LibsofTikTok and the corporate decoy strategy

The rich have settled on a devious strategy for extending their influence, and socialism has the only ethical response.

Photo credits: Tucker Carlson, edited, by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0. Glenn Greenwald with supporters, edited, by Gage Skidmore. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.

Yesterday, the Washington Post published an article by Taylor Lorenz about LibsofTikTok, a popular right-wing Twitter account that spends most of its time ridiculing minorities and trying to get people fired. And last evening, Glenn Greenwald laid out what one could easily mistake for a materialist critique of the article.

They’re using their vast resources — the Washington Post is owned by Jeff Bezos — not to challenge actual power centers, but to destroy and wreck the lives and reputations of people who they regard as having the wrong politics.

Glenn is right that Taylor’s article — whether or not one approves of it — was promoted with the financial backing of one of the wealthiest men in the world. But what makes this comment truly bizarre was that Glenn made it on the exact same plutocrat owned corporate media outlet — Fox News — that has been promoting LOTT for months. In fact, less than a week before, the show that Glenn made his comments on, Tucker Carlson Tonight, had run another segment promoting the account. And this kind of promotion pays off, of course: the jumps in followers LOTT received the day of these two episodes of Tucker alone now account for more than a quarter of her total.

This is not, in other words, a one-sided struggle between some powerful corporation with vast resources and some hapless, powerless worker. This is a proxy battle between two powerful corporations with vast resources in which Taylor and LOTT are both just parts of the apparatus of production.