My latest in PJ Media:
For perhaps the first time in her career, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has made a good public policy proposal, saying that Facebook should be broken up and noting correctly that “Zuckerberg himself said Facebook is ‘more like a government than a traditional company.’ They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, undermined our democracy, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.’” But now she has made clear that her problem with Facebook is not that it is behaving like a totalitarian state, demonizing and silencing those whom it hates, but that it is not authoritarian enough.
Facebook top dog Mark Zuckerburg said in the now-famous leaked audio from last July: “You have someone like Elizabeth Warren who thinks that the right answer is to break up the companies… If [Warren] gets elected president, then I would bet that we will have a legal challenge, and I would bet that we will win the legal challenge. And does that still suck for us? Yeah.”
Yeah. Especially since Warren is not backing off. “Facebook’s anti-competitive mergers,” Fauxcahontas tweeted Tuesday, “mean they face no real pressure to tackle disinformation.” What is disinformation, as far as Elizabeth Warren and her colleagues on the far-Left are concerned? Anything that dissents from their own agenda, and particularly anything that portrays in a positive light President Trump or anything he has done or attempted to do.
Warren and Facebook, as opposed as they are to each other recently, are both well aware that the Democrats went into 2016 carrying around all of the establishment media (with the partial exception of Fox News) in their pocket like so many nickels and dimes. They knew that they could count on the New York Times, the Washington Post, the TV networks, and the rest to provide relentlessly negative coverage of Trump and unremittingly positive presentations of Hillary Clinton. They knew that the major “news” outlets would do all they could to cover up Clinton’s manifest corruption and obviously off-putting personality.
Yet she still lost. She lost because Trump and his supporters took to social media to counter the media propaganda, and they prevailed. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest are determined not to let this happen again in 2020, and ever since their 2016 debacle have been working assiduously to ban, shadowban, deplatform, and otherwise silence all voices that dissent from the hard-Left agenda, however mildly. The only voices they’re going to allow you to hear in 2020 are their own. Dissenters will not be tolerated.
There is much more. Read the rest here.
mortimer says
I agree with Elizabeth Warren on this issue, but not much else. Facebook and twitter are two monopolies that have no accountability to anyone. They are run by medieval-style oligarchs who deem themselves to have the right to control what the serfs see and what the serfs say. They have become the real-life incarnations of the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland who walks about shouting ‘Off with his head’, whenever the slightest thing displeases her.
These ideological oligarchs have too much power. The laws that broke up the Rockefeller monopoly should be applied to break up the Facebook monopoly. Facebook and twitter are threats to democracy. They are not a ‘public square’ as they claim, but ideological echo chambers promoting one ‘infallible’ point of view.
They are secular versions of the medieval papacy.
gravenimage says
Mortimer, do you really think that Facebook and Twitter would be better under a Warren government?
Westman says
I remember when a concern of society was that computers would allow government to become, “Big Brother”. Now we discover that rebellious, sustained adolescent, soda-slugging programmers, having a command of the technology, run the “private” repositories of information and citizen communications that are attempting to control government.
The government’s legislators can only feebly attempt to keep up; not actually understanding the technology, and some US cities are even making payouts to ransomware.
Unelected technocrats are the new uncontrollable propagandists in a war to redistribute wealth and destroy any sense of nationhood. Call them social justice warriors if you must, however, in reality, they are just mental teenagers who continue to reject any demands from authority for real responsibility and have no real understanding of economics – just like our teenage children, except our children “grow up”.
It’s hilarious to watch legislators thinking that the “techies” are actually on their side in the attempt to effect the first coup on American government; completely oblivious to being the techies next targets. They should be asking if new “AOC’s” are in the wings with an eye on a congressional seat and the backing of tech.
Like children, the techies think someone else will pay the bills for all the migrants – those rich people who magically came into wealth by some accident in the space of a pizza-assisted TV show. They think, “We can solve all the social problems and have more ourselves if we just tax them more.” Yeah….
LB says
PLOT TWIST: All of this–leaked audio of Mark, Warren declaring war on Facebook, etc.–is staged by the two of them so that she would win the election and, of course, not actually doing anything.
We’ve seen this before. Take Merkel for example: she always “toughens up” about muslim migrants before the election, but then continues on as usual when she wins.
DON’T FALL FOR IT!
somehistory says
County music singer Merle Haggard sang a song about just such a thing in, “Rainbow Stew.”
One of the verses:
“When a President goes through the White House door and
Does what he says he’ll do
We’ll all be drinkin’ that free bubble-ubb
And eatin’ that rainbow stew”
Terry Gain says
She looks as crazy as Trudeau. I think she wil be the D nominee and Trump will trounce her. Her nomination will however depress the stock market. She has no intention of taking on these far left platforms.
James Lincoln says
Terry Gain,
If Sen. Warren becomes the Democratic nominee for president, the market will react negatively.
How negative will be dependent upon Wall Street’s opinion on whether or not she could actually win the election.
If she does win the 2020 presidential election, which I consider highly unlikely, there would be a major stock market correction.
Stocks most affected will be healthcare, technology, and fossil fuel stocks…
Infidel says
Warren actually does have more than one good idea, and there’s a good reason the momentum is in her favor. When she’s not in the same stupid mode of the woke Dems re: identity politics and climate change, she does have some good proposals that might attract some of the people Trump won over from Obama. For instance, there is her ‘Economic patriotism’ platform, which would make US workers our #1 priority, and not have policies that, in the name of market forces, allow both jobs and capital to be shipped abroad. Where she recommends workplace apprentice programs, since 4 year degrees ain’t right for everyone. And on this Facebook issue, she has made an unlikely alliance w/ Ted Cruz
As Tucker Carlson pointed out below, one side is totally controlled by Libertarian Finance lobbies, and the other by race hustling collectivists who want to get rid of passenger car ownership and give free healthcare to illegal immigrants
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SUW8kbZyucI
Angemon says
Their conclusion, after Trump’s victory: “Trump won because we gave him too much airtime”
Westman says
And they are still doing it. Every tweet gets news space or reaction comments.
Jap says
This should be interesting, one megalomaniac,oxygen stealing, lying wanna be dictator against another megalomaniac, oxygen stealing, lying wanna be dictator.
Grab the popcorn and watch the show.
Lotus says
The whole deplatforming thing has become ridiculous. A few big tech companies get to rule over how billions of people express themselves. There is the Google group, the Facebook group, Twitter, Yahoo, etc.
Who made these people the moral policemen of the world? They are not elected or accountable to anyone except their shareholders; they are only in the business of making money by harvesting people’s data and selling it on to advertisers. So what moral high ground do they occupy? None that I can see.
somehistory says
I don’t believe warren’s elevator goes to the top floor.
She says what she thinks most people want to hear, or what will get her something she craves…which is power. But she comes off as a fool and doesn’t seem to realize it, thinking she can just have re-do and all is fine.
Does she not look in the mirror when imagining herself reaching a goal? She resembles a contestant on Family Feud more than someone running for president of the country.
gravenimage says
For perhaps the first time in her career, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has made a good public policy proposal, saying that Facebook should be broken up and noting correctly that “Zuckerberg himself said Facebook is ‘more like a government than a traditional company.’ They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, undermined our democracy, and tilted the playing field against everyone else.’” But now she has made clear that her problem with Facebook is not that it is behaving like a totalitarian state, demonizing and silencing those whom it hates, but that it is not authoritarian enough.
……………………
Yes–I worry that if the government breaks up private companies it will make things *worse* for freedom of speech.
Infidel says
Not just that, what is the basis on which these companies would be broken up? Like de-merge Instagram and WhatsApp from Facebook? Pry YouTube and Android out from the Alphabet company? How would that solve the censorship issue, where ALL the companies in question – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, … censor opinions they don’t like, particularly on the right, and thereby deliver the Left a mechanism that they can’t legally have via the government? And if she wants TOTAL censorship of the right, then what exists now is perfectly adequate.
On the other issue that people want these companies, particularly Amazon, broken up, due to the disruptive nature of their market dominance and the destruction of so many retail companies, how would splitting it up along any axis – be it business unit (retail vs cloud computing vs publishing) or regions or acquired companies – undo the power of Jeff Bezos? Fact remains that the bulk of tech CEOs – Bezos, Page, Brin, Pichai, Zuckerberg, Dorsey, Gates, Nadella, Hastings – are blazing Leftists.
Instead, all these companies should be reclassified as publishers, rather than platforms, and their patents should be carefully reviewed. The reason Amazon got where it is today was their patent on one-click shopping, which ended just a year or so ago. That way, there can be right leaning social media companies competitive w/ ‘Big Tech’.
P.S: Incidentally, when I lived and worked in Silicon Valley, Big Tech companies meant companies like Intel, Cisco, Qualcomm, Broadcom, NVIDIA, AMD, Intuit, HP, Oracle, et al. Today, it means companies like Uber, Lyft, Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Snapchat… The only companies today that can really be considered ‘Tech’ by old definitions are Apple, Google and Microsoft. Of these, Microsoft is a miserable shadow of its former self: used Windows 10 lately, and remember what Windows 7 was like before Microsoft killed it?
Joe says
Facebook was committed to not let Trump be elected in 2015. One of their corporate goals in 2016 was to prevent Trump from being elected. But Trump raised 80% of his money on Facebook, and he spent 75% of his money on Facebook. Most of that money was spent on micro-targeting.
The guy who took the Trump campaign through Facebook, Brad Parscale, is now Trump’s campaign manager for 2020.
2016 was the first election that turned on social media. It is probably the first in a long series.
No one is talking about Snapchat who has caught and slightly surpassed Facebook in the gen-z and millennial demographics. Even more important, advertisers say they are getting a better return on Snapchat than any other social medium.