A Call for Unified Action to Curb the Abuse of American Citizens by Our Major Social Media Platforms

 

I let this e-fly (or mail) TO: FCC, FTC, SEC, DOJ, FEC, U.S. Chief Justice Roberts, U.S. Solicitor General Sauer, PA Chief Justice Wecht, PA AG Sunday, PA Governor Shapiro, U.S. Senators Fetterman & McCormick, U.S. House Rep Deluzio, PA Senator Jay Costa, PA House Rep Abigail Salisbury; at 2:45 to go on the record about the mechanics of end user abuse by social media platforms. I think it turned out a well and I'm glad I put it on the record come what may. All we can do is point out to the powers that be what's wrong and how to fix it. I can't say I'm hopeful they'll act but I tried.

My name is Bobby Bress. I am sixty years old, a disabled former Teamsters Local 399 film industry driver, born in Pittsburgh and writing to you from Pittsburgh. I am writing to share a hard-won understanding of exactly how the major American social media platforms abuse everyday American citizens, and, more importantly, to tell you that the problem is fixable, that the fix is not complicated, and that fixing it would let this country get back to the work it is supposed to be doing.

 

I want to be clear about the spirit of this letter before I lay out the case. This is not a grievance letter. I am not writing to you angry. I am writing to you, twenty-five years into the worst of what the internet became, more hopeful than I have been in a long while, because once you see how the machine actually works, you also see how plainly it can be unmade. The technology did not fail us. Brilliant people built extraordinary tools and handed them to us. The people who run the businesses failed us, and the people who run the government let them. That is a human failure, not a technological one, and human failures can be corrected by humans who decide to correct them. That is what I am asking you to decide.

 

My Evidence, and Why It Is Not the Point

 

Since 2022 I have conducted an independent forensic investigation of the corporate architecture behind the Banksy brand operation, published in real time on Reddit, GitHub, and Medium. Over four years that investigation forced me to learn, in granular detail, exactly how the platforms suppress a citizen whose work runs adverse to powerful interests. I watched my reach get throttled as my evidence got stronger, the early pieces reached three hundred thousand readers, and the later ones, sharper and better documented, hit a ceiling of a few thousand. That is not how an audience losing interest behaves. That is a hand on the dial.

 

And you do not have to take my word for any of it. Here is one thread you can pull yourself, in about fifteen seconds, on the platform's own public display. I hold Reddit's Elder badge at r/Banksy, awarded fourteen times for sustained contribution, and yet I do not appear anywhere on that same community's list of its top contributors. Both facts sit on the platform's own page. They cannot both be honest. The machinery that hands out the badge is automatic and counts what I actually did; the machinery that builds the public-facing list quietly leaves me off it. That is the whole mechanism in miniature, in plain sight, checkable by anyone reading this. I documented the rest of it the same way, from the inside, with the platforms' own metrics as the proof, and I offer the full record to the federal authorities as a worked specimen of how the dark machinery operates on one citizen, because the specimen scales.

 

And here is the thing I most want you to understand. That Banksy fight is not why I am writing. An art-and-business mystery, even one where a citizen got robbed of a fair evaluation of his own work and abused for the trouble, is a small thing in the scope of what matters. I will say plainly that I was ripped off of the present value of years of honest work. That happens to people every day. I will probably reap a fair reward for it in the end, Reddit never kicked me off, and GitHub has my work locked and time-stamped as my intellectual property if I turn out to be right. So I am not crying about it. I am setting it down right here, in front of all of you, and walking past it. Because the small thing taught me how to see the enormous thing standing behind it.

 

The Enormous Thing

 

The same machinery that throttled one citizen's art investigation runs, at a scale a thousand times larger, across the whole of American public life. The major platforms, Reddit, X, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and the rest, operate an integrated business model that monetizes the manufactured division of Americans against Americans. Operators pay to engineer consensus. The platforms profile us, sort us, gate what we see, and route engineered hostility through us. The labor that performs the manufactured fights gets bought cheap from low-wage countries, Pakistan, Thailand, and a bucket they politely call "Other", while the platform pockets the spread between what the domestic operator pays and what the foreign labor costs. Then they sell the whole churning mess a second time, as training data, to the artificial intelligence industry. Reddit alone takes sixty million dollars a year from Google for it. The discord is the product. We are the raw material. And the discord we are fed becomes the discord the next generation of machines is trained to reproduce.

 

This is the machine that has spent a decade making America about hate instead of great. You have your own evidence of it. Every American does. You have watched the machine take something you cared about, your town, your work, your faith, your politics, your family's peace at the dinner table, and turn it into a fight you never asked to have, with people who in the unmanipulated world are mostly decent and mostly just trying to live. You felt it happen and maybe never had a name for it. The name is in this package. It is tradecraft once reserved for hostile foreign governments and for the worst chapters of our own government's history against its own people. It is running right now, against all of us, for money.

 

The Easy Fix

 

Here is the good news, and it is the reason I am writing in hope rather than anger. The tools to fix this already exist. Congress already passed the laws. The Federal Trade Commission Act, the Securities Exchange Act, the Foreign Agents Registration Act, the campaign-finance statutes, the antitrust laws, the Communications Act, and the consumer-protection and public-nuisance authorities every state attorney general already wields, every one of them reaches this conduct. What is missing is not a new law. What is missing is the decision to use the ones we have.

 

And the fix I am asking for is modest. Make the platforms disclose who is paying them to engineer consensus. Make them disclose when foreign labor is performing American-citizen identity in paid campaigns. Make the gating machinery transparent enough that an independent party can check the platforms' claims against the truth. Restore the public access that lets researchers and journalists verify what is really happening. That is most of it. I am not asking anyone to shut a platform down. I am not asking to silence honest foreign voices, who are welcome when they speak as themselves. I am not against business. The platforms that can survive honesty will keep operating. The ones that cannot were never running honest businesses to begin with.

 

What I am really asking for, underneath all the statutes, is that the ethics we live by in the real world be made to apply in the electronic one. We did not agree that terrestrial ethics stop at the screen. Somebody just decided it for us and never asked. I want the real world back, our cable lines and our phone bills as its honest spine, delivering more to American life at lower cost than what the platforms, the hyperscalers, and the handful of delivery services that swallowed the Post Office are quietly adding to the price of simply being an American. The internet was supposed to be an asset held in common, a thing that made us and the world richer in every sense. It can still be that. It is not too late, and it is not even hard.

 

To the Offices Receiving This

 

Here is what I think of all of you, for whatever a Pittsburgh citizen with no horse in the race is worth. This machine has been running against Americans for over a decade. It has been in the public record the whole time. There have been hearings, academic studies, and journalism, everything except action. Your offices have had the authority and the jurisdiction the whole time. You are reading this letter today because the action did not come. Whatever your reasons were, you can keep them. I do not need them explained to me. I am a citizen. I am not your chaplain.

 

What I need from you is action. The kind that builds new monuments instead of new excuses. Americans aim high, we always have, we are the country that puts the high aim up in stone so the next generation remembers we did. The extraction machine is not the natural order of things. It is the order you have been letting stand. It will take more than cynicism to make America great. It will take you doing your jobs. Do them, and you prove that the institutions of American self-government still serve the citizen. Decline, and you prove the opposite. The country is watching which it will be.

 

A word about the President, because I know the machine has trained half of you to stop reading at his name. Between us, and I will say it once: I have more faith that President Trump will hear this call than that most of you will. I disagree with him on plenty. He is who he is. But he tries, and he has stood up to the big platforms in ways no one else in his position has. The package goes to the White House in parallel with this letter, through the Chief of Staff, who, by the look of things, is the one person in Washington keeping the executive branch moving while a great many men accomplish nothing. I do not understand why the rest of you cannot work for the American citizen regardless of what he does. And to every citizen reading this who cannot stand the man: do not blame the President for the machine. Blame the machine. Blame the machine. Even if his idea of a great America is not yours, on this one thing you want exactly what he wants, the machine off the back of this country. Start there. We can argue about the rest once we can hear each other again.

 

To Every Citizen Reading Along

 

This material is yours now. Not mine, yours. Take it, make it your own, and bring it to anyone in power you believe can speed the plow for us. You do not need my permission and you do not need to credit me. If you have your own evidence of how the machine took something you loved and turned it into a fight, add it to the record. The whole point is that one citizen is only one data point, and the machine cannot survive ten thousand of us naming it at once.

 

We are each, in the end, either part of the problem or part of the solution. So I will say plainly what I want, on the public record, in front of every office that could act and every citizen who could push them. I want us to take back what we built. I want the technology that so many talented people made for us turned back toward improving American lives instead of farming them. And I want the same honest, affordable electronic square offered to the rest of the world, because a country that fixes this first has something worth exporting. The people who will line up to tell you it cannot be done, or is more complicated than it looks, are the same people the current arrangement pays. It is not complicated. It is overdue.

 

If that is the country you want, here is where you start. Forward these materials to your own representatives, federal and state. Tell them a citizen has already done the work. Tell them you expect them to do theirs.

 

This is not the first time I have brought a piece of this to a federal authority. In late 2021, early in the investigation, I reported editioning irregularities involving a Banksy-related entity to the appropriate federal channel. Part of what has become this filing has therefore been in the system, on the record, for four years. The action did not come. That is part of why I am writing all of you at once now.

 

The full master complaint and the executive summary follow below. Parallel filings calibrated to each office's jurisdiction follow. I welcome any correspondence from any of you, and the public record at github.com/bobilon will track what each office does, and does not do, with what I have sent.

 

God Bless America.

 

Best,

Bobby Bress

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

21 May 2026

 

Executive Summary: An E-Townhall Prospectus

Towards the Honest Operation of America's E-Town Square

 

If every agency, senator, judge, and state official named at the top of this document were in a room together, alone together in real rather than electronic space, this is what I would put before the group. The framers expected the union to work through hard questions this way, civil deliberation toward best practices, citizens informed, officials accountable, the room operating on the working assumption that everyone present has a stake in getting the answer right. I have no Quaker affiliations, but the Pennsylvania-Quaker spirit of community governance that built this commonwealth is in this document. Plain American English. No shouting. No performance. We have been in electronic space where all civility has went out the freakin' window for too long. This document is one citizen's attempt to put a real-space deliberation back into the e-space where the country has been losing it.

 

A plain-American-English briefing for everyone reading this, the agency staff, the regulators, the senators, the judges, the Reddit readers, the citizens. Same document for all of you. That is how American democracy is supposed to work, contrary to wider opinions about what citizens can and cannot ask their institutions for.

 

What This Is

 

This package documents how the major American social-media platforms, Reddit, X, Meta, TikTok, YouTube, and the platforms operating alongside them, have built an integrated business model that monetizes the manufactured division of American citizens against American citizens. It documents how the architecture has been operating against my own four-year forensic investigation of the Banksy corporate operation, and it identifies the regulatory tools already on the books that reach the architecture. The package asks the receiving institutions for unified action across their respective jurisdictions to bring honest operation to the electronic public square the American citizen has been losing across the past two decades.

 

I am Bobby Bress. Sixty years old. Born in Pittsburgh, working from Pittsburgh, a disabled former Teamsters Local 399 film industry driver, no institutional affiliation, no funding source, no commercial interest in the outcome. Four years of time-stamped public-record investigative work, available at github.com/bobilon. This document goes to every agency, every senator, every judge, and every state official I named at the top, all at the same time. We all see who else is here. I am also posting it publicly on GitHub, Reddit, Medium, and across social media at the same time, so every citizen who wants to read along is in the room. The same document is going to all of us. There is no separate inside version and outside version. We are working through this together, the way the framers expected the union to work through difficult questions. The constitution is not a holy object. It is a working document recording what the negotiation has produced so far. This is the next round of the negotiation.

 

The Problem

 

The platforms run a four-layer apparatus. Within minutes of posting, content profiling classifies what a user has said, who is likely to engage with it, and whether the content aligns with or runs adverse to the interests of operators who have paid the platform for engineered engagement. Differential-visibility-gating then surfaces operator-aligned contentto trending and recommended spots while throttling operator-adverse content, with the user posting the adverse content seeing engagement metrics painted to look like organic decay while the underlying readership has been quietly gated below the displayed numbers. Consensus-engineering routes specific audience segments to specific content calibrated by operator-payment. And geographic wage-arbitrage routes the labor that performs the manufactured comment-thread output to non-English-speaking and developing-world countries, primarily Pakistan, Thailand, and the catch-all bucket the platforms call "Other." The platform sits as middleman, capturing the spread between what the domestic operators pay and what the foreign labor costs.

 

The same engagement substrate gets monetized twice. First as immediate consensus-engineering output sold to domestic operators paying for sentiment shaping, narrative amplification, mob-formation, and adverse-narrative suppression. Second as permanent training input sold to the artificial intelligence industry, Reddit's $60 million per year licensing agreement with Google, the parallel arrangements with OpenAI and the other LLM-training operators. The manufactured discord American citizens have been consuming is also the substrate the next generation of AI is being trained on. Whatever distortions the engineered-discord substrate carries are now being baked into the AI models the broader American economy is being asked to depend on.

 

This tradecraft is historically associated with hostile foreign-government operations against American civic life, and with the worst chapters of domestic-government conduct against American citizens, the J. Edgar Hoover-era manufactured-domestic-enemy machinery that operated for decades behind manufactured-threat justifications while the apparatus running it served interests other than the citizens it claimed to protect. The contemporary platform apparatus operates the same mechanism at scales orders of magnitude beyond anything the twentieth century produced.

 

I can prove the architecture operates against citizens, because it operated against me. The Reddit publication history of my four-year Banksy investigation, viewable at the platform's own Post Insights display, documents a trajectory of platform suppression that runs inversely to the quality of the work. Pre-suppression baseline (2022-2024): pieces reaching 339,000 views, 313,000 views, 130,000 views, 126,000 views, and dozens of substantive pieces consistently in the 5,000-to-30,000-views range. Post-suppression compression (recent months): pieces of equal or greater investigative depth reaching 2,000-to-7,000 views as a ceiling. Content got sharper. Reach got smaller. Organic decay does not produce that pattern. Selective gating does.

 

Here is the anomaly any reader can verify in fifteen seconds on Reddit's own public display. I hold the Elder badge at r/Banksy, awarded fourteen times for sustained contribution. Yet I do not appear on that same community's list of its top contributors. Both facts sit on the platform's own page, and they cannot both be honest. The system that hands out the badge is automatic and counts what I actually did; the system that builds the public-facing contributor list quietly leaves me off it. That is not a glitch. That is the architecture, in plain sight, on the platform's own page.

 

The Fix-It Matrix

 

The regulatory tools that reach this architecture already exist. Congress passed them. The agencies operate them. The state attorneys-general operate the parallel state authorities. What is missing is the unified application of the tools to the architecture the platforms have built. The matrix of available approaches, with best-fit identification, runs as follows.

 

Option A, Disclosure Rulemaking

Tool: Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, and state attorney-general rulemaking authority.

Action: Require platforms to maintain public registries of operator-payments for engagement-shaping services, parallel to existing campaign-finance and advertising-disclosure frameworks. Require disclosure of foreign engagement-cluster labor performing American-citizen-identity in coordinated paid campaigns, parallel to the Foreign Agents Registration Act framework. Require algorithmic transparency.

Best fit: Strongest single intervention. Disclosure is the precondition of every other regulatory tool. The architecture cannot survive its own disclosure. The platforms that adapt to transparency continue operating. The platforms that cannot survive transparency were not operating legitimate business operations to begin with.

 

Option B, Securities-Fraud Inquiry at the IPO Disclosure Level

Tool: Securities and Exchange Commission's offering-disclosure and ongoing-reporting authority under the Securities Act of 1933 and the Securities Exchange Act of 1934.

Action: Open inquiry into the engagement-metrics substrate underlying the Reddit S-1 of March 2024 ($6.4 billion valuation, $34 share-price at offering), the periodic disclosures of Meta, Snap, Pinterest, Match, and the broader category of publicly-traded social-media platforms whose valuations depend on engagement-metrics representations. Determine extent to which represented metrics include engineered-engagement substrateas material misrepresentation.

Best fit: Strongest doctrinal frame with identifiable victims (investors who bought based on represented metrics) and established remedies under Section 11 of the Securities Act and Section 10(b) / Rule 10b-5 of the Exchange Act. Moves on faster timelines than other regulatory frames.

 

Option C, Cross-Platform Coordination Inquiry

Tool: Department of Justice antitrust authority under the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act, plus RICO inquiry authority where the predicate-acts substrate on wire fraud and securities fraud supports the pattern-of-racketeering-activity element.

Action: Inquire into the cross-platform-coordination pattern operating through shared cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure), shared advertising-technology supply lines (The Trade Desk, Magnite), content-moderation-policy convergence, shared engagement-cluster-vendor relationships, and shared data-broker integrations. Determine whether the observable pattern reflects coordinated conduct that the antitrust and RICO statutes reach, or whether the pattern reflects parallel-but-independent operations.

Best fit: Most resource-intensive frame and requires subpoena power. Appropriate as a request for investigation rather than as a primary first-action frame. Compounds with Option B because the predicate-acts substrate overlaps.

 

Option D, Foreign-Agent Disclosure Enforcement

Tool: Department of Justice FARA enforcement authority.

Action: Inquire into the foreign-engagement-cluster operations performing American-citizen-identity in coordinated paid campaigns. Determine whether the operators-of-record and the platforms facilitating the operations meet the FARA registration triggers under the agent-of-foreign-principal framework.

Best fit: Compounds with Option A's disclosure rulemaking. The FARA framework was designed for exactly this category of foreign-principal-funded American-public-influence operation. The framework predates the internet but the statute reaches the conduct.

 

Option E, State Consumer-Protection and Public-Nuisance Action

Tool: State attorney-general consumer-protection and public-nuisance authorities, exercised on behalf of state residents harmed by platform operations.

Action: State action under the state consumer-protection statutes and the public-nuisance doctrine that has been applied successfully in the multi-state opioid litigation, the lead-paint cases, and the gun-industry litigation. Action on behalf of state residents whose civic life has been degraded by the platform consensus-engineering apparatus.

Best fit: Independent of federal action. State AGs do not need federal coordination to move. Pennsylvania has standing through my residency. The state-level frame creates parallel pressure that compounds with the federal frames.

 

Option F, Legislative Action at the Section 230 Narrowing Level

Tool: Congressional legislation amending Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act to clarify that platform liability immunity does not extend to platform conduct as architect-and-seller of consensus-engineering revenue-model services, only to platform conduct as passive host of user-generated content.

Action: House and Senate legislation calibrated to narrow Section 230 in the direction the recent jurisprudence (Twitter v. Taamneh, Gonzalez v. Google, the state-court platform-design cases) has been moving. Bipartisan-civic legislation that the federal recipients of this package can introduce and advance.

Best fit: Slowest frame but the most durable. Statutory clarification is what prevents the next generation of platforms from rebuilding the architecture under different doctrinal cover.

 

The Recommended Combination

 

Options A and B at maximum urgency. The disclosure rulemaking (A) and the securities-fraud inquiry (B) operate on the fastest timelines and produce the disclosure substrate every other option depends on. Options D and E run in parallel without requiring coordination. Option C runs as a calibrated investigation request. Option F runs as long-trajectory legislation and is appropriate for the legislative recipients of this package to advance.

 

What I Am Asking

 

Of the receiving institutions, open the inquiries. Apply the tools already in your hands. The substantive case is in the master FCC complaint attached to this package and posted at the public record. The matrix above tells you what tools you have and what each tool can do. The institutions that act will demonstrate that the institutions of American self-government still serve the American citizen. The institutions that do not act will demonstrate the opposite. That choice is yours to make.

 

Of the public reading this, watch what the institutions do. The package is posted publicly. I will document the responses, and the silences, in public. The citizens reading the work will see what each institution does or does not do. The cynicism that has accumulated across the past decade about whether the institutions of American self-government still serve the American citizen is a cynicism the institutions can refute by acting, or confirm by not acting. The choice belongs to them. The watching belongs to us.

 

Of every American citizen across the political spectrum, the architecture this package documents operates against citizens on the left, on the right, and in the center. The remedies asked for in this package benefit citizens across the spectrum. The structural-extraction-architecture the platforms have built is not a partisan issue. It is an American issue. The citizens recognizing the architecture and refusing the manufactured division it produces is the foundation any unified response begins from.

 

The full master FCC complaint, the coordinated parallel filings, the citizen-letter to the receiving institutions, and the supporting documentation are available at github.com/bobilon/Restoring-Honest-Operation-of-the-Electronic-Public-Square. The full master complaint is published at medium.com/@bobbybress/restoring-honest-operation-of-the-electronic-public-square-9f3fd2df590f. The Wednesday 20 May 2026 Banksy auction events at Bonhams and Fair Warning provide the empirical substrate the package references. The package goes out finalized on Thursday 21 May 2026 with the integrated post-event substrate complete.

 

Bobby Bress

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

 

Read the full complaint: https://medium.com/@bobbybress/restoring-honest-operation-of-the-electronic-public-square-9f3fd2df590f

Public record and supporting documents: https://github.com/bobilon/Restoring-Honest-Operation-of-the-Electronic-Public-Square