Put aside what you think of Alex Jones for a moment.
If they can do this to him and not fear the repercussions, they can do it to
anybody.
Published
1 day ago
on
August 7, 2018
By
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I wrote just one post last week and it centered around the dangers posed
to society by U.S. tech giants. I specifically called out Facebook,
pointing out how company executives are currently groveling to politicians in
order to prevent legislation that might deem it a monopoly and curtail its
power.
I explained how U.S. politicians prefer to use
the power and reach of tech giants for their own ends rather than take them
down a notch. Politicians aren’t at all concerned about the outsized
influence of centralized tech behemoths engineering society using secret
algorithms, they just want to be in control of how this power is abused.
Meanwhile, today’s biggest news is the uniform move by
three U.S. tech giants to de-platform Alex Jones and his Infowars website. The
main companies involved are Apple, Facebook and Google (via YouTube), as
reported in The Guardian:
All but one of the major content platforms have banned
the American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, as the companies raced to act in
the wake of Apple’s decision to remove five podcasts by Jones and his Infowars
website.
Facebook unpublished four pages run by Jones for
“repeated violations of community standards”, the company said on Monday.
YouTube terminated Jones’s account over him repeatedly appearing in videos
despite being subject to a 90-day ban from the website, and Spotify removed the
entirety of one of Jones’s podcasts for “hate content”…
Facebook’s and YouTube’s enforcement action against
Jones came hours after Apple removed Jones from its podcast directory. The
timing of Facebook’s announcement was unusual, with the company confirming the
ban at 3am local time.
Put aside what you think of Alex Jones for a moment.
If they can do this to him and not fear the repercussions, they can do it to
anybody. This is about
power, and these platforms together account for a massive share of content
distribution in the U.S. Ultimately, this is just a particularly muscular and
in your face example of what’s known as Silicon Valley’s cultural
imperialism.
I know a lot of people think the answer is to get
Congress to do something, as if those monumentally corrupt donor
puppets have any interest in helping the public.
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