3 ms·

I believe the US could do more with antitrust oversight. The DOJ under Clinton was pursuing Microsoft up until 2001, when the new Bush administration carried th

I believe the US could do more with antitrust oversight. The DOJ under Clinton was pursuing Microsoft up until 2001, when the new Bush administration carried through on a campaign promise and took the bite out of the investigation. This isn't to point the blame just at conservatives, who have historically been of the mindset that the government shouldn't interfere with business. Democrats haven't spent much political capital towards those ends either. For 2.5 years president Trump has been raging at Bezos because he owns the Washington Post, and that has extended to Trump raging that Amazon needs to be taxed heavily. Despite playing the social media angle for all it is worth, Trump has been claiming that Facebook/Twitter/Google have been filtering out conservative opinions. So pardon me for being suspicious that now the DOJ cares about looking into all of these companies. I'm for anti-trust regulation, but not when it is applied selectively for political gain.

jdgoesmarching 7y ago
Eh I mean, if Trump throwing a tantrum is how we stumble into anti-trust legislation I’m still for it.
- tasty_freeze 7y ago
  No, that is a dangerous position. If the laws are applied only to political enemies, it is not justice. It also degrades the law, erodes public trust, and undermines democracy. Here is a counter example. 501(c)(4) organizations [1] are non-profits which have certain reporting requirements that are not allowed to do political work. Laws were changed, ostensibly to allow them to do some activities that were in the gray area -- the law said as long as they were mostly doing welfare/social work, then they could keep their status. PACs abused this by claiming they were 501(c)(4) organizations, which allowed them to shield who was bankrolling them. When this was noticed, the IRS started looking into them. The right screamed bloody murder, saying the IRS was being used as a political tool of the Obama administration. And if that had been true, they would have been right to complain, even those the vast majority of those PACs were not really 501(c)(4)s. To this day it is claimed that this is what actually went down, when in fact the IRS looked into PACs from both parties. [2] [1] https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-the-irs-classifies-nonprofit-organizations-2501798 https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-the-irs-classifies-nonprof... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy
orev 7y ago
Kind of surprising that most of the comments here are taking the bait and think this is actually about anti-trust. This is 100% political, with us just having the “social media summit” that only included extremists, and the election coming up. This is a direct threat aimed at social media companies telling them they better not censor extremist content that is in favor of the current administration, no matter how vile it is, or else the investigations will go deeper and the consequences will be worse.

jdgoesmarching 7y ago

Eh I mean, if Trump throwing a tantrum is how we stumble into anti-trust legislation I’m still for it.

tasty_freeze 7y ago
No, that is a dangerous position. If the laws are applied only to political enemies, it is not justice. It also degrades the law, erodes public trust, and undermines democracy. Here is a counter example. 501(c)(4) organizations [1] are non-profits which have certain reporting requirements that are not allowed to do political work. Laws were changed, ostensibly to allow them to do some activities that were in the gray area -- the law said as long as they were mostly doing welfare/social work, then they could keep their status. PACs abused this by claiming they were 501(c)(4) organizations, which allowed them to shield who was bankrolling them. When this was noticed, the IRS started looking into them. The right screamed bloody murder, saying the IRS was being used as a political tool of the Obama administration. And if that had been true, they would have been right to complain, even those the vast majority of those PACs were not really 501(c)(4)s. To this day it is claimed that this is what actually went down, when in fact the IRS looked into PACs from both parties. [2] [1] https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-the-irs-classifies-nonprofit-organizations-2501798 https://www.thebalancesmb.com/how-the-irs-classifies-nonprof... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IRS_targeting_controversy

orev 7y ago

Kind of surprising that most of the comments here are taking the bait and think this is actually about anti-trust. This is 100% political, with us just having the “social media summit” that only included extremists, and the election coming up. This is a direct threat aimed at social media companies telling them they better not censor extremist content that is in favor of the current administration, no matter how vile it is, or else the investigations will go deeper and the consequences will be worse.