Ida B. Wells vs. Social-Media-Caused-MAGA

Fascist media has been around for a while

How did this country select a reality TV star with bad hair and orange makeup to rule over us as a fascist dictator?

One common answer is social media. Even before Trump’s reelection, two-thirds of adults said that they believed that social media was bad for democracy. Experts claim that social media pushes people to extremes since online they tend to only talk to people who already share their views. Even worse, social media can encourage the spread of misinformation because platforms reward shares and likes regardless of accuracy. And of course platforms like twitter—run by far right asshole Elon Musk—are weaponized to spread fascist hate.

It’s undeniable that social media can spread fascist propaganda and lies. And the current fascist regime is using its power to silence opposition and to install oligarchs to control and discipline media.

It’s also true, though, that “social media has led us to fascism” is a narrative that assumes, first, that the US was antifascist or opposed to fascism up till social media came along. It also assumes that, until recently, we had a free, nondivisive press committed to truth and objectivity. These assumptions are, at best, questionable; at worst they are themselves a form of disinformation. America has a long history of fascist enthusiasms—and those fascist enthusiasms have often been stoked by a press that loves conspiracy theories, smears, and hate.

As an iconic example of the despicable history of American media, it’s worth considering Ida B. Wells’ efforts to debunk the myths and conspiracy theories which justified lynching in the decades after the end of Reconstruction.

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Wells writes the truth about lynching

Per Mia Bay’s excellent biograpy, Wells was born in 1862 to an enslaved couple. Her parents were emancipated at the end of the Civil War, but both died of yellow fever when Wells was only 16. She became the primary caregiver for her siblings and never attended college. Nonetheless, she went on to be one of the first Black female journalists in the nation, and an early and influential advocate for civil rights. In 1889, she became editor and co-owner of The Free Speech and Headlight, a Black-owned paper based out of the Beale Street Baptist Church in Memphis.

Wells found the issue that would define her career three years later. In 1892, a dispute over a game of marbles outside the Black-owned People’s Grocery escalated into an interracial fight. William Russell Barrett, owner of a rival grocery, used the incident to initiate a campaign of white supremacist terror against the owners of the People’s Grocery, including Thomas Henry Moss, a close friend of Wells. Barrett’s efforts ended with Moss and his two co-owners being first arrested and then taken from the jail by a mob and shot without trial.

Wells was horrified. She was also radicalized. Bay explains that prior to the murder of Moss, Wells had at least ambivalently believed the white supremacist propaganda which justified lynching. White officials, politicians, and journalists argued consistently and passionately that mob violence was a reaction to the crime of rape; Black men, they insisted, were violent and unruly and post emancipation had launched a vicious campaign of sexual assault against white women. These excuses and smears were so prevalent that even most middle-class Black reformers like Wells gave them credence. As she said in her autobiography, “if unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to lynching, perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life.”

But Moss’ murder did not fit this narrative. He was a respectable middle-class businessman who had not been accused of sexual assault. He was killed for daring to defend his own property from white assault. Wells, in her own words, began to wonder if lynching was simply “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property.”

Wells began a systematic study of lynchings in 1892. What she found horrified her; most victims of lynchings were not even accused of rape. Those who were often had simply had consensual sexual relationships with white women. As Wells wrote in a searing editorial in Free Speech in May of 1892,

Nobody in this section of the country believes the old threadbare lie that Negro men rape white women,…If Southern white men are not careful, they will overreach themselves and public sentiment will have a reaction; a conclusion will then be reached which will be very damaging to the reputation of their women.

Backlash

Wells’ refutation of the myth of rape, and her suggestion that white women sometimes had consensual relationships with Black men, enraged white supremacists in Memphis. White newspapers, including The Memphis Commercial and The Evening Scimitar explicitly called for violence against Wells; the Scimitar, which initially thought Wells was a man, wrote an editorial demanding the author of the editorial be castrated. Spurred on by these inflammatory columns, a white mob attacked the offices of Free Speech, destroying the printing press and the archive. The racists left a note threatening to murder the editors of the paper if they tried to publish again.

Wells was out of town when the mob struck, and she never returned, abandoning her belongings and her home. She moved to New York City, where she became part owner of, and writer for The New York Age. There she continued to attack lynching and the rape myths which supposedly justified it.

Wells’ campaign against lynching, which continued till the end of her life, had some notable successes. Before she took up the cause, there was virtually no pushback against the rape myth. Thanks to her research and advocacy, antilynching became central to the civil rights struggle. Like abolitionists before her, she enlisted British reformers to the cause, convincing UK women’s and progressive groups to lobby newspapers and politicians on the issue. The NAACP, which Wells helped found, also made antilynching campaigns central to its mission. After moving to Chicago, Wells advocated for antilynching legislation in Illinois which provided for the dismissal of law enforcement officials who allowed mobs to seize prisoners. She also was instrumental in securing the dismissal of a sheriff in Cairo, IL, ensuring that the law had force. Her efforts dramatically reduced lynchings in the state.

But Wells also experienced many failures. She was attacked and smeared, even by some former allies. B.A. Imes, a Black leader in Memphis, targeted her in hopes of conciliating white supremacists in the city; he suggested Wells had “polluted the minds of the innocent and pure.”

While Wells gained a national reputation, that reputation was double-edged. In 1894, for example, she received a sarcastic, vicious telegram from Memphis that read: “Lee Walker, colored man, accused of raping white women, in jail here will be taken out and burned by whites to-night. Can you send Miss Ida B. Wells to write it up?” Walker was in fact murdered; as Bay writes, Wells “had become well known enough to figure prominently in the national debate about lynching—and to attract personal missives from the lynchers themselves. Yet she could not prevent Lee Walker’s death or shield other victims of mob violence.”

Fascist media and antifascist media

Wells (or Wells-Barnett as she was known after her marriage) is in some ways an inspirational demonstration of the power of the press to challenge injustice and to overturn lies. She single-handedly undermined one of the nation’s most pernicious myths, showing an international audience that lynching was not justice for heinous crimes, but was instead an expression of white supremacist terror.

Wells-Barnett’s powerful use of the press as a force for truth and justice also, though, highlights the extent to which the press in her day was not, in general, a force for either of those things. The myths that Wells-Barnett challenged were myths initially generated and disseminated by a white supremacist press, north and south. That same press not only justified lynching but actively encouraged it; the white Memphis press, remember, inspired a murderous mob to target Wells herself.

Wells-Barnett was very popular with the British press. But the very fact that she had to go to Britain in the first place was a testament to how resistant the American media was to her message, and (relatedly) to her person. Black writers in Wells-Barnett’s day were rarely hired in US newsrooms; Black women writers even more rarely than that. And even in England, Wells-Barnett was barred from many platforms; she appears to have ghost-written or silently collaborated with reform minister Charles Aked on antilynching editorials, calculating (correctly) that as a white man he would be listened to in venues where she could not gain a hearing.

The silent collaboration with Aked foreshadowed Wells’ more thoroughgoing erasure over time. Though she helped found the Black women’s club movement, she was too radical to find a comfortable home among the wealthy, highly educated women who assumed leadership roles. Though she helped found the NAACP, she was too outspoken and too radical to be embraced by the cautious, overwhelmingly male leadership. By the time of her death in 1931, she was largely written out of the history of antilynching and of civil rights. She received no obit in the New York Times at the time; it would be decades until her full contribution was remembered and celebrated.

Is social media worse?

With Wells-Barnett’s experience in mind, our current social media and media landscape looks less like a radical break with an idyllic media past, and more like a continuation of a racist default.

As we’ve seen, lies and conspiracy theories were common currency in Wells-Barnett’s’ day. So were calls to violence—calls which were arguably more explicit, more frequent, and more deadly, even than those we see now. Right wing white supremacist bias was also more sweeping and more entrenched, certainly in the South, arguably throughout the nation. Black writers had less access to mainstream platforms than they do in 2025, and Black women had even less access than that.

In this context, it’s clear that part of the reason that social media is “divisive” is that it allows for people to speak who were largely shut out of national conversations in the past. White supremacists in the post-Reconstruction South had a hammerlock on media—a hammerlock enforced by extremes of mob violence up to and including murder. Antiracist journalists like Wells-Barnett could only find platforms with difficulty and at substantial personal risk. And even when they did manage to gain an audiencce, they struggled to affect policy (federal antilynching legislation has still never passed) and to maintain a career and a reputation.

This isn’t to dismiss the radicalizing power of social media; nor is it to downplay the dangers of reactionary media consolidation. I think it’s important to realize, though, that these problems and dangers are not exactly new, even if they take new forms as media technologies change. More, the new technologies also create new opportunities and new possibilities. If Ida B. Wells-Barnett were writing today, she’d no doubt be using social media, newsletters, and blogs to get her message out.

Technology can’t solve fascism, though, just as technology isn’t, ultimately, the cause of fascism. Looking back over the two hundred fifty year fascist slog of American history can be bleak and disheartening. But there’s also some hope, and some inspiration, in realizing that we are not the first ones to fight these battles, and that in some ways we arguably have more tools now than those in the past. Ida B. Wells-Barnett did not see her cause triumph; she did not see her people freed. But she never stopped fighting. As Ta-Nehisi Coates said earlier this year,

…for those of us who ground ourselves in a larger tradition…This is a remarkable time in terms of our freedom as writers and journalists to speak to people, in terms of the amount of people who are empowered and have some amount of privilege and could just look away and are not looking away.

It’s not a great time politically — you understand what I’m saying? But it’s just not the worst, either. It’s not the worst.