The Unholy Alliance: The Rise of the Far-Right and Digital Capitalism
While social media was initially hailed as a pillar of democracy, a troubling development is emerging: Digital moguls like Elon Musk are increasingly taking openly far-right positions. This analysis examines the “unholy alliance” between digital capitalism and right-wing movements. It reveals how platform algorithms, targeted disinformation, and a misunderstood concept of freedom work together – and why Germany and the EU have become prime targets of this development.
In his New Year’s speech, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz reassured citizens that electoral power belongs to them, not to “the owners of digital platforms.” This remark was a pointed reference to South African-Canadian-US-American billionaire Elon Musk and his public endorsement of the party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the face of the upcoming federal elections. Musk’s endorsement was widely criticized as an unacceptable intervention in German politics, fueling a public debate about the growing influence of digital moguls and the increasing sense of external electoral interference.
The question is if such support from digital moguls like Elon Musk for the far-right marks a shift in the way social media relates to liberal democracy. The first years of social media proliferation were marked by “cyber-utopianism” and enthusiastic praise of social media as a liberating power, both strengthening democracy and toppling authoritarian regimes. As early as 2012 Evgeny Morozov wrote about a “net delusion”, noting that the Internet made propaganda, censorship and authoritarian regimes stronger, while jeopardizing democratization. And while scholars were increasingly writing about social media as a factor furthering polarization and radicalization, digital moguls in the United States and Europe pledged network neutrality, promising to work on strategies and regulations which would prevent such outcomes in future.
Today, digital moguls are turning toward open support of the far-right, including their direct promotion of nativism and “disinformation order” in both the US and in Europe. We are witnessing, I want to argue, a tightening of the ‘unholy alliance’ between digital capitalists, cyber criminals and authoritarians all over the world (wide web) bringing established democratic systems under attack from different angles.
Social Media and the Rise of the Far-Right
Multiple crises and mounting anxieties in the last decade have turned social media into the perfect platform for the success of a right-wing “politics of fear”. Scholars exploring “social media logic” and the new ways of engendering social interactions within the network society have offered clues as to how this was technically possible. In particular, they point to the effects of secret algorithms recommending content to users: programmability, popularity, connectivity, and datafication. According to right-wing extremism scholars Maik Fielitz and Holger Marcks, social media “offers a beneficial terrain” for far-right agitation since it facilitates the exploitation of existing security threats and simultaneously serves as one of its primary engines. Fielitz and Marcks identify perceptions of imperilment as the main driver of current far-right mobilization, aligning perfectly with far-right strategies of “dramatic storytelling, gaslighting, and metric manipulation,” which thrive in the digital ecosystem. Social media, they argue, “catalyzes the amplification of fears, the diffusion of post-truth, and the logic of numbers”.
In addition to the ‘social media logic’ warnings about the strategic and systematic “disinformation order” have mounted especially after the 2016 discovery of the Cambridge Analytica campaign and the microtargeting of voters which contributed to Donald Trump’s elections and Brexit. Relevant allegations were later confirmed by two independent inquiries, namely the UK Parliamentary international committee report from 2019, and the joint FBI, CIA, and NSA declassified report in 2017. Both reports revealed disinformation operations and armies of bots operated by Russian intelligence hacking into state systems (including election infrastructure), reading campaign officials’ emails (such as Hillary Clinton’s) and leading cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns. Historian Timothy Snyder refers to the 2016 elections as “the Russian intervention.”
In their response, owners of digital platforms largely stuck to network neutrality or remained determined “cyber-utopians”. They proclaimed the progressivist ideal of a free and liberal internet, apologized for unintentional mistakes and promised to work on the improvement of digital environments. In addition to verbal public apologies, Facebook (Meta) spent $725 million to settle a class action lawsuit for private data harvesting by Cambridge Analytica and other companies. This was only half of what the company paid in 2024 ($1.4 bn) in a settlement with the state of Texas over biometric data and facial recognition. With disinformation labeled as one of the main threats to global security, regulation of the digital space and use of private data became increasingly cited as a political priority by governments and international bodies. It is against this backdrop that digital moguls are now giving up on their previous promises to fight disinformation, instead endorsing the far-right in their electoral campaigns.
Shifting Moguls and their New Digital Alliances
In addition to his previous support for Donald Trump, Musk has recently intensified his political activity in Europe, spanning from Germany to the UK, where he is reportedly seeking a replacement for Nigel Farage as leader of the far-right party Reform UK. For German voters, Musk personally hosted Alice Weidel, the head of the AfD, in a live-streamed “conversation” watched by up to 210.000 people on X – an event currently under formal investigation by the administration of the German Bundestag as a possible act of illegal party donation. Equally troubling are the contributions of other moguls feeding into an antiliberal background noise. Recently, a celebrated cartoonist from The Washington Post resigned after facing censorship over a cartoon critical of the newspaper’s owner, Amazon-billionaire Jeff Bezos. A similar situation occurred with The Los Angeles Times and its billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. Meta owner, Mark Zuckerberg, just announced that he will stop fact checking programs which he accused of introducing censorship into the digital space, instead supporting “X-style community notes”.
With this shift, digital moguls are joining the long-standing activism of the fossil fuel lobby and its intersections with far-right politics. On behalf of “Big Oil”, entire agencies and hacking communities have worked to create memes, craft dramatic narratives, spread fake news, and target voters. That said, Cambridge Analytica is not an individual case but, but an emblematic instance of a developing digital environment. The Guardian recently revealed an Israeli hacker group, “Team Jorge,” in an undercover investigation. The group was found to be selling services such as fake social media profiles and disinformation campaigns, with involvement in at least 33 presidential elections worldwide.
Digital moguls, the fossil fuel lobby, cyber (state and non-state) criminals, and right-wing parties do not necessarily share the same economic or political goals. They also do not actively conspire or follow a joint coordinated plan. However, they ultimately align and synchronize in their simultaneous contribution to the promotion of far-right agendas. More and more, they are forming an ‘unholy alliance’ in favor of the far-right, which is increasingly presenting itself as a libertarian movement supporting national economic success rather than nativist, identitarian politics.
Musk in Kekistan
To be sure, Elon Musk’s influence does not only stem from his wealth but also from his 200 million followers on the X platform. For those familiar with the digital far-right, Musk’s latest renaming of his handle to “Kekius Maximus” on December 31 could easily be decoded as a signal to his most active far-right followers. It was a symbolic act akin to taking command of the “Kekistan movement”. Journalist Annika Brockschmidt has unpacked the semantic layers of Musk’s new name. It combines “Kek,” a prominent buzz word from Alt-Right online community and some kind of digital parody religion, with references to the main character in the movie Gladiator, while at the same time alluding to a (semi-)ironic far-right dreamland of “Kekistan”. The Kekistan flag, resembling the Nazi war flag, has become a symbol of traditionalist far-right ideology, its presence notably observed during the Capitol uprising. In essence, on New Year’s Eve, Musk hailed followers of a well-elaborated far-right ideology, using humor and irony as a shield against accusations of far-right activism, similar to the one used to dismiss his “Hitlergruß” on Trump’s 2025 the inauguration day.
Some days earlier, Musk had used his reach on X to try to capitalize on the shock and a widespread feeling of insecurity among the public following the terrorist attack in Magdeburg. Polemicizing against German Chancellor Scholz right after the incident, Musk linked the attack directly to “mass immigration”, adopting far-right “nativism” and promoting ethnical homogeneity of societies. He even warned of “ensuring that Germany does not lose its identity in the pursuit of globalization,” demanding Scholz’s immediate resignation due to “incompetence”.
Freedom of (Hate) Speech
Besides nativism, a central value connecting digital moguls and diverse actors of the far-right is their defense of absolute freedom of speech. Elon Musk portrays himself as an uncompromising advocate for this principle, notably through his $44 billion purchase of Twitter to “save freedom of speech”. Using every opportunity to denounce regulations of the public sphere as betrayals of liberalism, if not as outright fascism, Musk started un-banning Donald Trump and numerous other far-right accounts on the platform. In this version of digital libertarianism, hate speech and racism are repeatedly defended as instances of an inalienable individual right to speak without restriction.
It is obvious that this interpretation has little in common with the aforementioned “network neutrality” or a liberal interpretation of “freedom of speech.” As John Stuart Mill exemplarily stated, liberal conceptions of freedom find their ultimate limits in the necessary prevention of harm to others, hence excluding hate speech, racism, or calls to violence. Today, to the horror of classical liberals, Musk is literary standing in front of a 200-million-strong audience, counterfactually screaming “fire”, and placing his bets on the unrest and harm that are likely to follow.
A rarely asked, but worthwhile question is whether this kind of power deserves absolute (or any other) freedom. In her book Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff argues that asymmetry of knowledge between platform owners, businesses and intelligence services on the one hand, and prosumers on social media, on the other, must lead to a reevaluation of liberalism as such. In traditional capitalist systems, the alliance of capitalists with liberal freedoms has been made on the assumption of ignorance – the market and its rules were beyond prediction. Today, in the era of “surveillance capitalism” digital autocrats have extensive knowledge and quasi-certainty about the market, extrapolated from the big data of digital platforms, and created through their manipulation. More importantly, this knowledge is not shared but kept as a business secret, generating lucrative profits and preferred political outcomes for platform owners. The “freedom”claimed by digital billionaires like Musk builds on the expropriation of users’ private data. “Our lives are scraped and sold to fund their freedom and our subjugation, their knowledge and our ignorance about what they know,” writes Zuboff.
From Liberal to Critical Critique
The ongoing shift of digital moguls toward the far-right reflects a normative turn. It combines the pursuit of profit under “surveillance capitalism” with increasingly explicit nativism and a rejection of legal regulation in digital spaces, which is packed and sold as libertarianism. Preventing regulations in the digital sphere has, therefore, emerged as one of their primary goals. It is no coincidence that Germany and the EU, both with comparatively advanced digital regulations, have become key targets for these actors.
Contrary to many liberal analysts, for critical scholars the developing intimate alliance between digital moguls and the far-right is unsurprising. It reflects the established Marxist critique of fascism as an ideology solidifying extreme inequalities and social divisions created by global capitalism. Democratically regulating hate speech and disinformation is a necessary and long overdue step in countering the rise of the far-right and “digital fascism”. However, a rightly understood liberal digital discourse is only one part of the answer. It cannot replace the other. There is a need to confront the underlying normative and economic failures of liberal globalization – the severe social inequalities and the disparate patterns of ownership in our interconnected world.
Dr. Katarina Ristić ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Global and European Studies Institute der Universität Leipzig. Sie arbeitet an der Schnittstelle von südosteuropäischer Geschichte, Medien- und Erinnerungsforschung. Derzeit forscht sie zu Rechtsextremismus und Erinnerungskultur im digitalen Zeitalter.
OpenEdition schlägt Ihnen vor, diesen Beitrag wie folgt zu zitieren:
Katarina Ristić (31. Januar 2025). The Unholy Alliance: The Rise of the Far-Right and Digital Capitalism. Zusammenhalt begreifen. Abgerufen am 27. April 2025 von https://doi.org/10.58079/137rk