Islamophobic meme on Facebook (8/5/26).

A lot of social media users have been wondering why their feeds have been filled with far-right, often racist, content. For me, it started with more conservative media outlets and Republican politicians in my feed. I’m a journalist who covers this stuff, so at first it wasn’t so alarming.

But then came more and more memes about Islam—the religion in its totality—being incompatible with the West, and the need for its expulsion. Then there were the grotesque caricatures of Black people. And then came the antisemitism in the comments: praise for “the painter” (Adolf Hitler), “109/110” (the hoax that Jews have been kicked out of 109 countries, and it will be soon be 110), and blaming everything from economic downturn to falling birth rates on a juice-box emoji (sounds like “Jews”).

Freedom for the right’s speech

Mark Zuckerberg (Guardian, 1/7/25): “Factcheckers have just been too politically biased,” so Meta moved content moderation to Texas, “where there is less concern about the bias.”

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sat with Elon Musk, who has taken over Twitter and rebranded it as X, at President Donald Trump’s second inauguration (AP, 1/20/25), it was clear the Big Tech bigwigs knew it was time to get cozy up to Trump and the far-right MAGA movement, for their own financial interests (NBC News, 1/8/25; New York Times, 1/8/25).

Along with Zuckerberg’s heralded public makeover from Silicon Valley nerd to alpha bro (Washington Post, 10/4/24), the company made it clear that it needed to replace woke empathy with the shock jock antics of mid-2020 Trumpism. Last year, Zuckerberg said Meta would get “rid of factcheckers, ‘dramatically reduce the amount of censorship’ and recommend more political content on its platforms” (Guardian, 1/7/25), a concession to the far right’s claim (Fox News, 1/11/25) that content moderation led to suppression of medical misinformation and racist drivel.

Loyal Trump machine soldato Jim Jordan, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, heaped praise on Zuckerberg “for ending censorship efforts at his company—and urged other Big Tech firms such as Google to follow suit,” as the New York Post (1/7/25) reported. The Post quoted the congressmember saying, “Zuckerberg should be hailed for taking the lead ‘in upholding freedom of speech online.’”

Of course, as is always true for the right, freedom of speech means freedom for the right’s speech. Freedom of speech in favor of Palestine, for example, has been anything but upheld by Meta’s platforms (Human Rights Watch, 12/21/23).

Revenue for racists

Rightwatcher Kaz Ross (Australia’s ABC, 8/5/26): Meta‘s “financial model is to reward content creators who get engagement, and as we know, the best way of getting engagement is to produce rage bait, extremist material, aggravating material.”

The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (8/5/26) has uncovered that this uptick in far-right content isn’t just the Facebook audience’s imagination—we are witnessing something deliberate. An ABC investigation

has found Facebook’s parent company, Meta, is directly paying several controversial content creators, including a white nationalist with Neo-Nazi links and a prominent anti-vaxxer.

Content produced by these creators appears to be, at times, in direct violation of Facebook’s own policies around content monetization.

Futurism (8/8/26) also picked up the story:

One receiving payouts from Meta was Hugo Lennon, a known far-right agitator and white nationalist with ties to neo-Nazi groups. Lennon was taken away by police for hurling racial abuse at India’s prime minister Narendra Modi during his stay at a Melbourne hotel, and is believed to be one of the organizers behind an “anti-immigration” march on a sacred Indigenous site in the city last year….

Meanwhile, the Facebook page for the Australian white supremacist site the Noticer has been making money through the revenue program since November 2025. Underscoring how much Meta has dropped the ball on this one, even X—owned by Elon Musk, who performed two suspiciously Sieg Heil–looking salutes back in 2025—has banned the Noticer for violating its “hateful profile policy.”

More ‘borderline’ content

BBC (3/16/26): “As the company sought to compete with TikTok, more borderline harmful content was allowed on the site.” “It’s because the stock price is down,” a former Meta engineer said he was told.

We’ve been seeing red flags for a while. Earlier this year, the BBC (3/16/26) reported that engineers at Facebook and TikTok claimed they were pushed to allow harmful content to drive traffic:

More than a dozen whistleblowers and insiders have laid bare how the companies took risks with safety on issues including violence, sexual blackmail and terrorism as they battled for users’ attention.

An engineer at Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, described how he had been told by senior management to allow more “borderline” harmful content—which includes misogyny and conspiracy theories—in user’s feeds to compete with TikTok.

The Independent (7/5/26) also looked into one account featuring AI-generated far-right content in Britain:

These politically charged, divisive videos about Britain have racked up millions of views, but they’re all created using artificial intelligence (AI) and produced by people more than 5,000 miles away.

The page, Life in Britain, has more than 100,000 Facebook followers. Despite all of its videos being AI-generated, none come with warnings from Facebook, owned by parent company Meta, despite the Independent flagging this with the tech firm more than a month ago.

And that’s after a Guardian investigation (9/28/25) found that a “network of far-right Facebook groups is exposing hundreds of thousands of Britons to racist and extremist disinformation and has become an ‘engine of radicalization.’”

Rot from the top

AI-generated racism on Facebook (10/7/25).

FAIR and others have documented how Musk’s reign at X has turned a network once thought of as a free-wheeling playhouse of news and entertainment into a screaming den of right-wing grievance (PBS, 8/13/24; Le Monde, 8/13/24; Conversation, 2/18/26). Users have feared that TikTok’s takeover by Trump ally and tech oligarch Larry Ellison (Forbes, 1/26/26) will also mean a political shift for the beloved platform.

While the ABC investigation is primarily about Australian accounts, there are two more general takeaways: First, the ABC’s findings should make us wonder how much more is happening behind the scenes at these networks worldwide.

And the Australian investigation inverts our understanding of how the far right organizes online. For a decade, the prevailing understanding has been that far-right individuals met, swapped memes and riled each other up on 4Chan and other dimly lit corners of the internet (New York Times, 10/14/20; Politics, Religion and Ideology, 8/11/25). We need to understand that the rot comes from the top of these Big Tech behemoths—not just from the roots.

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