Re-platforming Hatred: Meta and a New Class of Digital Demagogues

In that same period, Meta began to understand the scale of the problem and started taking action against individual figures. The most visible test case came later that year when the company removed Alex Jones and the Infowars network. Meta did not present it as a political gesture. It presented it as a necessary response to a pattern of targeted harassment and radicalization that the platform had been slow to confront. For the first time, Facebook was willing to say that some personalities were using the architecture of the site to push audiences toward extremism. That decision, hesitant and overdue, marked the beginning of Meta’s era of high-profile deplatforming.

Soon thereafter, Meta widened the net and removed several other high-profile figures whose work revolved around different strains of extremism. Louis Farrakhan, the longtime leader of the Nation of Islam, had spent years circulating conspiratorial rhetoric about Jews and other minorities. Paul Joseph Watson, a prominent Infowars personality, built an audience by blending anti-immigrant panic with a steady stream of culture-war agitation. Laura Loomer used confrontational activism and fabricated narratives to fuel an online presence built almost entirely on provocation.

Their removal signaled that Meta was no longer focusing on isolated violations. The company was beginning to treat these personalities as part of a larger ecosystem that thrived on harassment, conspiracy, and the deliberate radicalization of young audiences. It was the first attempt to draw a boundary between political expression and the kind of content that corrodes the public space the moment it reaches scale.

Now comes the part that moves from history into interpretation. It is difficult to imagine that Mark Zuckerberg, coding in a Harvard dorm room, understood the social and political power his platform would eventually wield. His priority was scale in a world where the user was the product and growth was the only real metric. I do not doubt that he was disturbed when he realized the platform was amplifying hatred. Yet during the same period, Facebook was pulled into two separate storms: foreign interference in the 2016 presidential election and the Cambridge Analytica scandal, which broke into public view in March 2018.

Zuckerberg struggled to manage these crises in public. His testimony and press appearances made him look uneasy, and nothing in his delivery helped people trust that he understood the consequences of what he had built. From that point forward, the Facebook brand carried the weight of those failures, and the company has never fully shaken the sense that it lost control of its own architecture.

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