By virtue of their property rights, they can shape their media outlets as they see fit, in particular by selecting teams of dedicated journalists.
It’s the same in the U.S. For example, take Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, as well as Amazon and Blue Origin. Bezos intervened just before the last U.S. presidential election to stop the newspaper’s editors from endorsing the Democratic candidate, as they usually did.
In March 2024, Rodolphe Saadés, the wealthy boss of global shipping giant CMA CGM and proud owner of several newspapers, decided to sack the editor-in-chief of La Provence. This was because he disliked the front page, which criticized—in a very moderate way—the government’s “clean plaza” operation in Marseille, which did nothing to solve the problem of drug trafficking in the city’s housing projects. But such outbursts are rare. The most prominent journalists rub shoulders with their bosses, the business community, and politicians, whose interests and opinions they defend without needing to be called to order.
Social media, on the other hand, could appear to be less subject to editorial guidelines and journalistic control. But in reality, while there may not seem to be any external intervention, social media are shaped by algorithms that are entirely controlled by the platforms. These programs highlight certain content over others, making selections based on criteria defined by the platforms. Some will highlight areas of interest, others interactions with other users, etc. For example, if you show an interest in politics, the algorithms will almost certainly suggest videos and content from Elon Musk or the far right in general, even if you have completely opposite political views. This display, which seems free at first glance, is in fact completely biased by the way the platforms work.
This manipulation of content, along with its immense popularity, makes social media a diplomatic weapon, deployed among other things in anti-Chinese propaganda by Western governments. Biden banned TikTok from the U.S. at the end of his term, on the grounds that its parent company is Chinese and that there was a high risk of foreign interference. It is the United States and its secret services that have a long history in this area.
Trump suspended the decision, but only on condition that the platform hand over its activities in the country to an American company, an opportunity for Elon Musk, who immediately expressed interest. In Europe, too, social media is used, like other traditional media, as a propaganda tool. The entire political class uses it, and the major parties spend considerable resources flooding the networks during election campaigns.
Ultimately, the various state apparatuses have complete freedom to shut down a social media platform, a television channel, or a newspaper, or to censor their alleged effects. In Romania, for example, the presidential election of November 24, 2024, was invalidated on the pretext that the pro-Russian candidate who came out on top had benefitted from a campaign on TikTok. The reality was that the other candidate was unpopular with the European Union.
In France, after the riots that followed the death of young Nahel in Nanterre in June 2023, Macron also raised the possibility of suspending social media during events of this kind. The government ended up doing so during the riots in New Caledonia: it suspended TikTok, claiming that rioters were promoting terrorism on the social network.
All of this is hidden behind the “freedom of expression” promised by social media. Basically, social media is just a modern means of communication that the bourgeoisie can use to consolidate its domination.
The ideas of the ruling class permeate all of society: the organization of work, as well as culture and philosophy. The exploited majority accepts the status quo as long as they are convinced that this unjust social order is the result of human nature, or even God. In short, that it cannot be changed, that there have always been rich and poor, that this is the natural order of things. For centuries, religion has played this role, being the “opium of the people,” to use Marx’s famous expression. The clergy’s stranglehold on society served to influence and shape the opinions of the exploited classes, to whom it preached, and still preaches, submission and waiting for paradise.
When the school became an institution, it also propagated the ideas of the bourgeoisie, defending the bourgeois republic, its colonial conquests, and respect for the state and authority. In 1846, in The German Ideology, Marx analyzed the modes of transmission of ideas in class societies: “The ideas of the ruling class are, in every epoch, the ruling ideas; that is, the class which is the ruling material force of society is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas.”
By developing the means of production, capitalism has produced major innovations in communication: newspapers, radio, cinema, television, the Internet, etc. Each technological development initially led to greater freedom. Some innovations were born out of humanist ideals. In the early days of the Internet, the aim was to exchange information, particularly in the academic world, because different computer companies were designing computers that were incompatible with each other. State aid was therefore crucial in building the necessary infrastructure, since capitalists were unwilling to make the heavy investments needed without knowing whether the technology in question would be effective and profitable.
Once the technology was deployed, capital flooded in and took control. The Internet was first deployed under military auspices, before being used for civilian purposes and then commercially from the 1990s onwards. The same phenomenon can be seen with radio, which appeared in the 1920s, and television, which was invented at the same time but did not really take off until the 1950s. As with every new media development, these initially appear as a means of freer information and expression, because capital had not yet taken over the most recent sector.
In the 1970s, in France, a movement for free radio stations challenged the state’s monopoly on radio broadcasting by setting up illegal transmitters. These radio stations often criticized, if not the social organization, then at least the established order and its values. But they faced the problem of funding. This is when the debate over advertising arose: in order to escape government censorship and continue broadcasting, should free radio stations agree to broadcast advertising? This naturally meant placing themselves under the control of private capital.
In France, the government ended the state monopoly in 1982 and legalized free radio stations at the same time. They became simply private radio stations which, if they did not want to lose their advertisers’ money, could only broadcast very measured criticism of the system.
The same problem arose when television became an everyday object. In the 1980s, it found its way into almost every home. Now, anyone who could broadcast was able to reach millions of viewers, with a simple, direct means of communication and the added power of images. Advertising revenues exploded, and so did capitalist appetites. In 1984, André Rousselet, Mitterrand’s chief of staff before heading the Havas communications agency, launched Canal +, France’s first pay-TV channel. In 1986, Jérôme Seydoux, a major French businessman, and Italian billionaire Silvio Berlusconi launched La Cinq, a new private channel. During the first cohabitation between President Mitterrand and Prime Minister Chirac, the right wing endorsed the dual audiovisual sector: one part public and the other private. Words were followed by action, and TF1 was entrusted to Bouygues in 1987. Hersant, a major French capitalist and notorious collaborator during the Second World War, took control of La Cinq and M6, with capital from Lyonnaise des Eaux, among others.
Capital turns everything into a commodity, including freedom of expression. The crisis of capitalism has led capitalists to invest less and less in the productive sphere. The emergence of social media, and more recently artificial intelligence, has therefore appeared as a new windfall for capital seeking new outlets.
Faced with the power of capitalism’s means of information, and in particular the digital giants, how can revolutionary activists find a way to get their ideas across?
Like other technological advances, social media are neither a source of absolute freedom nor the devil’s weapon that will destroy human relationships. They reflect the contradictions of capitalism and are both formidable tools of communication and propagators of rumors, fake news, and anti-worker ideas.
It is true that capitalists, even the richest and most powerful, do not always fully control their own system. Social media is no exception, and sometimes the creature escapes its master. In 2011, it played a major role in spreading the Arab Spring, as well as during the Hirak in Algeria in 2019 and the outbreak of the yellow vest movement in France in 2018. The accessibility of social media can make it a very effective tool when rebels take it up. In December 2024, the simple hashtag, #JeNeSuisPasContent, which reflected a vague and general discontent among the population, spread throughout Algeria to the point of making the government nervous. Several dozen people were arrested, demonstrating the government’s fears that protests would explode on social media.
When the masses really get moving, they always find ways to express themselves, organize actions, and disseminate information, and social media can play an important role in this spread. The authorities are well aware of this, which is why many authoritarian regimes block communication channels, starting with social media, and the famous libertarians, including Elon Musk, would do the same if the protests got out of hand.
Revolutionary communist activists should not abandon social media, which has become a main source of information for millions of people, well ahead of traditional media. But if their ideas do not “catch on” or go viral, it is because social media is merely an echo chamber for so-called “public opinion,” heavily distorted by the biases mentioned above. Social media do not have the power to transform the general situation, to alone roll back the reactionary ideas produced by decaying capitalism. They basically reflect the general balance of power at a given moment between the bourgeoisie and the working class.
For those who want to prepare for the overthrow of this social order, social media cannot replace an organization, a real party with human connections. They can only contribute to spreading ideas or information more widely, and often in a superficial way. Revolutionaries must equip themselves with their own independent means of propaganda, and from this point of view, the print media plays an important role.
Historically, newspapers have played an essential role in the very structuring of the labor movement and its organizations. From L’Écho de la Fabrique des canuts Lyonnais (1831–1834) to L’Iskraof the Russian revolutionaries (1900–1917), via the Northern Star of the British Chartists (1837–1852) and the German Sozialdemokrat (1879–1890), countless newspapers have enabled workers not only to inform themselves, but also to forge a common critique of capitalism and to organize themselves.
To make a newspaper live requires fighting to find funding from working-class readers, finding printers willing to print a revolutionary newspaper, having a militant distribution network, and buyers who, through their actions, provide support. The production of a workers’ newspaper, in terms of its design, production, and distribution, requires human connections and an organization that social media cannot provide.
Having an independent workers’ press was one of the major struggles of the labor movement. Even when they were banned in Germany in 1878, German socialists managed to publish their press abroad and smuggle it clandestinely into the country through countless relays, in what became known as “the red post.” Before World War I, the German Social Democratic Party had dozens of daily newspapers and magazines and hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
In Russia, the Bolshevik Party understood the importance of this issue. It devoted considerable energy, both from abroad and by operating clandestine printing presses, to publishing its newspapers, which reached soldiers on the front lines during World War I. During the civil war that followed the Bolshevik rise to power, Trotsky’s train, which crisscrossed the front lines, was equipped with a print shop to publish leaflets. The new technological means of the time, notably radio, were used to spread the ideas of the revolution.
Using the technical means developed by capitalism is a necessity. The workers’ party—based on human ties, shared experience, and common class interests—will undoubtedly need to create newspapers, radio stations, social networks, and all other means of spreading its ideas in order to prepare for a society free from profit and exploitation. But we must not lose sight of the fact that these are only tools for building the workers’ party, which finally can only be a militant network.