There is always a conspiracy to explain away Republican wins. Sometimes it is the Republican noise machine, even if Democrats build a much larger and better-funded one. Sometimes it is a nefarious corporation. Often the conspiracy theories that Democrats use to motivate themselves are simply forgotten, living a ghostly afterlife. Remember Diebold? Remember that Bush was conducting the war in Afghanistan in order to personally profit from a pipeline? Remember when Democrats distrusted the Bush-era CIA? Probably not. No. All was forgiven, huh.

But it’s worth asking whether there will be an afterlife to the Resistance.

I expect that there will in fact be continued pressure on Facebook and other social-media companies to monitor, restrict, and throttle speech that is inhospitable. The Left has taken to saying that “Facebook is a Right Wing Company” — which is to say, it hosts and facilitates the conversations of people in America who are older, whiter, and more conservative than users of other social networks, and workers at the company itself. The move to pressure and clamp down on social media is widespread. This has been the case not just in authoritarian nations such as China, but in liberal-democratic ones such as Germany, whose social-media law is admired by Russia and the Philippines.