It's time to rein in Big Tech.
Big Tech is bent on installing themselves as the rulers of our country. Through government deals and monopolistic behavior, they have achieved total hegemony over America’s information flow and national discourse, capriciously silencing all those who who not align with their leftist agenda, from individuals all the way to the revered newspapers like the New York Post. Recent Senate hearings have also revealed that Facebook, Twitter, and Google are in fact making a concerted effort to remove such content - even if that means silencing the truth. These efforts actively undermine the very tenets of our nation. One of the reasons why America is so successful is because of our love and endless pursuit for discourse - for respecting opposing perspectives in hopes of reaching new conclusions. But with the left’s antics - desperate attempts at revising history and, quite literally, turning this country against itself - America will surely fall behind.
Research and multiple Senate hearings have also revealed the sizable impacts Big Tech has successfully made in recent elections. We spent three years - and millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars - on nonexistent “Russian collusion.” Why aren’t we talking about this?
But the most insidious consequences lie in Big Tech’s attempts at getting younger generations addicted to Facebook/Instagram - utter filth, trash products and content - and brainwashing them into buying into these falsehoods and narratives without encouraging them to think for themselves, all while selling their data to Beijing. We have a youth generation stranded at home, lazy and unmotivated to study, instead soaking themselves in the endless stream of hogwash cooked up the media and disseminated by their best friend, Big Tech. Through infinite scroll, autoplay, targeted ads and recommendations, social media is probably the most appealing thing to these teenagers. There’s no intellectual stimulation, let alone satisfaction, in doing so. But that’s the whole point. Big Tech’s mission has always been to reduce the populace into moronic, obedient sheep who lack the ability to question longstanding narratives. Only when they achieve that can the left fully enact their dastardly, destructive, and downright cruel agenda.
Are you okay dude lmao plenty of Democrats in Congress want to break up Big Tech. You spewed all of that just to come to the conclusion that it's all a conspiracy by the left?
100% agree with breaking up big tech, America’s societal fabric has been destroyed by Facebook induced polarization. It would not be hard to fix these platforms, hell they know how make them better (I read an article recently how they internally developed a “calm” Facebook with only legitimate news sources), but that would lead to Zuccs ad revenue going down because outrage and insanity pays the bills. Mark Zuckerberg is a psychopath with more power than anyone on the planet besides world leaders like Xi Jinping, and he could be in control of Facebook destroying the world with his dystopian shit for the next 60 years. Not to even mention the effect this has had on innovation, big tech companies just copy/steal/acquire new features and don’t create them themselves, they don’t need to.
We need more Pramila Jayapals and people who understand tech in congress and less clueless boomer idiots. I wouldn’t say greater than 20% of the Democratic Party has the competence or the motivation to break up big tech, even less on the conservative side. America is fucked. Also fuck Ted Cruz and his grandstanding about how the platforms have an anti conservative bias
One thing Trump got right is Cruz's wife.
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Not just America's societal fabric - these tech giants operate across the entire West. The soundbite invective in Twitter and shameless vanity in Instagram have reduced Western individuals into predictable minions. No business can operate without paying at Google's search engine toll booth (I'd buy Alphabet stock every time a major B2C startup raises a big round).
At least the US can say that they benefit from most of the jobs created by these firms. The rest of the world is a marionette in their hands, full stop. Individuals are now reduced to pawns in a Bayesian scheme.
Big Tech have built a competitive advantage through global-scale dumping for nearly 20 years. They amass users by giving away their product for free, and monetize these users, always being one step ahead of the users and two steps ahead of regulators. They have achieved a symbiosis between their software, and their users; this symbiosis is their product.
This is way bigger than a US left vs US right issue. The entire Western way of life - based on collaborative individual agency in largely free, largely competitive markets overlooked by well-informed representative democracies - is in jeopardy.
These aren't regular businesses, given that their product is the result of the way people interact with their software. These aren't companies seeking a profit by making and selling widgets. They can't just be treated like any other company. They are a direct contributor to the downward spiral the Western world is in, and must be reined in.
Not a conspiracy obviously but agree it does silence non leftist views. Largely because tech believes progressives have the morally correct view and because their employees tend to be aligned with that view.
john Cochrane’s latest blog post touches on this wrt YouTube.
Most of the biggest news publishers and most widely shared pages on Facebook are conservative. Twitter has a slight left bias, but crazy Q Anon shit and straight up misinformation is still widely shared. Facebook doesn’t have a liberal or conservative bias, they only want to do whatever gets you to spend the most time on their platform and will incrementally drive people in whatever direction that will do this. The Kenosha Wisconsin shooting where two people were killed was inspired by a Facebook group organizing the event which had been reported by many users for inciting violence, but Facebook said it didn’t violate their policy. Two people were shot and killed. Other cases in India where people are getting killed for what they shared on the platform, people are buying and selling child slaves on the platform, but no, we can’t regulate this shit because that would violate the “free-market” and America’s freedom.
Agree. Facebook declined to hand over info of and ban the Uyghur terrorists who used Facebook groups to organize terrorist attacks in China in 2006 that killed and injured hundreds. Freedon of speech they said. That's the very beginning of the great Chinese firewall.
Then Mark Zuckerberg tried to get back to the profitable Chinese market by picturing himself as the son-in-law of the Chinese, while his wife is really more Vietnamese. What a joke.
This is wild to me. Absolutely bonkers. Just because Ben Shapiro and Dan Bongino have somehow become popular on Facebook doesn’t mean that the platform isn’t left leaning. Anecdotal evidence is often the exception to the rule, not the rule. If you really need evidence of how these platforms skew one way, take a stroll down https://www.reddit.com/r/WatchRedditDie/ and see just how many people are being censored for dissenting opinions. Not too mention have you seen the demonization or Parler? Sure it’s partly about money.... but it’s more about the Twitter losing its power to censor information and act as a publisher (which Jack loves to pick and choose when to do so). Ted Cruz went Harvard educated lawyer on Jack and Hawley went Yale educated lawyer on Zuck in a way I haven’t seen since Louis Litt and Stu Buzzinni.
Yeah, you figured them out and it is all a left wing conspiracy. Do you know what is most important to a company? Earnings, full stop... The execs at Google are not spending their time trying to figure out how to steer the country into following some leftist agenda. Until now, I have been praising WSO for having some very bright people. The topic and the way it is presented is complete trash.
If you want to have an intelligent conversation about how certain tech companies have monopoly power, that could lead to a reasonable discussion.
This. We need to be having adult discussions about actual issues, not Alex Jones style scream matches. It’s an important topic and shouldn’t have to devolve into conspiracy theories to maintain people’s interest. The fact that we have a handful of companies that have a monopoly on information, and perhaps more practically, convenience, should be a jumping pad into a discussion on how we as a society should handle these examples and evaluate the morality and philosophy of these technology-dominated times. My opinions are pretty light given the magnitude of the topic, but it would be nice to hear what people think about the issues that matter instead of pushing a left vs right narrative.
The only monopoly issue I can see is Google and their market share in search, which is something like 90%. I am not an expert on the law here but I would think that a 90% share can't be good for companies. If a company wants to advertise online, it is probably going to have to use Google to get any clicks at all.
LMAO this is the type of post that gets you full torqued, isn’t it? Having an enjoyable thanksgiving?
financeabc is a mega cuck, just ignore everything he says
The fact that some business school professor tells you this doesn't make it so. You're out of touch with reality if you don't think these companies are influencing public discourse in a way that hurts one side.
For what it's worth, I don't think the executives (or at least the founders) of these companies are the biggest culprits here. The super-bright programmer types who found tech companies tend to be somewhere in the left-libertarian quadrant of the political compass. Think: pro-weed, pro-LGBT, anti-regulation, and pro-free speech. Scan early interviews with people like Sergey Brin, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jack Dorsey, and you'll find them making fairly strong statements in favor of free speech and setting early company policy accordingly.
I think these companies change when they get big. At a certain point, the nerdy 10Xer libertarian hacker types who built them are outnumbered by average programmers and managers drawn from the hard left Bay Area milieu. A lot of these people are intensely political and will throw shit fits if they see their company providing a platform for views they don't like. The James Damore incident at Google was a good example: his paper generated a backlash from the rank and file staff, not the executives. But the executives need to find a modus vivendi with their employees, so they cave to stuff like this.
Not sure what a business school professor has to do with any of this. Companies have a primary obligation to their shareholders, which means to maximize earnings. On top of that, when companies maximize earnings, the executives and higher up employees get more compensation. It would not make any sense for a company to sacrifice their earnings to push some agenda. In fact, activist shareholders would try to force management out if they were to act in a way that would be detrimental to shareholders
I feel like your take comes from someone who has never written a line of code or ever made a single MR. Thats not how code works. There isn’t some dude in a basement “hacking away” at some error free feature thing and pushing it to production that works flawlessly and changes Facebook recommendations.
The thing I hate most about the truly large companies is that whatever you're using, you're 100% at the mercy of their robots. They've got you by your balls, to put it bluntly.
One fuck-up, doesn't even have to be you yourself doing it, and you're blocked from their services. Imagine having xx years of work, memories, and what not effectively vanish at the drop of a hat.
Of course, you could just swap out every FAANG-service with some open source alternative, or more user-friendly alternative, while religiously taking backups of your important stuff - but still, it's a hassle.
If this stuff goes unchecked - 10 years from now half your household items will require some Google / FB / whatever login to work, only to get bricked the second you've been banned from said platforms. And who knows what they'll ban you for.
(A lot of these things can be solved in 5 mins by just talking with actual humans, but that doesn't scale well - so we're stuck with shitty bots that will gatekeep you 'til the end of time)
I'm starting to really wonder if the only thing Orwell got wrong in 1984 was the date.
Deleted to make my point much clearer below.
If you don't know the difference between Big Tech and Social Media, why should anyone take you seriously?
You sound like one of those people who think "Wall Street" is synonymous with "Big Banks" (Buy-side people are laughing their asses off at this). Do you think that Apple, Amazon, and Netflix are trying to spread left-wing ideologies selling you phones, delivering random shit to you, and letting you binge watch Breaking Bad?
Apple? Yes actually. Apple has publicly pushed in their marketing campaigns with leftist/left leaning ads. The whole concept of PC vs Mac ads where you see a guy in a suit who looks like a square vs Justin Long in jeans and T-shirt as a college student who's some cool liberal, maaaaaaan. When they release new apple products they've had ads with John Lennon, Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, all historically left leaning/progressive figures. So despite them being secretly a very ruthlessly capitalistic company (Steve Jobs was the biggest hypocrite, guy thought he was enlightened when he was actually like any other ruthless cut throat entrepreneur/CEO), they publicly attempted to be perceived as a very young, hip, and liberal company.
And Netflix? ABSOLUTELY they try to push liberal agendas. They're hollywood now, have you not seen the controversy they got into for pushing a netflix original about borderline child porn, and they tried to play it off as pushing the boundaries of art??
Do you know why Apple's advertising might skew towards the liberal side? Well, it is not some grand plan to brainwash younger people to become virtue signalers.
Here is your answer: liberal people tend to like technology.
Apple's favorite color is green.
Dude Ghandi and Mandela were looking to actually implement positive change, and both achieved notable success in their areas. You don’t have to be a liberal shill to support these figures.
“Big Tech is left-leaning” didnt FB give away data to help Trump win in 2016 and UK leave the EU? Also, I don’t think their “political agenda” is the problem, the problem is that they’re way too fucking big. If a conservative industry was taking over the world we’d have this same discussion. But they are totally engineered for addicting people and dividing the world
Social Media companies (let's face it Amazon, Netflix, Microsoft, and Apple aren't even in the business of spreading messages) only "left-leaning" (superficially) because they make more money that way. Their recommendation algos are still turning hunch of people into alt-right idiots and white supremacists.
Why is every single dumb opinion on here from students/analysts.
God fucking dammit I'm out.
pretty sure you changed your username so it would check out
We are at the point where a tech company is able to censor the allegedly most powerful person on the planet. If that's not enough to you, then you don't deserve your freedoms anyway.
A good way to distinguish libertarians from lolbertarians. The first understand the threat to freedom that comes from monopoly. The latter just have an irrational hatred for the word government without understanding where the threat of tyranny comes from.
This is such a bad take. I assume you are referring to Mr Trump. Who decided to completely eschew traditional forms of communication with the American public specifically because it didn't allow him the freedom to lie, to speak into an echo chamber, to only hear positive feedback. The only reason Twitter (again, I assume you're referring to Twitter) is capable of muzzling Mr Trump is because he himself refuses to communicate through other media. Remember his "press conferences"? The ones he would throw a tantrum and storm out of like a toddler, because someone asked him a non-softball question?
I agree that tech companies need more regulation. But not because of their "censorship". They have no power to censor anyone, any more than CNN or Fox News does. The only power they have in that regard is that which an individual gives them.
I mean, this is true... but it also means that 99% of the libertarians out there aren't, by your definition, libertarian. Which means perhaps you're not the libertarian at all, since (at least in the United States) Libertarians are against "the omnipotent state," and curtailing the right of a person to run a business the way they want is against that platform.
Traditional media networks have more regulation than Twitter does. I'm not referring to Trump's comments specifically, but social media platforms really do have the freedom to do whatever they want. Hopefully will end soon.
1) Traditional forms of communications have long divorced from telling the truth to begin with, thus Trump bypassing them is hardly Trump's fault. There's no reason in the world Trump or any conservative should communicate via people who intentionally and dishonestly mispresents what they say. Honestly, Trump's fault was being way, way too nice. In the exact moment the likes of Alex Jones was removed from social media, Trump should have permanently revoked media passes to all his conferences to all liberal media. No exceptions. And give it to Alex Jones instead. Fight fire with nuclear power. See how it developed, this is hardly contestable.
Secondly, as far as ''lying'' goes, what should be then the punishment for those liberal journalists who promoted any the following:
-Russia collusion
-Covington smirk of white supremacy
-Smollet hoax
-imminent end of the world by climate change if we don't do yadda yadda
-illegal immigrants being refugees
-non biologically related gender identities
Because if Trump deserves to get muzzed, then those journalists should be given a first class ticket for the first attempt of mankind to colonize the sun.
2) I'm not a libertarian, though I agree with them about the threat of monopoly of power to freedoms. I'm a spoilt Westerner that says provocative things; it's virtually guaranteed I'd end up in trouble with any form of tyranny.
I see the argument from both sides here. The big thing here is the ability of big tech to control and even manipulate the information which is disseminated into the public.
On one hand these companies were first-movers and came up when big tech didn't exist as we know it so are struggling to grapple with both sides of the political spectrum as their original mandate was not one which was heavily predicated on the current political climate. So that they may not know how to properly neutralize the info they're passing on.
On the other hand, one could argue that they've been acclimatized to their current stature and that the political beliefs of the management team or key decision makers may now influence information and do so via their own political beliefs.
There isn't any real answer on how to solve the above. Breaking up the companies may allow for less of a singular force with which people are dealt their information but on the other hand would breaking up the companies really affect the overall dissemination of whatever is being spread? This is more freeballing so feel free to bite back but these are my initial thoughts
Gotta love the American right wing - rights for me, not for thee.
When it's a conservative business that doesn't want to comply with the law of the land so they can deny contraceptive coverage because of "freedom of religious expression," it's just a corporate entity expressing it's Constitutional rights. Of course, when a liberal leaning company dares to take a political or ethical position, all of a sudden American democracy is about to come crashing down.
Say what you will, but at least the left has some internal ethical consistency beyond "I get mine and you don't get yours".
Apparently, the dude has not even worked in the corporate world yet but yet he is complaining that there is some type of left wing conspiracy going on in big tech. I have to wonder how this happens and how people become vulnerable to extremism at such a young age. I would be curious to find out why he has adopted views that are not in synch with reality. Is he basing these views on family influences, educational influences media influences or something else.
Honestly, it's just the attitude that people of slightly below average intelligence and with little self-confidence take. How do you make yourself feel smarter and more important than you are? By alleging some vast conspiracy that only you and a select few others have the intellect and perspicacity to penetrate. Once you decide the world is out to get you, and you in particular, any position is defensible. Contrary facts are part of the conspiracy. People who don't believe you or agree with you are dupes or pawns. And as long as that's the case, this guy still thinks he's special. He gets to live in his little bubble where he's the hero of the story, instead of some random NPC.
Once you get to the point where fact or expert opinion are no more valuable than your "gut instinct," there's no going back. And while it's not limited to the American right, this kind of pseudo-intellectual conspiracy mongering seems far more central to their political identity than your average liberal. Which is why we see so many trolls on this site, or why even posters who are nominally intelligent and knowledgeable in other areas can only ever provide their opinion, backed up by shadowy "facts" that they've "read all over the place" or that "everyone knows". Truth and data and fact and science are subordinated to opinion and superstition. At least the emotional decisions made by liberals are done out of empathy for other humans, instead of whatever crank on the internet is selling in a given week.
Funny, I referred to this exact case in the other thread before I came on here and saw this. You clearly did not read the decision very closely in the Hobby Lobby case. The reason why Hobby Lobby won the case was because they were defined to be a "closely-held company". In other words the owners of the business, were so involved in the business that they were essentially running it, not the board of directors or some other framework. So the courts ruled that forced contraceptive coverage went against the owners rights of religious expression. I'm not sure which tech companies would come under the "closely-held company" standard. Even though Bezos is well known, the dude is probably just playing golf at resorts most of the year, rather than actually being heavily involved with the business.
And to say the left has consistency is absurd. When small business tried to open "science" stopped them. But BLM protests, riots, looting, and as of recent Biden celebrations were allowed to go without any sort of restraint.
If you think Bezos is playing golf instead of working, you would benefit more in life from learning more before having opinions.
Aren't you supposed to believe in the near-sanctity of the Constitution? The right of the people peaceably to assemble is right there. And despite what you've heard on Fox or OANN, the BLM protests were almost entirely peaceful. You know, except for the conservative neckbeards crossing state lines to gun down a couple protestors here and there.
And your decision over what is "closely held" and what isn't seems to vary markedly depending on what the political agenda of the owner is. Hobby Lobby is closely held because it espouses conservative values, but Jeff Bezos is an absentee landlord because... what? You didn't give a reason.
Here's the thing.
Most conservatives don't believe abortion should be legal. Most liberals do. Can you force people to do things they don't believe in?
Most conservatives believe in free speech. Are you saying that most liberals don't? If so, okay, then liberals don't have to guarantee free speech to conservatives.
Otherwise your argument is moot.
This is such an awful argument. I don't care if you don't believe in abortion! Good for you. I'm not forcing you to get one! You know what you're trying to force my side of this issue to do? Not have one. Liberals are making the argument that it should be a personal choice, without interference from the government. Conservatives are arguing that government should step in and prevent it. So please, tell me again how I'm forcing someone to do something they don't believe in? Yet another example of the rampant hypocrisy of the right.
I think I recall reading somewhere that you are not from the United States, so let me clear something up for you. The right to free speech? It only means that government cannot censor you, and even within that context it's not a universal right. Last I checked, Twitter wasn't a government entity - they can do what they please. I'm not saying they should, but I hear conservatives tell me all the fucking time about how government shouldn't be involved and people should vote with their wallets, and let the free market decide. Except, shitty knockoffs like Parler (a) can't get any traction, and (b) are just as bad as the things their replacing, so instead, there is all of a sudden a hullaballoo about "free speech."
So on both of these arguments, I'm not sure what you're trying to prove. Because in both cases it's conservatives asking the government to step in and actively enforce their beliefs on others.
Singling out tech is kind of silly considering corporate power in general is too strong and most industries have consolidated to an extent the robber barons of yesteryear could only dream of.
Ah yes, you mean like McCarthyism? Or cancel culture? American society does love discourse indeed
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