Let's Talk About Left-Wing Quackery

Someone said something funny on Twitter last week.

“It’s very weird posting here and then going elsewhere on the internet,” remarked Center for New Liberalism co-founder Jeremiah Johnson. “Outside of like Truth Social, this is the only social media network with a large pro-ICE contingent. This is a 95/5 issue on Insta, TikTok, Reddit, Twitch, YouTube, etc., everywhere but here. … The morons trapped in Elon’s bubble have no idea how bad this is for them.”

It’s true: there are precious few dissenting opinions on social media platforms with ruthlessly enforced speech codes and overzealous moderators who blacklist anyone to the right of Karl Marx.

More to the point, Johnson’s self-satisfied critique of Twitter is a timely reminder that the left is not, in fact, immune from having its worldview algorithmically narrowed, insulated, and ideologically curated.

Right-wing bubbles are a reality, yes, but let’s also take a hard look at the seldom-discussed left-wing echo chambers, where outright lies and fabricated narratives similarly grow and metastasize into larger, more dangerous “truths.”

For all the talk about the right-wing information ecosystem, there’s remarkably little daylight between the communities that inspired the 2016 Comet Ping Pong incident and the communities that encourage lethal resistance to the “trans genocide.” The chief distinction is that left-wing crankery is often justified and defended by mainstream institutions meant to serve as a sanity check on such things — institutions that would swiftly condemn similar nonsense if it came from the right.