Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP file via NBC News

Many of us have played a game called “Mafia,” “Werewolf,” or “Assassin” before. Its rules are simple: A moderator secretly assigns the role of “killer” to two or sometimes more players in the game. The moderator sits out gameplay, but they assure that the killers in the game know who the other killers are by asking everyone to close their eyes, then asking the killers to open theirs to reveal their identity to their secret allies. The game typically cycles between two modes, “night and day.” In night mode, the killers perform certain actions, including “killing” players or eliminating them from gameplay. In day mode, all players discuss and vote to eliminate one person whom they believe is a “killer.” The goal is to eliminate the threat in the group. So, everyone uses reason or logic to deduce who they think the killers are. The “villagers” or the “innocents” win when they successfully identify and eliminate the assassins, werewolves, or killers. The game cycles between night and day until all of the killers have been eliminated or they reach numerical parity with the innocent people.

The game is best played as an immersive experience where there is plenty of downtime for side conversations and lots of group debate. This allows room for the killers to use rhetorical techniques to shake suspicion. For example, side conversations can be used to gain allies. Open group diatribes rationalizing why someone else in the game is the actual killer, double as persuasion. You would think that these diatribes would be a dead giveaway (of course, the killer would want to divert attention from themselves), but in active gameplay, there is so much finger-pointing going on that it all feels natural. I use this game in my classroom to teach about asymmetries of power.

If you have played this game before, you will know that the killers are often never discovered or only discovered later in the game. This is because they have an unfair advantage over everyone else. They have the power of knowledge of who is who and what is what. Therefore they can engage with the game very differently. Without fear of being killed, they can focus on shifting the larger group’s opinion on who the bad guys are to protect themselves. Everyone else is vulnerable because they can’t identify who is a friend and who is a foe. They are constantly being manipulated by people whom they may misrecognize as an ally.

I wish I could bring everyone into my classroom to illustrate how Silicon Valley is running a game of Werewolf on us and winning(!) because of the huge asymmetry in information (and, therefore, power) they hold over all the rest of us. Only they are aware of the full extent of the power of their social media tools, and they are in complete control of them. Since around 2014-ish we have been stuck in a perpetual cycle of political unrest and turmoil in this country, which social media has obviously played a role in. However, as long as we’re playing the game like a villager, getting lost in the rhetoric of the blame game-- it’s the feminists, it’s the government, it’s the Democrats, it’s the Republicans, it’s Trump, it’s Joe Rogan, it’s misinformation-- we can’t quiet the noise and look at the patterns to reveal the true villain.

I’m rushing to get these thoughts on paper before the inevitable announcement comes that Donald Trump (and most likely, Meta) has saved TikTok (as of 3:24 PM on January 19, 2025, TikTok is already back online). All of us know that this is where this is going. The error message that shows up on TikTok when users try to access it in the U.S. is an obvious tell.

But this, too, is a diversion. I see two main talking points on my feed right now in response to the TikTok ban: 1. Donald Trump just wants to take credit for reinstating TikTok (yes, obviously) 2. This ban is not about China having access to our data but about Silicon Valley owning all the big social media platforms (yes, also true). However, I don’t hear people talking about why TikTok is so valuable. The sleight of hand comes in us thinking that the story ends here, but we can go a level deeper.

China’s access to our data is perhaps a serious privacy and national security concern, but only because of TikTok’s instrumentarian power— that is, the power to mine data to manipulate people’s thinking and actions. In The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for A Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019), Shoshana Zuboff defines instrumentarian power as the power that undergirds surveillance capitalism. Now, I’m going to try my hardest to distill a 704-page book into a few sentences here, but surveillance capitalism is essentially a new form of capitalism in which the primary resources are not land or labor; they’re data. In this ecosystem, every individual’s behavioral data-- a bunch of seemingly insignificant data points-- who they talk to, where they drive, where they work, what they like, what makes them sad, where they live, where they shop-- is more valuable than other commodities because it can be used or manipulated to coerce people into actions (i.e., buying, voting, etc.), but most importantly it’s doing this by manipulating people’s thinking at an imperceivable level. Most people readily hand over this seemingly insignificant data because they falsely believe that the tech companies can’t do anything with it. This couldn’t be further from the truth.

Now I know how that sounds, and trust me, I’ve spent the better part of the last two years trying to keep my mother off YouTube to no avail. So, I know the uphill battle I face in getting everyone (including you highly educated folks) to understand how these highly sophisticated algorithms operate at a level beyond our human capacity to perceive. And that no matter how smart you are, you’re not smarter than the algorithm working in the background. However, I still have to say it and keep saying it because we’re all at risk. The tech bros have figured out how to manipulate us ideologically, and they aren’t as in control of the tools as you would think they are. I present Mark Zuckerberg’s alleged decline into Far Right toxicity as a prime example. He knows better than anyone else how the algorithms work to shift political ideology, yet he has still fallen prey to them himself. To repurpose the words of Roger McNamee, we’re all about to get Zucked.

The tech bros don’t want to save us from China, and they don’t simply want to buy it and profit off the app themselves. That’s just a perk. This isn’t about money or fame alone. It’s about power. The Silicon Valley tech bros want to be the only ones who can colonize our attention and our thinking. I can’t put enough emphasis on the thinking part. The power grab happens while we’re being distracted by news stories like “Zuckerberg removes ‘fact-checking’ from his platform.” Y’all, this story keeps me up at night because it is their biggest diversion. The fact-checking never really did much. It was a rhetorical strategy to keep everyone thinking that tech CEOs were addressing the misinformation problem they did not intend to solve. The biggest issue we face with social media is not a lack of media literacy and bottom-up misinformation and disinformation anyway; it is how information is being weaponized against us in echo chambers from the top down. We’re beyond a simple, straightforward debate around facts. We’re at a point where people’s epistemic realities (the way people view the world and take in information) have been dramatically shifted by manipulation of behavioral data via social media and other IOT (Internet of Things) products (i.e., smart refrigerators, smart thermostats, etc.). We don’t need to reverse engineer the algorithm to prove it because the sheer fact that all of us know someone who has taken on some radically illogical niche (probably conservative) ideology is proof enough that something is going wrong. Something is broken, and it might be far off the rails.

If anything, shadow-banning-- the covert policy of tech companies suppressing the spread of certain types of content is more of a concern than mis and disinformation because, again, this happens outside of the view of most people, and it’s happening intentionally. The Silicon Valley tech bros have the sole power to choose to shadow-ban leftist ideology (which many claim they’re already doing… and I would agree). Why? Because leftist ideology is like the rare villager who figures out the patterns of the werewolves and tries to expose them.

Meta and Google run the biggest monopoly in American history-- a monopoly of behavioral data and information. This control is maintained by extensive lobbying of the U.S. government and very carefully laid rhetoric that redirects attention any time the werewolves come up in a negative light, i.e., the genocide Facebook caused in Myanmar was met with claims of ignorance: “We had no idea something like this could happen.” This was even after they watched it happen and ignored calls for help from experts on the ground in Myanmar; the proven fact that Facebook data was mined to produce targeted ads that were, in turn, manipulated to win an election for Donald Trump in 2016 has been completely glossed over in mainstream media. Most people don’t even know that this is something that undoubtedly happened; the mental health crisis that plagues American teenagers today has resulted in the proposition of a teenage-only Instagram that will undoubtedly have the same issues as before because the teens themselves produce the harmful content. They’re suffering from social comparison, not child predators.

This technique of diversion, which Zuboff defines as dispossession, was perfected by Google in its decades-long venture into trying to reach totality in collecting data and information. For example, Google Books was marketed as a library for all, but we now know this was used to train the large language modeling systems that now power Google Search and AI. As a college professor, I’m witnessing undergraduate students outsource their thinking to these products because Silicon Valley rhetoric has convinced them of their magical capabilities. These plagiarism machines fail often, especially when it comes to nuance or subjugated knowledge. They also severely impede a person’s ability to think because, as I learned in school, “writing is thinking,” and these tools eliminate the process of piecing things together for yourself and sell the theft back to you as “convenience.”

When you read the TikTok ban through this longer lens of power, you see that it’s so much bigger than Trump’s play for praise when he inevitably restores TikTok. It’s so much bigger than debating whether TikTok was a threat to privacy or national security. It’s so much bigger than Zuckerberg just wanting a new product in his portfolio. It’s about keeping our information ecosystems closed and primed for the inevitable continuation of the artificial amplification of Far Right ideology. The worst thing we can do is sit around and try to explain away everyone’s descent into the Far Right. Snoop Dogg isn’t performing at Trump’s inauguration because he’s broke or because he’s being blackmailed; he’s just adjusting his sails to the changing winds of the consensus within his social class. When Jay-Z, who has already reprimanded us for using “Capitalist as a slur,” follows suit, we shouldn’t be surprised either. Everyone is susceptible to coercion when they haven’t properly outfitted themselves with the armor of information. If you paid attention to their political beliefs, these guys were always one step away from the Far Right rabbit hole. On top of that, the trap was lined with the seemingly harmless bait of masculinist rhetoric (but that’s a story for another day).

For answers, we need to look to the source of the political confusion and social upheaval, and all signs point to the places where we get our information: Elon Musk was painfully transparent about why he spent a small fortune to purchase Twitter, and it wasn’t about making money, because Twitter makes far less money than it used to. He bought it because he wanted to fight the so-called “woke mind virus.” White conservative’s way of describing leftist ideology and progressive thinking. During the 2024 U.S. Presidential election, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post announced that for the first time in its history, it wasn’t going to endorse a candidate. This is likely because the left-leaning editorial staff would’ve probably endorsed Kamala Harris, whom Bezos opposes because of her proposed platform of regulating the tech industry. Just a few weeks ago, Zuckerberg appointed Dana White, the head of the UFC and Donald Trump’s close friend, to the board of Meta. These aren’t coincidences. These are signs of a realignment of power and class solidarity that’s happening amongst the billionaire class who doesn’t want to be left out of what’s next.

And what is next?

A couple of months ago, I participated in a faculty research symposium where I talked about my work, which I love doing but is sometimes difficult because there are so many moving pieces to the puzzle of racialized disinformation. At this panel, a woman asked me a question that I hear often about where I think the problem lies, and she brought up Russia as a possibility. I told her that, while I acknowledge the long history of Russia interfering with our information ecosystem and especially the way they’ve targeted Black American media specifically over and over throughout the past century, we don’t actually have to go that far back or that far away. We can look at the very recent history of the political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica, whom we know Trump hired to win him that election in 2016. It wasn’t stolen, it was purchased.

I wrote a little bit about this in a two-part series called “The Artificial State,” but the TLDR is that while using computer science and data to refine political marketing messages is an old practice (it’s been around for more than 60 years), the tools that we have available to do this now are more powerful than ever before. Beyond their uncanny ability to predict which messages will resonate the most, computer scientists have figured out how to coerce people into action. Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie details the secret sauce to his highly coercive algorithms in M*ndf*ck: Cambridge Analytica and the Plot to Break America (2019) and most notably refers to the tools as “ideological weaponry.” This is an important analogy to draw because these tools, originally conceptualized and deployed via the military against other countries, have (since 2014-2016 ish maybe longer) been inverted and redirected to ourselves domestically. They’re being used in ways that impact much more than how we vote or don’t vote, as was the case of the highly successful anti-Hilary Clinton Super Predators talking point that very successfully kept many Black folks from voting for her in the 2016 election. It’s about how we think. And it’s increasingly hard to think in a space with so much noise. This is especially true when you are aware of how learning happens.

Everyone wants to think of themselves as smart or a free thinker, but the reality is that a lot of learning happens through social learning or imitation of what’s going on around us. It’s how babies learn how to talk or how our parent’s political beliefs often rub off on children until they get out of their hometowns, go to college, and start reading books. It’s why 74 million people are so utterly convinced that Donald Trump cares about them and their issues and will save us from the “evil Democrats” because all their friends in their social media echo chambers do, too. The psychologists would call this logical bias the “false consensus effect,” the cognitive bias wherein people believe that everyone thinks the same way they do, or that their beliefs are normal and competing beliefs are abnormal. Alarmingly, the tech bros have figured out how to hardwire the false consensus effect and other logical fallacies.

We keep looking for the problems outside of the country, when the call is coming from inside the house. In Werewolf, Mafia, Assassin, or whatever you want to call the game, the bad guys always reveal themselves in transparent moves, but the villagers fail because they second-guess themselves when things are “too obvious.” Sometimes, you have to call a wolf a wolf.

“If you can control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his action. When you determine what a man shall think you do not have to concern yourself about what he will do.” - Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)