Who Is in Control? The Need to Rein in Big Tech

Imprimis ^ | January 2021 | Allum Bokhari

[Retain Mike]

In January, when every major Silicon Valley tech company permanently banned the President of the United States from its platform, there was a backlash around the world. One after another, government and party leaders—many of them ideologically opposed to the policies of President Trump—raised their voices against the power and arrogance of the American tech giants. These included the President of Mexico, the Chancellor of Germany, the government of Poland, ministers in the French and Australian governments, the neoliberal center-right bloc in the European Parliament, the national populist bloc in the European Parliament, the leader of the Russian opposition (who recently survived an assassination attempt), and the Russian government (which may well have been behind that attempt).

Common threats create strange bedfellows. Socialists, conservatives, nationalists, neoliberals, autocrats, and anti-autocrats may not agree on much, but they all recognize that the tech giants have accumulated far too much power. None like the idea that a pack of American hipsters in Silicon Valley can, at any moment, cut off their digital lines of communication.

[Retain Mike]

This is the first of two posts from Imprimis on the subject. This defines the problem and the next presents an example.

[lasereye]

A field of computer science called “network analysis” is dedicated to identifying groups of people with shared interests, who read similar websites, who talk about similar things, who have similar habits, who follow similar people on social media, and who share similar political viewpoints. Big Tech companies are able to detect when particular information is flowing through a particular network—if there’s a news story or a post or a video, for instance, that’s going viral among conservatives or among voters as a whole. This gives them the ability to shut down a story they don’t like before it gets out of hand. And these systems are growing more sophisticated all the time.

[lasereye]

I wonder if they are monitoring Free Republic in some fashion.

[SunkenCiv]

• All Red States Must Join Gov. DeSantis to Restrain Big Tech
• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Banned From Instagram Days After Outlining Bill Gates’ Global Domination Efforts

[humblegunner]

https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3931633/posts

[Truthoverpower]

I have a funny one as I just had an experience trying to go to a website and Google did everything they could to try to prevent me from going just like the old Grover book where he would try to convince you not to turn those pages

I typed in MGTOW

I got 100% anti-propaganda every single website

So I added the www. .com

Then they gave me some really weird pages that say this website is highly dangerous they’re going to steal all your information and tried everything to redirect me away from the little place where I could continue

If you ever thought for a minute that there’s a giant conspiracy two per propel women up and boys and men DOWN.

LOOK AT THE BIAS OF GOOGLE. THEY CANT HIDE IT

If in this world you try to censor another; You will find that inherently difficult to do

Our country is founded in free speech

[Truthoverpower]

Now don’t get me wrong !

in my world, it’s all about my dear wife!!!!

whatever she wants !!! whenever she wants it !! she’s always right !!

and I’m dead serious!!!

But the only reason why that tremendous woman is really happy 😃

is because I’m a real man.

[Basket_of_Deplorables]

Excellent piece!

“The most important demand we can make of lawmakers and regulators is that Big Tech be forbidden from activating these filters without our knowledge and consent. They should be prohibited from doing this—and even from nudging us to turn on a filter—under penalty of losing their Section 230 immunity as publishers of third party content. This policy should be strictly enforced, and it should extend even to seemingly non-political filters like relevance and popularity. Anything less opens the door to manipulation.

Our ultimate goal should be a marketplace in which third party companies would be free to design filters that could be plugged into services like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and YouTube. In other words, we would have two separate categories of companies: those that host content and those that create filters to sort through that content. In a marketplace like that, users would have the maximum level of choice in determining their online experiences. At the same time, Big Tech would lose its power to manipulate our thoughts and behavior and to ban legal content—which is just a more extreme form of filtering—from the Web.

This should be the standard we demand, and it should be industry-wide. “

YES!!!