World News

Puppeteers of Democracy

By Katie Liang '27 and Leslie Rosoff '27 in Winter 2025

The presidential inauguration has always been a monumental event. Held outside to an audience of hundreds of thousands and with the flag billowing above, brightly sporting our stars and stripes, the inauguration is the paramount of our democracy, the sacred transition of power that has carried us from George Washington to today. 

Normally, it is attended by important politicians and regular people alike. Normally.

This year, on January 20, 9:00 am Pacific time, the inauguration of the 47th president of the United States was held indoors due to minor weather conditions and was presented to a limited public eye. Inside the capitol building, several tech CEOs of high regard were seated in the front row. Elon Musk, owner of X, formerly Twitter, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew were among the many present. 

These people are the masters of the world’s eyes, the way we interact with the world: social media. Not only that, but they are some of the wealthiest individuals on Earth. Money has always bought power, but even more so lately, it has paid for political influence. 

Concerns of accountability and transparency are raised by this merging of politics and media. A few people gain enormous, unbound power as a result of the increased reliance on social media to propagate doubt within voters and frame democracy as an ongoing turbulent disagreement. The people in power have a major impact on elections, policy making, and the democratic process itself, regardless of whether they have to do with algorithms, content control, or data. 

These tech CEOs’ participation and the restricted public access to the inauguration this year represent a broader trend: the manipulation of political influence. Media platforms were made to be shared by the people, a virtual exercising of the first amendment like no other. However, as political tensions rise, social media seems to reflect how corporate power is increasingly influencing the world and governance, both through what appears on feeds and what is allowed to be posted.

Mark Zuckerberg recently commented on the issue, highlighting Meta’s step back from their fact-checking systems and arguing that they “went too far” in filtering content. The change was widely supported by many conservatives, who believed that fact-checking could verge on censorship, while liberals pointed out that the policy allowed for an increase of hate speech. 

Zuckerberg credited the shift to complaints arising during the 2024 election, wherein social media became a key battleground for the votes of the youth. All the while, tech companies continued to benefit from our society’s increased reliance on apps like Twitter and TikTok for our news and politics. 

Social media tends to sensationalize in order to increase user interaction. This inevitably equates to more money in the hands of the individuals behind these services even as the average citizen is regular people led astray by clickbait. 

To influence the public is to influence the policy. In other words, there is immense power in a narrative, and in a society infested by digital propaganda, it is more important than ever to seize control of that story, lest we allow the richest people on our planet to dictate it for us.

Money should not buy political power. In a world where platforms that put profit ahead of responsibility take center stage, how can the democratic process remain true to itself?