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The transnational export of platform-driven repression

  • Writer: Manushya Foundation
    Manushya Foundation
  • 2 hours ago
  • 7 min read

Manushya Foundation’s Digital Rights Advisor Jean Linis-Dinco explores how political pressure on Big Tech companies in the U.S. is reshaping global content moderation, digital rights and civic space worldwide.


(with research from Janna Fathul, former Feminist Campaigner & Researcher at Manushya Foundation)


This is their world and we are just living in it. That is the only honest way to describe the rise of the BigTech giants both in terms of profit and power in recent years. They operate in this tiny and quite lucrative space between markets and governments, yet they exert so much influence and power on how entire societies communicate, live and struggle.


Four years ago, Fernandez published an article titled ‘How Big Tech Is Becoming the Government’, arguing how the COVID-19 pandemic changed the techno-political landscape as it did public health. But describing them as a new form of government paints a rather incomplete picture because in reality, BigTech holds power that is broader, less accountable and more insulated than any other government on this planet.


The shift Fernandez described laid the foundations for a novel form of transnational governance carried out by unelected billionaires who never professed to be political actors yet operate with the reach and confidence of imperial institutions. Content moderation is just one of the frontline manifestations of this as the rules written in Silicon Valley that caters to the current American leadership were never simply technical decisions. They were political choices shaped by the loudest forces in the United States.


The American right understood this terrain with ruthless clarity and launched a campaign to discipline the platforms by shouting how conservative voices are being censored in America at every turn. Donald Trump escalated this strategy into a full-scale political weapon, framing himself as the primary victim of a system rigged against conservatives to energise a base who had already embraced a worldview where any challenge to their claims signalled conspiracy. Trump reframed moderation decisions as evidence of persecution and turned grievance into a governing tactic.


The point, nonetheless, is that these allegations had no evidentiary grounding, but that should come as no surprise. Barrett and Sims examined these declarations in detail and found no reliable data showing that conservative content was being removed for ideological reasons. In fact, they noted that conservatives used the bias narrative to attack the legal protections that allow platforms to moderate at all. On the contrary, their analysis showed that the accusation functioned as a form of disinformation, which heavily relied on repetition, grievance and distrust rather than empirical evidence.


Trump’s reelection amplified this dynamic, with billionaire backers rushing to align themselves with him and signaling their willingness to bankroll his power before he even returned to office in 2025. Their support reinforced the message that platforms would face political and economic punishment if they failed to accommodate the demands of the American right. As BigTech carved out quiet exceptions to avoid provoking that conservative bloc, those concessions did not remain confined within the American homeland.


American platform politics does not stay American. They are, as I write this, being absorbed into the central rulebooks that govern moderation worldwide, turning domestic political survival into the global standards that shape how billions of people communicate. 


The global export of anti-rights movement


Moderators enforcing English-language rules on content from Latin America, Africa or Southeast Asia relied on the same policy framework shaped by outrage cycles generated in US media. Women’s reproductive health became one of the primary arenas where this exported ideological discipline took hold.


This is why Meta’s censorship of abortion-related information since 2022 cannot be described as a series of technical mistakes however they maintain that it is. If anything, what it reflects is a structural process where the political sensibilities of the American ruling class determine the boundaries of legitimate speech worldwide.


The removal of posts for allegedly violating drug and pharmaceutical standards mirrored the moral panic surrounding reproductive rights in the United States. That panic was later imposed on contexts that have entirely different legal landscapes. The banning of Latin American abortion rights accounts, the restrictions on reproductive health providers serving women in Asia and the Middle East and the suspensions of Thai organisations like Tamtang and Women Help Women followed a rulebook shaped thousands of kilometres away.


Despite some content and accounts being reinstated, the ambiguity of Meta’s content moderation policies gives the company wide latitude to decide which information reaches the public. Petty, in their submission to OHCHR’s call for inputs on the relationship between human rights and technical standards, recorded how the platform’s restrictions disproportionately targeted content aimed at women, queer youth and other marginalised groups. They drew on evidence that ‘Facebook regulations on sexual and adult content disproportionately affect women and result in censorship of marginalised populations.’ Their submission also documented that SRHR (Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights) organisations across Kenya, Congo, India, the MENA region and Latin America all experienced the same cycle of ad rejections and opaque enforcement.


The repeated acts, suspensions and bans strips away the illusion that the censorship is ‘a technical bug’, as what Meta alleged. The enforcement of content moderation policies, shaped by American politics, on a global platform has effectively exported an anti-women agenda to countries where reproductive rights are legally protected such as Thailand. Meta’s platforms, in this regard, have become an instrument of ideological control, dictating what pieces of information are accessible and whose bodies are monitored, surveilled and policed. In Thailand, more specifically, the suspension of Tamtang, one of the country’s few safe abortion networks, demonstrates how these policies put vulnerable populations at direct risk by restricting access to life-saving information.


Local conditions in countries Meta operates do not matter because the corporation does not answer to local publics. It does not answer to the woman in Chiang Mai searching for safe abortion information, nor to the youth in Lagos or Bogotá who rely on digital spaces for basic sexual health education. It only answers to the political and economic forces that determine its survival at home in the United States. The company cannot detach itself from the state that guarantees its property, shields its monopolistic power and enforces the legal architecture that sustains its business. In return, it reproduces the ideological climate of that state through the very infrastructure half of the world relies on to communicate.


Meta controls a central part of the world’s communicative infrastructure. And that infrastructure is privately owned, run for profit and disciplined by the same state in which the corporation is headquartered. A platform structured by capitalist imperatives will only do what it was meant to do: reproduce the worldview of the dominant class because its survival depends on aligning with those who hold power.


Moving Forward

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains…” —Rosa Luxembourg

We are all chained to the Americanisation of global speech through private corporate infrastructure. We are all chained to our phones through relentless ad culture that keeps us busy scrolling so we look the other way when they level another country for oil. We are all chained to platforms that can erase a sexual health clinic’s page without warning, bury a mutual aid appeal for a Palestinian and even suffocate an anti-imperialist movement online. 

The unchecked authority of BigTech to dictate the flow of information across borders demands more than lip service, more than what this short essay seeks to offer.


We must organise to create autonomous networks that do not depend on the goodwill of Silicon Valley. Pockets of resistance have shown up in recent years such as the rise of the Fediverse. These platforms, built on decentralised protocols and community governance, offered a small but significant space where people can speak, organise and share knowledge without being filtered through the priorities of corporate capital. These spaces are imperfect, of course. There is no denying that. But, they demonstrate that digital communication does not have to replicate the power structures of the market.


Only when the working class own and govern the infrastructures we rely on, from the date centres to the digital commons, will liberation start being a material reality.



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