The Illusion of Virtue: How Tech Elites Shift Loyalties While Consolidating Power

Social media platforms were once hailed as the great equalizers of the digital age, offering unprecedented avenues for free speech, democratic debate, and grassroots mobilization. In their early days, these platforms enabled dissent, fostered revolutions, and gave voice to the marginalized. Yet today, many users find themselves censored, deplatformed, or algorithmically buried for expressing views that challenge prevailing narratives. Among the worst offenders is Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, whose moderation practices have come under increasing scrutiny. What began as an experiment in digital democracy is now perceived by many as a curated echo chamber - one that privileges dominant ideologies, silences dissent, and fosters a chilling effect on honest discourse.

Compounding the problem is the growing presence of scam and fraudulent advertisements on Meta’s platforms. While content critical of certain worldviews is swiftly removed or suppressed, questionable ads - often by foreign actors or outright scammers - remain visible for days, sometimes even weeks. This contradiction reveals the underlying driver of Meta’s content policy: profit, not principle. Moderation is not applied consistently based on truth or civic value but selectively, based on financial and political incentives. This double standard undermines the credibility of the platform and raises serious questions about the priorities of those who control it.

Once perceived as champions of open society, many tech moguls have revealed themselves to be opportunists - shifting allegiances in response to political winds rather than principled convictions. During the 2010s, the tech elite embraced “woke” ideology with fervor. Buzzwords like diversity, equity, and inclusion became corporate mantras, and companies fell over themselves to demonstrate moral purity. But that alignment was largely superficial. Social justice messaging offered a convenient shield against regulatory scrutiny and reputational risk while distracting the public from deeper structural issues - monopolistic behavior, data exploitation, and labor abuses.

Now, with the cultural pendulum swinging, many of these same figures are repositioning themselves. They are aligning not with progressive causes but with populist, anti-establishment rhetoric of Trumpism. What changed? Not their principles - those were always malleable - but the calculus of power. Wokeism, once a profitable brand, is increasingly seen as stale, coercive, or even hypocritical. In its place, “free speech absolutism,” nationalism, and contrarian posturing have become the new currency for relevance and control. The message has changed; the game has not.

Vivek Ramaswamy’s book "Woke, Inc." articulates this phenomenon with unsettling clarity. Though himself a Trump-aligned figure, Ramaswamy delivers a trenchant critique of how corporations hijack moral language to serve their bottom line. He argues that companies have no business moralizing when their real goal is shareholder profit. By adopting fashionable causes, they deflect scrutiny and avoid meaningful accountability. ESG investing, DEI trainings, and corporate social responsibility become tools not for justice but for corporate consolidation. In Ramaswamy’s view, this is not progress - it’s a dangerous fusion of economic power and moral authority. He calls it “the merger of state and corporate power,” where companies act as de facto enforcers of ideology without public oversight or democratic legitimacy.

This critique cuts deeper than partisan lines. Whether cloaked in rainbow flags or MAGA caps, the tech elite’s real ideology is control. Their support for social causes - or opposition to them - is best understood as a means of narrative management, not a reflection of values. They weaponize both wokeness and anti-wokeness to shape public opinion, manipulate markets, and silence critics. In this sense, Meta’s paradoxical behavior - censoring political dissent while allowing scams to flourish - is not a bug but a feature of the system. The appearance of virtue conceals the machinery of power.

The result is a digital public square that mimics the structures of authoritarianism: selective enforcement of rules, suppression of undesirable viewpoints, and opaque decision-making by unaccountable elites. Users who question dominant narratives are marginalized, not through open debate but through algorithmic invisibility. Meanwhile, bad actors with financial clout or state backing navigate these same platforms with impunity. The illusion of a free and open internet remains, but the substance has quietly eroded.

The future of democratic discourse depends on our ability to recognize and challenge these dynamics. Genuine free speech, accountability, and pluralism will not return through nostalgia or incremental reform. They will require structural change: transparent moderation, decentralization, and the return of moral humility to those who build and run our digital infrastructure. Until then, the tech elite will continue to trade virtue for influence, shifting their ideological costumes while holding onto the same levers of power.