It is, moreover, extremely dangerous and troubling that corporate platforms can arbitrarily delete users and cut them off from the web of connections they built with their own words, images, and labor over years.

When Wolf says that “they start purging your enemies, then they purge you,” she’s not wrong. Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, progressives in North America had been pretty complacent about this threat because it had mostly been their political adversaries getting booted off platforms. But well before Musk started suspending the accounts of Twitter users who displeased him, the same kinds of power abuses had deplatformed Palestinian human rights activists at the behest of the Israeli government, and advocates for the rights of farmers and religious minorities at the behest of India’s Hindu-supremacist government. Yet in North America, raising the alarm about the fact that we have outsourced the management of our critical informational pathways to algorithms run by for-profit companies, working hand in glove with governments, somehow became the terrain of the Bannonite political right, which points to a dangerous ceding of ideological territory.

Establishing a democratic, noncorporate media—through public broadcasting and community access to the airwaves—was once a core progressive demand. Though there are civil liberties groups that still stand up against corporate censorship, as well as civil rights groups that fight for net neutrality, progressives today have not, for the most part, made fighting for a democratic and accountable information sphere a cornerstone of their political agenda. On the contrary, many happily cheered corporate deplatformings - until the same dynamics came for them.

— Doppelganger by Naomi Klein