By Jacob Mchangama
On November 2—the day before the 2026 midterm elections—Vice President JD Vance posted an upbeat message on X, “We got your back, New York!”, accompanied by an infographic detailing how “The Trump Admin Delivers for New York.” Within 24 hours, it had received 10,000 likes.
Eight hours later, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani took to social media to mock Vance’s post with a well-known meme of a young man on a subway platform pretending to slow down a train and open the doors. The message was unmistakable: Vance was taking credit for developments that had little to do with the Trump administration’s policies. Mamdani’s post took less than a day to rack up over a million likes, and on Election Day itself, the vice president was brutally ratioed.
[. . .]This rapid change of the Republicans’ fortunes on social media challenges deeply held assumptions about our digital age. Experts, legacy media, and establishment politicians have long claimed that the business model of social media—optimizing for outrage, sensationalism, and conflict—favors illiberal populists. And many have proposed crackdowns to deal with the supposed pernicious influence of social media.
[. . .]As we approach the end of 2026, there are fresh reasons to be optimistic about the ability of democracy to resist hostile takeovers by illiberal and authoritarian governments. The same tools that too many defenders of democracy want to put under government control are the very same tools that have, in the past few months, helped defeat illiberal and populist incumbents and challengers across three continents.
It turns out that free online speech, far from being democracy’s fatal flaw, may be one of its greatest strengths.
Read More
Jacob Mchangama is the Founder and Executive Director of The Future of Free Speech. He is also a research professor at Vanderbilt University and a Senior Fellow at The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).