No, it isn't Your Imagination--The Internet Really is That Right-Wing

While once upon a time we heard much market populist claptrap about the web giving voice to the voiceless as we now know the way the Internet functions and is utilized--how its apparatus is run and why, and who uses it and how--favors the easily communicated and therefore familiar and well-established idea, those with money and legacy media access, those on the right side of major corporations of the media and other varieties with all their strictures, and those who appeal to a privileged audience--all of which, of course, works out to the right having a much easier time than the left using the Internet to promote its ideas. The unsurprising result is that online many do find themselves feeling that the web has a right-wing bias, with the right's complaints about Big Tech not being in their corner only affirming the fact--because we actually hear so much of their complaints, in contrast with a left whose complaints get far, far less hearing anywhere that anyone who does not deliberately seek them out is likely to come upon them.

What seems more debatable is just how much difference this has made. Looking at the twenty-first century one may regard the right, and especially those relatively far to the right, as having gone from triumph to triumph during it as any remotely progressive tendency suffered the extreme opposite. How much, one may wonder, has this been a result of how people live online?

It is a very large question--but it also seems to a very worthwhile one given the political direction of the era.