Towards a Digital Empire: U.S. Tech Corporations, Social Media, and the Global Rise of Fascism

• In Event: Militarism, Memory, and Media

Abstract

The shifting contours of the American empire and its digital afterlives demand a critical reckoning with how U.S.-based institutions, including global tech corporations, sustain structures of violence beyond national borders. Aligning with the broader conference’s interrogation of the late-stage American empire and its entanglements with authoritarianism, racial capitalism, and colonial logic, my paper particularly examines the role of American digital infrastructures in sustaining contemporary imperial formations.
My paper situates itself within the contemporary crisis of democracy in South Asia, particularly India, under the right-wing Hindu majoritarian government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The digital sphere has become a crucial site for the Indian state’s authoritarian expansion, enabling the proliferation of racialized violence against minoritarian communities such as Muslims, Dalits, and Bahujans. The unchecked spread of fake news, internet shutdowns, and curbs on free speech are symptomatic of this emergent digital authoritarianism. Central to this phenomenon is the complicity of global American tech corporations, particularly Facebook (now Meta), whose inadequate content moderation policies have facilitated the Indian state’s larger fundamentalist project.
Drawing from the 2018 WhatsApp-induced lynching of Nilotpal Das and Abhijeet Nath in Assam, my paper interrogates how Facebook’s lax regulations in non-Western geographical contexts contribute to racialized violence and state repression. The American Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen’s 2021 testimony before the U.S. Congress revealed how the company’s internal policies promote ethnic violence, particularly in India, its largest market, where it lacks adequate resources to moderate content in diverse regional languages. As such, American tech corporations do not merely operate as neutral digital infrastructures but actively reinforce imperial logic and majoritarian nationalism.
This paper engages with the conference’s broader inquiry into the late-stage American empire by examining how U.S.-based social media companies enable global authoritarianism, thereby entrenching imperial violence beyond the territorial bounds of the United States. If the American empire is in crisis, its digital afterlives continue to shape the repressive political landscapes of postcolonial nation-states. In exploring this convergence of neoliberal capitalism, digital governance, and right-wing populism, I ask: How does Facebook’s inaction on content moderation outside the U.S. reflect a larger restructuring of American imperial power in the digital age? What does the complicity of American tech giants in enabling ethnic violence in the Global South reveal about the durability of the U.S. empire, even as its territorial and political hegemony appears in decline?
Positioning social media platforms as active agents in the global consolidation of fascist regimes, my paper situates American tech corporations within a broader critique of late-stage empires, tracing their complicity in sustaining transnational authoritarianism. By doing so, it seeks to contribute to the reimagination of American Studies from its peripheries, foregrounding insights from postcolonial, Black, Indigenous, and anti-colonial studies to critically engage with the role of digital infrastructures in contemporary imperial formations.

Biographical Information

Tapaswinee graduated with a B.A. in History from Jadavpur University, Kolkata in 2019 and an M.A. in Gender Studies from Ambedkar University, Delhi in 2021. Her research interests lie at the intersection of postcolonial South Asia, transnational feminism, race and racialization, and masculinity studies, and she has pursued these interests through interdisciplinary research methods that include oral history and the study of creative practice (poetry) as resistance. Her proposed Ph.D. project explores the relationship between settler colonialism and the rise of religious fundamentalism in the socio-political context of contemporary South Asia.

Author

• Tapaswinee Mitra, University of Maryland College Park