If asked who the most powerful or influential person in the world is, I guess an ordinary person like me would say the President of the United States. There is a fact that no one can deny: whether we like it or not, the USA is the most powerful country. But think about it, even the US president’s Twitter account can be suspended. Maybe he tried to stage a coup in his own country, targeted the Congress to his supporters and so on, but he was actually continuing to do what he had been doing for years. For years, he had been posting lawless, autocratic, divisive, and targeting tweets. Now there is only one thing that has changed: he no longer has influence and power as the ‘President of the United States’.

Taking advantage of this situation, social media companies did not even hesitate to do what was deemed impossible. I know Twitter has a particular grudge against Donald Trump, but Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube did not hesitate to join this bandwagon either.

Just a few days ago, WhatsApp, which has reached nearly 2 billion users, updated its user agreement, stating that it will not allow those who do not accept it by February 8 to use the application. The most important clause of the new agreement is that personal data will now ‘officially’ be shared with Facebook. Immediate objections arose from people, as if they were not already providing data to Facebook, but at the end of the day, we know that people will use whichever app the community is on. WhatsApp’s waiting until now was not in vain. If you remember, last August, Facebook suddenly made a Facebook account mandatory for Oculus virtual reality headsets. Considering Instagram as well, it is obvious that Facebook’s database will be highly attractive to advertisers.

Google, on the other hand, remains as quiet as possible, moving silently and deeply, surrounding us everywhere in the virtual world like blood circulating in the body. YouTube enters the life of every human child whose eyes begin to see, via their parents’ cell phones, and never leaves. Meanwhile, the parents get to spend a few hours in peace!

When it comes to cloud computing firms, shopping sites—especially Amazon and AWS—only those who know the industry can fathom the extent of the danger. When we combine keywords like datasets, machine learning, deep learning, big data, artificial intelligence, and data analysis; the average user doesn’t even know what is going on in the ‘cloud’.

Furthermore, using ‘digital fascism’ as an excuse, attempts are being made to develop ‘local and national’ single-centered(!) solutions. Although it is pleasing that the penny has finally dropped, even though the train for social media and messaging apps left 10 years ago; I believe that in the age of global communication, human and time resources will be wasted.

After what I have described, the question ‘Is the future of social media a digital dictatorship?’ starts to become meaningless in my opinion.

The real question we need to ask is: How do we overthrow the digital dictatorship?