In his 2025 essay “It’s the Internet, Stupid,” political theorist Francis Fukuyama revisited one of the defining political questions of the 21st century: why has populism surged across the globe in the last decade? Best known for “The End of History?” (1989) and The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in which he argued that liberal democracy and market capitalism represented the final form of human government after the Cold War.
The book was later criticized, and Fukuyama was taken to task for touting a naïve view of the world. One of many factors he didn’t consider was the rise of the Islamic state, which became a new threat to the West after 911.
Fukuyama’s central argument for the rise of populism is technological: the Internet and social media. By process of elimination, he concludes that other factors—economic inequality, racism, cultural backlash, or leadership failures—while significant, cannot fully explain the timing or the peculiar nature of today’s populist movements. Fukuyama lists nine commonly cited causes of global populism, ranging from economic inequality to human nature, before zeroing in on the Internet.
His diagnosis of the Internet’s role is framed around the loss of traditional means of communication. Before the digital age, information passed through gatekeeping institutions—newspapers, universities, editors, and broadcasters—that filtered falsehood and moderated tone. The Internet’s democratization of communication removed these filters, enabling everyone to become their own publisher. What once appeared as a liberating channel for knowledge, Fukuyama argues, has devolved into a destabilizing force that erodes trust, empowers conspiracy theories, and rewards sensationalism over truth.
He highlights how algorithms, designed to maximize engagement for profit, drive users toward extreme and emotionally charged content. Fukuyama’s account captures not just a technological transformation but also a psychological one—the conversion of information consumption into a competitive, addictive game of attention.
One of his most striking examples is the anti-vaccine movement, which he says is emblematic of the Internet’s distortion of truth. Vaccination skepticism, he notes, has no coherent ideological basis and would once have contradicted conservative reverence for science and innovation.
Yet online echo chambers allowed anti-vax sentiment to spread virally, demonstrating how networked misinformation can override reason and public health alike. By connecting the anti-vax phenomenon to populist distrust of elites, Fukuyama underlines how the Internet has fused political grievance with systemic nihilism—the belief that all knowledge is manipulated or fake.
I take issue with Fukuyama’s conclusion and the assumptions he made in reaching it. The Internet and social media are not the answer. The answer is the failure of Western governments to address their people’s needs. Social media is an amplifier of the public mood, not the cause. In his quest to find a single cause, Fukuyama became fixated on social media and overstated its importance.
Meanwhile, he calmly dismisses economic inequality, racism, cultural backlash, and leadership failures as relevant contributors. To me, it’s easy to find the right answer if one is objective about globalism, the real culprit. Rich men’s schemes to expand their wealth are boundless, and the needs of the public do not appear on their radar.
The gospel of globalism teaches that workers have no value and no grievance. Use them where their cost is minimized. The nation-state is a thorn in their sides that must be removed. How dare the nation-state leaders try to rein us in with their laws. We want only international laws that we can control outside of the nation-state.
Fukuyama overlooks that populism reflects the strategic exploitation of media by political actors, leading to public backlash. In addition, he doesn’t identify the public as participants in the media, which they are. Their behavior is the pulse of the culture.
Fukuyama’s embrace of globalism is evident in his discussion of COVID. He discusses the bad actors who spread misinformation and conspiracy theories on social media, while ignoring the fact that the federal government did the same. It demanded adherence to rules it made up, not supported by science.
It attacked doctors for suggesting effective alternative treatments in order to protect vaccine manufacturers’ profits. Branding the critics of the government’s approach to the pandemic as quacks and liars shows his support for government controls, which is the globalist model.
I can’t explain the logic behind Fukuyama’s article. Is this a case of an academic trying to create new interest in a particular subject, or was he out of material to talk about? Perhaps he wants to raise the visibility of social media as a destructive force, so people start paying more attention. His time would be better spent calling out the real danger: the lack of responsible governance in the Western world.
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.
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