Posted on 12/27/2016 10:47:50 AM PST by blam
Selwyn Duke
December 27,2016
How much face time will your news story get on Facebook? How many eyes will ogle it on Google? Too often, this is apparently determined not by whether the story is “fake” news or newsworthy, but by whether it’s politically correct. And it’s time to break up the Internet’s left-wing, information-conduit oligopoly.
If “knowledge is power” and “The pen is mightier than the sword,” entities controlling what pens you see are powerful indeed. C that Facebook and Google “account for 75% of all the referrals major news and entertainment sites now receive,” according to a Politico report in July.
Facebook boasts a 40 percent share of the social media market and 1.5 billion users worldwide, making this Internet “nation” more populous than any country on Earth. Upwards of 40 percent of American adults get news from the site.
Google accounts for 64 percent of all U.S. desktop search queries. In Europe, the figure is a whopping 90 percent. The company also owns YouTube, the world’s most popular video-sharing website.
How is this power used? Earlier this year, ex-Facebook employees admitted they routinely suppressed conservative news and were ordered to place relatively unpopular but company-favored (read: liberal) stories in their “trending” news section. And trending means mind-bending because people are influenced by what’s “popular.” Make an article appear more or less so and you can cause some readers to embrace it as “consensus” or dismiss it as a fringe view. It snowballs, too: prominent placement makes a piece more popular, which makes it more prominent, which makes it yet more popular, which makes…well, you get the idea
(snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at thehill.com ...
Monopoly breakups are coming and it could not happen soon enough. Google is a front for the government surveillance state and grew big on government grants so they need a beatdown by patriots anyway.
The Sherman Antitrust Act has specific criteria under which you can charge monopoly practices. Google comes close, but neither has the required market share. Also, they tried to go after IBM on the same grounds and spent millions of taxpayer dollars and, after decades in the courts, they finally gave up. You’d have the same food fight here. I don’t like Google for its filtering of the search engine topics, but I don’t like wasting money, either. I just choose to use an alternative search engine.
The founders of Facebook and Google build their own companies and provided products that were, for whatever reason, superior to their competitors.
Moreover, neither is a monopoly as there are other search engines and other social media sites.
And, the American people have decided that they do not want a government that picks winner and losers in corporate America.
By the time such an action got to the point of a final decision in the courts, market forces would remove the monopoly condition.
Happened with IBM, and Microsoft.
No, misusing the laws to punish your ideological opponents is a leftist tactic.
I have never had a FB account and refuse to go to it. I also deleted Google (having searched relentlessly on my computer for anything “Chrome”) from it.
These two are like inviting cancer into your body.
There is no monopoly condition.
The ‘article’ states that Facebook has a 40% market share and that Google has a 64% market share.
Those are not monopolies.
Yes. If there was ever a reason for anti-trust breakups and there was, tech giants should be broken up. Yes.
“The founders of Facebook and Google build their own companies and provided products that were, for whatever reason, superior to their competitors.
Moreover, neither is a monopoly as there are other search engines and other social media sites.
And, the American people have decided that they do not want a government that picks winner and losers in corporate America.”
Well said.
I disagree. Trump needs to do this.
If he does not they will surely abuse their power
to destroy him.
The authors of the First Amendment could not have foreseen the day when the technical means to exercise it would fall almost exclusively into the hands of private corporations.
Let alone those run by partisan leftist hacks with a zillion axes to grind.
I do not use Google or Facebook for these very reasons. I wish the market would take care of this. I prefer the govt to not get involved.
Use the progressives’ 1wn weapons against them! That’s the ticket!
“The authors of the First Amendment could not have foreseen the day when the technical means to...”
Sounds like a very familiar liberal argument.
Just replace First Amendment with Second Amendment.
No thank you.
“The authors of the First Amendment could not have foreseen the day when the technical means to exercise it would fall almost exclusively into the hands of private corporations.”
They don’t, you’re just engaging in hyperbole to support an unsupportable position.
Change First to Second and you've got the gun-grabbers' favorite argument for flushing inconvenient parts of the Constitution.
Nuts to that.
Sure, let’s just become the enemy. Great plan!
The problem is not Facebook and Google.
The problem is that the goal of almost every major news organization in the world is to advance the Left Wing agenda.
And another problem is that, world wide, Conservatives are a small political minority almost everywhere, and no amount of favorable or fair news coverage is going to change that.
The USA is the best evidence for that assertion.
Our citizens have unfettered access to the best Conservative news coverage and the best Conservative news analysis in the world.
But 80% of new immigrant citizens vote for the Democratic Party!
“Antitrust Should Be Used To Break Up Partisan Tech Giants Like Facebook, Google”
yeah, good luck with that.
Since each offers only a single, uniform, integrated national service, how would you “break” them up? For FB, limit the number of total posts per day? Limit new signups? For google, limit the total number of searches per day? Limit the the number of websites they can index?
When Google ends up controlling 90% of the internet
and you can no longer get to Free Republic, come back
and tell me about it.
Oh, that’s right....you won’t be able to.
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