In December 2024, the evictions began. Gradually, abortion funds, reproductive-health providers, queer groups, drag performers, nightlife collectives had lost their accounts or had them restricted across Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. It started across Europe and the UK, then reaching Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. Repro Uncensored, which tracks these bans, counted 210 takedowns and severe restrictions in a single year, against 81 the year before. This was becoming a trend.
Accounts built over a decade, audiences gathered post by post, a community's own archive of itself, gone overnight. The few who got a reason got a grotesque one: their crime, Meta said, was human exploitation. None were given a working way to appeal. When asked, Meta said the takedowns were correct, that nothing about its rules had changed, and that any claim it was targeting a movement was, in its word, “baseless.”
It is tempting to file this under “content moderation gone wrong." It is also tempting to file it under the obvious political story: Meta has bent the knee to Trumpism, swapped progressive-liberal Nick Clegg for Republican Joel Kaplan, and is grovelling toward the new administration. Neither is the whole story.
To see the whole story we need an older word: feudalism.
The land, the lord, and the people who farm it
Feudalism was a system during the 9th to 15th centuries in which a monarch owned all the land and parcelled it out to nobles in exchange for loyalty. The nobles leased it down to peasants and serfs, who worked the fields and held up the whole pyramid from below in exchange for protection. The part we tend to forget is this: the land was never theirs. They could be removed from it. And there was no court above the lord to appeal to. In his domain, the lord was the law. Not a rule applied equally to everyone, but the personal, revocable will of whoever held the ground beneath your feet. That system has come back.
The economist Yanis Varoufakis calls our present arrangement techno-feudalism. The platforms—Amazon, Google, Apple, Meta—are no longer ordinary firms competing in a market; they are fiefs. They don't mainly profit by selling you things. They extract rent by owning the digital ground everyone else is now forced to stand on. Varoufakis calls the rest of us "cloud serfs": every post, every upload, every drag look you photograph, every infographic an abortion fund designs is actually unpaid labour that makes the lord's land more valuable. We farm the field. We don't own it. And we can be evicted from it.
When the lord becomes the king
For years, “global affairs” at Meta meant bridging tech and politics, translating between Menlo Park and the world's governments. Nick Clegg, a former British deputy prime minister, played exactly that role as the head of global affairs.
Joel Kaplan, who replaced him, does something else. As the Guardian put it, the job became “an approach that treats the two as one and the same.” The rebranded Chief Global Affairs Officer (perhaps, a CGAO as a new acronym) Joel Kaplan appears right after the president on the company leadership board, and is himself a former White House deputy chief of staff under George W. Bush. Meta's chief legal officer is a former Trump trade representative. And, of course, we have the installation of Dina Powell, a Trump-aligned executive as Meta's president. The lord's court is now staffed by the sovereign's former ministers.
Feudalism’s signature is that sovereignty is privatised, handed to lords who are, at once, the landlord, the lawmaker, the police, and the judge of their own territory. No neutral public state stands above them. The lord writes the rule, enforces it, and decides what it meant, all in-house.
The recent evictions work not with law, but with a lord's justice. The account is removed first; the crime—“human exploitation”—is named afterward. There is no functioning court. Meta itself conceded that its appeals process for banned accounts had become frustratingly slow. And the pardons, when they come, come by whim. More than half the flagged accounts were quietly reinstated. One of them, Women Help Women, was restored with the admission that it had been taken down in error. However, the very same quarter it was misfiling abortion funds as traffickers, Meta was publishing a report boasting of the opposite skill, a machinery of forensic precision when it comes to identifying threat. Which seems to be simply aiming at where the sovereign prefers. Evicted by edict, charged retroactively, judged by no one, pardoned at the lord's pleasure: feudal justice working exactly as designed.
One realm's law over every land
For years before this wave, Meta was already deleting reproductive-health content in countries where that content was perfectly legal. Abortion providers in Mexico—where abortion is decriminalised—had their posts removed. Contraception information in South Africa, where the procedure is legal on request, was pulled also. As a result, a woman in Cape Town or Mexico City is governed, in the only public square most people actually use, not by her own democracy but by a culture war being fought in Texas.
And the state now behaves in the same way. Among the new administration's first acts was the reinstatement of the global gag rule, stripping funds from any organisation, anywhere in the world, that so much as advocates for abortion. Both the platform and the government imposes one realm's morality onto every other.
The one real defense to this overreach is a country that still insists on setting its own law, in its own public square, on its own ground. We know it is the real obstacle for them because their new CGAO says so. When the European Union moved to make the platforms obey European law—the Digital Markets Act—Meta's reply, in Kaplan's mouth, was to brand it an attack on American business and “a multi-billion-dollar tariff” on the company. A democracy governing its own digital space, recast as economic aggression against the home realm. The fief recognises exactly one crown.
The asymmetry is the point
On 7 January 2025, Meta rewrote the rules. It ended fact-checking, pulled back proactive moderation, and renamed “hate speech” as the softer “hateful conduct.” The changes were rushed through with no public sign of human-rights due diligence. Even Meta's own Oversight Board said so.
The new policy doesn't weaken protections evenly. It builds in an asymmetry: its moderations now allow hate speech against queer people while the same attacks on other protected groups stay forbidden. It even imports the word “transgenderism,” a word anti-gender ideology movement actors use to recast an identity as an ideology. Meta's own Oversight Board told it to drop the term; nearly a year later, the company was still “assessing feasibility.” Even the lord's in-house court can be safely ignored.
Feudal law, patriarchal in nature, was always a law of bodies: of who may reproduce, who must labour, and who can be turned off the land at the lord's pleasure. Techno-feudalism inherits the instinct intact. And the movement gathered at its side cheers a single demand: we need more babies. It is feudalism's oldest equation restated for the cloud. Bodies exist to make more bodies, more subjects, more labour, and the fief's task is simply to clear the ground of anyone who says otherwise. As a result, in these frameworks no duty is placed on the men; the whole weight lands on women's bodies and women's choices. And similarly, the non-reproductive alternatives have to be limited; not conforming to the cis-heterosexual norm is not tolerated.
With Trump's administration, Meta's justice simply forms itself around loyalty, not around its set, and publicly known, principles (if it had any at all!). That is why, today, the censorship lands specifically on women and queers.
Nowhere left to stand?
Why does all of this feel inescapable, rather than just one bad company we could simply leave? Because the fiefs became the public square at the very moment the public square is being demolished. Reporters Without Borders records the United States moving to defund its own public broadcasters in the very week it launched a government website dressed up as a news outlet but publishing only the president's talking points. It is propaganda in the costume of journalism. The way out of this trap is not a kinder lord; it is to stop being a tenant.
Breaking open the fief
So what do you do when the public square turns out to be a private manor? You stop trying to be a better-behaved tenant, and you start building ground of your own. But where to start?
Waag Futurelab works from the premise that technology is not neutral but rather an expression of cultural and political values, and so it can be built to express different ones. Its framework, the Public Stack, takes any technology apart into its layers—hardware, software, design, ownership, governance, law—and asks of each: whose values are in here, and who gets a say?
If we run Meta, or its likes, through that frame, we reach the same diagnosis we reached through feudalism, only in a different vocabulary. Ownership: private, concentrated, extractive. Governance: the lord decides, in-house. Law: move fast and break things, where rules are treated as obstacles. And the Public Stack's answer is not to beg the lord for fairer rules; it is to change who owns the ground. Against private ownership it sets social ownership: the commons, what the strategist Henry Mintzberg called the “plural sector,” infrastructure held by the community rather than by capital. Against the lord's private justice it sets collective governance: moderation decided by the people who actually live on the platform. And against a Europe that rents its public sphere from California, it sets digital sovereignty: a continent that builds and controls its own systems, “aligned,” in Waag's words, “with European values of openness, inclusivity, and democracy.”
Building our own public squares is not unimaginable as public alternatives already exist. Waag's Open Socials programme—together with partners across Europe's public sector—sets out for the vital migration this essay has been circling: moving away from platforms designed by private companies for commercial and political ends, toward the open social web, where the community owns and decides what the feed shows and how moderation works. Mastodon, Bluesky, Eurosky, Blacksky, Pixelfed, PeerTube: public squares where the rent is not extracted and the eviction notice cannot be served by a single lord.
We have been forced off better land than this, and we are building again. And queer people, especially, know how to do this. The queer commons has always built its own ground after eviction: the ballroom when the clubs barred the door; the bar, the bathhouse, the zine, the mailing list when the mainstream had no room. The open social web is only the newest room we need to build for ourselves. The newest, the most urgent, and the most transformative.
What we, the serfs can do
Lend your audience. When an abortion fund or a queer collective is evicted, the accounts still standing can carry their work and hand them the megaphone until they rebuild.
Do not flee one fief for another. Meta platforms like Instagram have just recently became alternative public squares for post-Twitter exodus of academy, civil society, artists, and cultural institutions. In no time, however, it became clear that the migration just swapped one lord's manor for another's.
Leave. Because the lord's first power is to make you forget you were ever anything but a tenant, remembering is where it starts to end. Have a second home on the open social web. If you must, keep a foot on the lord's land for now, where the people still are. But stop treating it as the only ground there is. It never was.
Try to do it collectively, synchronously, and loud - we, these organisations, are leaving, and here is why. One person or organisation quietly leaving may not change much; it may merely forfeit their audience.
Make the going easy for your audience. Build an engaging room for them. Show them that open social web can be as simple, as fun, and definitely much healthier, than the addictive design elements of the one they leave behind.
This op-ed reflects the personal views of the author, written in their capacity as a research & communications intern.
