When Democratic Massachusetts Rep. Jake Auchincloss recently described America’s digital realm as “a failed society,” he did something few members of Congress have managed: He reached for the right metaphor.

The surge of antisemitism on TikTok and X is not a content-moderation glitch to be patched with better filters or sharper terms of service. It is the predictable output of platforms that have ceased to function as governed communities at all. They are failed states, and antisemitism, as it so often has been in history, is the clearest warning signal that institutions have collapsed.

Political scientists define a failed state by the breakdown of legitimate authority, the erosion of public order, the rise of unaccountable warlords and the scapegoating of minorities who become convenient targets for grievance. By each measure, our largest platforms now qualify. X has stripped its trust-and-safety architecture to studs; TikTok’s recommendation engine operates as an opaque sovereign whose rulings no user can appeal.

Into that ungoverned territory have moved a new class of digital warlords. Influencers monetize outrage, bot networks manufacture consensus, and ideologues have discovered that Jew-hatred, the world’s most reliable political accelerant, still reliably juices engagement.

The American Jewish Committee reported earlier this year that social media has become the principal source of the current antisemitic wave, surpassing every other vector. At the recent Milken Institute global conference, Jewish leaders described platforms as “algorithmic hate machines” whose business models reward the amplification of exactly the content a functioning society would suppress.

These are not the complaints of the squeamish. They are the diagnostic observations of people watching a polity come apart.

As a media law scholar, I am wary of metaphors that smuggle in bad policy. “Failed state” is usually invoked to justify intervention, and the First Amendment properly forbids the government from intervening in free expression.

But Auchincloss’s framing does not demand censorship. It demands that we stop pretending that platforms are neutral pipes and start treating them as the governance structures they have become, shaping what hundreds of millions of Americans see, believe and fear.

That reframing points to a regulatory move the First Amendment permits and, I would argue, encourages. There is a difference between speech and reach. A user’s right to post an antisemitic conspiracy theory is constitutionally protected. A platform’s decision to inject that theory into 10 million feeds through an opaque recommender system is not speech in any traditional sense; it is industrial distribution.

Consistent with the First Amendment, Congress can require transparency in how amplification works, as well as mandate independent algorithmic audits and condition liability protections on minimum governance standards. This is not censorship. It is the digital equivalent of creating zoning codes in a territory that currently has none.

Skeptics will object that regulating amplification is a slippery slope to regulating speech. That objection has force, but it mistakes the terrain. The slope is already slick, and we are already sliding. When a 17-year-old opens TikTok and is served, within four scrolls, a video arguing that Jews control the banks, no neutral marketplace of ideas is at work. An algorithm has made an editorial decision on behalf of a corporation that faces no accountability for the consequences. Calling that arrangement “free expression” empties the phrase of meaning.

The antisemitism now mushrooming on X and TikTok is the canary, not the cage. If the only minority being hunted were Jews, the moral case for action would still be overwhelming. But failed states do not stay narrow in their cruelty. The same ungoverned spaces that incubate antisemitism today will incubate tomorrow’s persecution of whichever group the algorithm decides engages best. History’s pattern is unbroken on this point.

Auchincloss is not the first politician to worry about online hate, and he won’t be the last. What distinguishes his formulation is its refusal of the usual euphemisms. He is not asking platforms to “do better.” He is saying that what they have built has failed, and that democratic societies do not tolerate failed states on their maps. We should not tolerate one in our pockets.

Rebuilding will be slow work. It will require Congress to pass the Platform Accountability and Transparency Act, courts to recognize amplification as a distinct regulatory object and citizens to demand that the platform companies be answerable to something other than their own engagement metrics. The alternative is to accept that a generation of Americans will come of age inside a failed society, learning its grammar of grievance and its oldest hatred.

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