Kohli is the advocacy associate at Interfaith Alliance, a national organization dedicated to protecting the integrity of both religion and democracy in the United States.
For better or for worse, I grew up with social media. I remember jumping on Google+ after school and continuing conversations with friends. I would use Facebook groups to organize class gifts for favorite teachers. Snapchat was for sending funny pictures and maintaining streaks as a way to qualify friendships. Of course, social media platforms are so much more than places to make silly posts for your friends. Platforms are part of a complicated information ecosystem, in which some parts thrive as healthy forums, and other parts spread lies and misinformation, allowing hate and harassment to thrive on and off line.
I also grew up with Indian-American, immigrant parents. My grandparents tell me the beauty of this country is that people of so many backgrounds and cultures can come here to coexist. But social media, for all its strengths and potential, gives an outsized voice to people who want to spread hate and sow division. When I scroll through the depths of Twitter or accidentally click on a YouTube video that sends my recommendations down a rabbit hole of extremism, it’s clear to me that each of us is constantly in danger of being pushed into echo chambers of hate.
Elon Musk’s plans for Twitter threaten the very coexistence my grandparents celebrated. Musk’s fumbling leadership of the influential social media platform risks the democratic promise of our country. If hate is allowed to run rampant and millions of users feel unsafe, we are failing to live up to that promise.
Musk has positioned himself as a champion of the First Amendment right to freedom of speech. This framing could not be further from the truth. Instead, he has allowed extremists and people with hateful ideologies to expand their reach on Twitter. Musk fired staff in charge of dealing with hateful content on the platform, leaving the company too short-staffed to handle the increase in harmful posts. In the 12-hour period after Musk’s ownership of Twitter was finalized, the use of derogatory language toward Black people increased almost 500 percent.
While concerns about Musk’s damaging impact on free speech have been well-documented, the risks to another fundamental right have been overlooked: freedom of religion, which recognizes the right for people of all faiths or none to practice what they believe. Social media is so intertwined with our lives offline that threats to religious freedom are no longer confined to the physical world. Every day that hate is allowed to run rampant and target communities online, the freedom to believe as we choose erodes.
In recent years, harmful content on social media has manifested in physical acts of violence targeting vulnerable communities. A 2021 report from the Anti-Defamation League exposed the harmful effects of online hate on different communities, from an increase in violence against Asian Americans, to antisemitic harassment directed at Jewish members of Congress, to the quadrupling of hateful Facebook posts against African Americans after the murder of George Floyd.
There are too many examples of real-world violence committed by young social media users who encountered increasingly extremist content online. The perpetrator of the devastating attack at a supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, N.Y., streamed the massacre on Twitch. The shooter wrote a manifesto on Google Docs filled with white supremacist ideology, stating that he was radicalized on 4chan in 2020. The Twitch livestream was taken down in just two minutes, but the video remained on Facebook for over 10 hours, allowing 46,000 people to share it. His actions, and the failure of platforms to identify and take down content like this immediately, created further extremist material for other users to view.
For better or for worse, social media is the most accessible way for people to connect online. Our government has an obligation to protect people of all backgrounds and identities. As backlash against content moderation comes to a head on Twitter, there’s no telling how other platforms might adjust their policies in the future. The national conversation around what’s happening with Twitter is laser-focused on the whims of a CEO who doesn’t seem to understand what he wants. All the while, real people and communities are being hurt.
While people like Musk play games with the ever-growing universe we’ve created online, our government must devote real time and resources to taming the giant that is the tech industry. Without regulation, and while people from different faiths, backgrounds and identities are harassed on and off social media, this country fails to be a safe haven for the people who need it most. Big Tech and its social media platforms are only getting started – we must ensure that this industry’s progress does not come at the cost of our most sacred freedoms.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.