What If There Had Been Social Media in the 1940s?

For how long could World War II have dragged on? Was the nuclear arms race a foregone conclusion?

So far in 2022, I’ve constructed two alternate history thought-experiments. Each of them speculates on how history might have unfolded differently had social media been widely available throughout the 1920s and the 1930s.

Specifically, those ruminations addressed how a hypothetical existence of the World Wide Web might have influenced the 1918 Spanish Flu epidemic and the Great Depression.

Once again, I will tweak that formula to ponder how the 1940s could have unfolded if social media had been a global phenomenon amidst the rise of Hitler and World War II.

Imagine the vast rabbit-hole of cyberspace…and then move it up eight or nine decades in the timeline. How would Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and similar platforms have exacerbated the wartime climate?

From The Wild West to Ethnic Cleansing

In this scenario, TV and movies would have been first developed and released throughout the 1870s (if the telephone and radio had been invented during the days of the French Revolution). With television sets and radio receivers in Gilded Age living rooms, there may have been reporters on hand to capture live-action footage from events such as the Great Chicago Fire, the Battle of Little Big Horn, James A. Garfield’s assassination, and the dedication of the Statue of Liberty.

Journalists would have craved direct quotations from freedom fighters such as Harriet Tubman, Walt Whitman, Lee Yick, Victoria Woodhull, Sitting Bull, and Martha “Calamity Jane” Cannary. In fact, cowboy culture of the Wild West probably would have been en vogue — as rowdy, conflict-lovin’ Americans watched the Earps, the Jameses, and the Youngers becoming the Kardashians or Hiltons of their era.

Every news anchor would have wanted that exclusive interview sit-down interview with Charles Guiteau or Robert Newton Ford. Not to mention the innovators of this time — with Thomas Edison, Mark Twain, and Robert Lewis Stevenson likely becoming yesterday’s incarnations of Elon Musk, Oprah Winfrey, and Stephen King, respectively.

Depending on whether such widespread public commentary could have staved off the Great Depression in this alternate timeline, I’d envision the home computer becoming an American staple in the 1930s. Some version of the Internet could have been released as World War II was beginning, and entrepreneurs would undoubtedly have sought to infuse it into the global economy across the 1940s and 1950s.

The digital divide due to class divisions may have been inevitable, regardless of our national prosperity threshold. Also, we shall work under the assumption that, prior to the 1940s, politicians in the United States would have been mostly the same people as those elected in our reality.

With Franklin Delano Roosevelt already in the Oval Office by this point, would he have defeated Alf Landon or Wendell Willkie so easily? My guess is that Landon would have ended up as a milquetoast sacrificial lamb against Roosevelt, but FDR’s victory against Wilkie could have been a lot tighter. Still, let’s assume that FDR secured himself a third term.

By this point, Adolf Hitler has presumably established his footing throughout Europe and other parts of the globe, with American media often distracted by other sensationalistic topics (Lucy Mercer, anyone?). Although it’s not like Hitler would have been entirely absent from the public consciousness — FDR’s 1937 “Quarantine Speech” in Chicago and Hitler’s 1939 Reichstag speech, when blasted over the airwaves on a loop, would have ginned up American nationalists as those two heads-of-state took very public shots at one another.

World War ‘Through-With-It’

A rather scary thought is whether the nuclear arms race might have been accelerated during this period. Seeing how investigative journalists would become more emboldened with moving-picture media at their fingertips — what if somebody had blown the lid open on the Manhattan Project?

We could have witnessed a concurrent buildup of nuclear research amongst the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union. Timewise, however, I’m going to cast doubt on the likelihood that Germans would have had an atomic bomb deployment-ready prior to Hitler’s fall from power. And, in the years succeeding the war, standard game theory and mutual-assured destruction may have been enough to avoid a nuclear holocaust by the middle of the century.

One thing that I’m certain wouldn’t have been different was American anger. Just think of the public reaction to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor possibly being live-streamed via Facebook.

President Roosevelt would have undoubtedly conducted televised interviews with German refugees to the U.S. He was trying his hardest to get Americans to care as much about Germany’s war crimes as they already did about the ones being committed by Japan. Without question, these intimate two-person fireside chats could have accelerated pro-war sentiments even faster if they’d occurred prior to the Pearl Harbor bombing.

But, prior to America’s 1941 entry into World War II, there had been a notable antiwar sentiment amongst the general public. Given the tendency of social media to proliferate misinformation or disinformation, would nationalistic fervor for the war created more divisions than existed in our reality?

I’m just visualizing all the potential conspiracy theories that a 1940s iteration of the Internet could have disseminated. Might some isolationists — thinking of Henry Ford and Elizabeth Dilling, here — have used social media to spread lies? Something akin to the theory that Nazi concentration camps were embellished or fabricated altogether? (in the vein of Bill Kaysing making claims that the U.S. moon landings were hoaxes)

There was also the symbolism of “the Big Three” — FDR, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin — holding their 1945 summit at Yalta. For many Americans, seeing and hearing this trio of world leaders in technicolor and crisp audio would represent new hope. It would have provided a clear blueprint for the post-war reorganization of Europe within the American psyche.

Others, by contrast, might have viewed it as arrogance. After all, why should the U.S., the U.K., and the U.S.S.R. get to call all of the shots? For peaceniks or anti-imperial thinkers, Yalta may have cemented their intense hatred for everything embodying hegemony and colonization. This could have been compounded by Internet whistle-blowers regularly calling out FDR for his allowance of Japanese internment camps over the past three years.

Finally, with the magnified national trauma caused by FDR’s brain hemorrhage in April 1945, public sentiment toward the federal government could have soured a lot more quickly. After all, someone would have inevitably broken the story that the president’s health ailments were being kept hidden from the American public. People would have felt betrayed; might this ill will have carried over to Harry Truman a lot more palpably? Especially with a greater number of dissenting voices openly questioning Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Or, alternately, General Douglas MacArthur may have been scapegoated for his role in America’s failure to bring Emperor Hirohito to justice. An onslaught of TikTok and Instagram voices would have challenged Truman’s inability to send Hirohito to be tried for war crimes. If Truman’s popularity had plummeted, would the post-war reconstruction of Japan have become a mess? If MacArthur had fallen, how would Truman have dealt with the Korean War?

Might Thomas Dewey have actually won the 1948 election? At the very least, someone in the vein of Admiral Chester Nimitz would have risen on the international stage as MacArthur’s successor.

Beating McCarthy To The Punch?

Regardless of the tougher road Truman could have had ahead of him, as a leader, Democrats wouldn’t have been the only ones to incur online wrath.

As World War II was winding down, the public persecution of Communists was revving up. In 1944, when U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy called for amnesty toward Nazis involved with the Malmedy massacre, segments of the public would have gone ballistic. A strong enough onslaught of outrage could have disempowered McCarthy from his Senate leadership assignments — if not forcing him to resign altogether (or, causing him to go down in a humiliating defeat during his 1952 senatorial reelection campaign).

Or, let’s suppose that McCarthy had been savvy enough to refrain from taking his unpopular position on Malmedy due to him recognizing how powerful social media would prove to be. In that case, he could have laid low and waited until the early-1950s to rally the general public against communism.

But the Tydings Committee hearings would have still been televised. Democrats would have engaged in visible grandstanding against McCarthy’s witch hunt; and many Republicans may have backed him up, afraid of losing their base. Couple this with the diatribes from McCarthy and his loyalists against homosexuality…and the LGBT+ community would have been propelled into the spotlight. If Walt Whitman had managed to carve out a sympathetic public profile for himself in the prior decades, then might American acceptance of Queer identities have been accelerated in tandem with the civil rights battles for racial justice?

Social media tends to have a polarizing effect; but with that polarity comes pendulum-swings of varying distances and velocities. If Facebook and Twitter placed the war industrial complex on trial, in the court of public opinion, much sooner — how much of the values espoused by 1960s and 1970s counterculture may have preemptively migrated into the 1940s and 1950s?

Is it possible that Baby Boomers and GenXers would have taken up more of the movement-based mantles that we’re seeing Millennials and Zoomers of today proceed to champion?

Would the JonesGens (“Xoomers”) of this alternate universe have been more like the “Zillennials” of today?

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