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Why, sure they are. They censored the president under phony pretenses. They've censored Senator Hawley's book. They censored other government officials from

Why, sure they are. They censored the president under phony pretenses. They've censored Senator Hawley's book. They censored other government officials from even uttering the name "Eric Ciaramella", even though he was certainly not a whistleblower and even if so, not legally entitled to such a level of privacy. But to be more accurate, they're censoring non-liberals. This is evidenced by the fact that actual dictatorial regimes with many many violent deaths on their hands are allowed access to those avenues of communication without a fraction of the editorial control than was the President of the USA. Other politicians, who have the "D" by their name (the government equivalent of a blue checkmark apparently) are allowed to spread hoaxes and lies for years and call for harassment and violence towards their political enemies, and big tech allows it to stand. Because they agree with it. One only need to see the Googlers crying in the hallways after Hillary's defeat in 2016 to know why. They got their feelings hurt and vowed to never let it happen again, by any means necessary. And they are people with significant means to control what you may or may not say in the digital public square, if they don't simply decide to unperson you entirely.

lasagnaphil 6y ago
The neoliberal Democrats and Silicon Valley seem to be in kind of in a lovers-gone-haters relationship though, it’s more complicated than what you’re suggesting. They were really loving each other in the Obama years, remember when social media was hailed in liberal media as a positive force for democracy (alluding to the various Spring revolutions)? I mean, Obama’s campaign used private Facebook data no less than Trump did, and liberal media even spun that as a good thing at that time! The problem is once that same technology was soon to be used against the neoliberals from both left/right wing populism (Occupy Wall Street and Bernie for the left, Trumpism for the right), that’s when their relationship got shakened quite a bit and now we’re up to the point where the Dems are filing antitrust regulations against Google. The neoliberals got a bit afraid that the new technocrats (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) would accumulate enough power to do whatever they want (against their interests, although so far big tech's interests just seemed to be about making as much money as possible with disregard for anything else), so liberal media began spewing out one of the most blatantly aggressive narratives that social media was the sole fault in the rise of Trumpism (well, only partially so, the more substantial reason has to do with US neoliberal policies leading to deindustrialization, along with the greater urban/rural inequality divide). I mean, SV companies have their faults, but it’s not just them responsible for this whole mess. Anyways, the mainstream Dems finally got the big social media companies to censor as they please, but that’s only after the populist left/right started to look for decentralized or encrypted alternatives, albeit slowly (Telegram/Signal/Mastodon/Pleroma/Lemmy/etc).

lasagnaphil 6y ago

The neoliberal Democrats and Silicon Valley seem to be in kind of in a lovers-gone-haters relationship though, it’s more complicated than what you’re suggesting. They were really loving each other in the Obama years, remember when social media was hailed in liberal media as a positive force for democracy (alluding to the various Spring revolutions)? I mean, Obama’s campaign used private Facebook data no less than Trump did, and liberal media even spun that as a good thing at that time! The problem is once that same technology was soon to be used against the neoliberals from both left/right wing populism (Occupy Wall Street and Bernie for the left, Trumpism for the right), that’s when their relationship got shakened quite a bit and now we’re up to the point where the Dems are filing antitrust regulations against Google. The neoliberals got a bit afraid that the new technocrats (Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc) would accumulate enough power to do whatever they want (against their interests, although so far big tech's interests just seemed to be about making as much money as possible with disregard for anything else), so liberal media began spewing out one of the most blatantly aggressive narratives that social media was the sole fault in the rise of Trumpism (well, only partially so, the more substantial reason has to do with US neoliberal policies leading to deindustrialization, along with the greater urban/rural inequality divide). I mean, SV companies have their faults, but it’s not just them responsible for this whole mess. Anyways, the mainstream Dems finally got the big social media companies to censor as they please, but that’s only after the populist left/right started to look for decentralized or encrypted alternatives, albeit slowly (Telegram/Signal/Mastodon/Pleroma/Lemmy/etc).