Posted on 09/05/2018 5:27:13 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
Social Media and search giants are being hit with a class-action lawsuit from a pro-Trump group who claims that they conspired against Conservatives.
Freedom Watch, which promotes right to privacy among other causes, claims that Facebook, Google, Twitter and Apple violated antitrust laws.
“Our YouTube account on Google never gets above 49 thousand,” said Larry Klayman, the group’s founder, during an interview on FOX Business’ “Varney & Co.” on Tuesday. “It goes up, it goes down. That’s been going on for about six months,” he claimed while adding that other conservative groups and interests are also experiencing the same issues.
Klayman, a former antitrust lawyer who helped break up AT&T’s telephone monopoly during the Regan administration, also alleged the tech companies collaborated to restrain trade.
“There’s also a concept of conscious parallelism,” he said. “When companies move in tandem in parallel fashion that do the same thing that can be restraint of trade. So we believe there’s an actual agreement between these leftist owned media giants like Google, Twitter, YouTube etc.,” he explained.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxbusiness.com ...
This could bring in the SEC and the FCC.
This picture tells everything. And Valeria Jarret is hidden in the picture behind Zuck.
The woman in black with her back to us is a spouse of one of the others. I forget who. Liz has a full seating chart.
Praise be to God!
Yes. Companies and individuals are basically forced into the cloud these days with very little understanding of what it is.
When it all becomes cloud based, who wins? Whomever has the data. Scary times we live in.
I think that stifling of competition and creating impossible barriers to entry for opposing thought might be a way to attack them. You’re right, as a business they should be able to associate with whom they choose, but if they actively squelch the ability of others to create competing services, then I think antitrust law must surely apply.
Spoken as a layman and ready to be corrected.
Oh, and if it turns out they are wholly pwn3d and operated by the C_A, then I think all their code should be made open source.
Interesting. And China just Shut F@cebook Down right before the were supposed to go-live with a Chinese Fakebook. Methinks Apple and Suckbook don’t play well together.
Jeff Sessions ate at a local Mexican place and the owner got death threats, threats to burn the building down, threats to shut him down. Nasty nasty crop o’ communiss we’re dealing with this time.
It’s because communists are inherently immoral animals. To them their ends justify any means.
Not if they are a publicly traded company and offer their stock as an investment in as an ‘internet service provider’ while, in fact, are a content provider that manipulates, censors and shifts its focus on one political spectrum versus a another. They violate the terms of their stock offering and violate terms of free trade.
Azure, AWS or other cloud vendors don’t do politics or social media per se. It’s really about running stuff, like virtual machines, database and apps on their hardware instead of your own. So I don’t think Azure can be tied in to FaceBook, Twitter or even Google Search.
Microsoft Azure also has a separate Government segment. It can be used by US DoD, Fed, state and locals govs but it does not interact with commercial Internet side. It’s isolated for security reasons, not politics or social media.
The separate Azure China realm is similar to Azure Government.
But sure enough, Microsoft is full of SJWs and would repress or silence conservatives in a heartbeat. I KNOW. It’s happened to me. I worked/contract for them. I’m from Alabama. You should hear the grief I get every time I’m in Redmond. The only people you can be socially crass and prejudice to are Southerners.
In their numerous cafeterias, every TV blares MSNBC like CNN at airports...
If they knew I was a FReeper and Trump supporter I’d probably lose my contracts, no bull.
Since the use of any of the online services is voluntary and since all are private organizations/corprations, the law suit has no merit.
Decisions as to how their business is conducted is to be established by their boards of directors.
To change the behavior, control of the boards must be obtained
P
Good!! About time someone did this.
These companies are larger than most countries. They are not merely “private organizations.” They are the corporate equivalent of nation-states.
Plus, they played a game of bait-and-switch, luring conservatives into being dependent upon them for communication, then pulling the rug out from under them as an election approaches.
That’s “election meddling,” which they claim is a crime when it is done by “Russians.”
If they want to kick us off, do it AFTER the election so we have plenty of time to replace them before the next election.
Ping your lists - lots of us might want to sign on for this one...
Corrected your sentence for spelling and punctuation.
Neverthe less, regardless of size, they are corporations that offer a service. They promulgate rules for that service.
If you use their service you abide by their rules. You can not use lawyers to change their rules.
I read a good article today at American Thinker titled A Solution to Internet Tyranny which is kind of how I have viewed the problem for some time.
The author makes the distinction between a "Platform" and a "Publisher", and does it in a way I find kind of attractive, and spells out why Twitter, YouTube, and others are, and should be "Platforms" and why the distinction is important.
I read it, and felt it went somewhere down the middle between your view and mine (if I understand your view correctly) and seemed to be able to straddle it in a way that worked for me.
The author states: "...The simple technique that can be used to end the censorship is to have DoJ interpret existing law, or for Congress to pass a law, stating that any Internet site that controls its content for any reason other than criminal activity is a publisher, not a platform..."
Of course, anyone with an ounce of skepticism might look at that and say that the rub is deciding what is "criminal activity", but given that most of us here (though not all) already look at things such as speech as non-criminal.
Most real conservatives tend to look at someone who says "I hate minority X, and don't think they are worthy of this or that" and think "I don't agree with that, but he has the right to say it" because we abhor the concept of "Thought Crimes" or "Hate Crimes". Leftists, on the other hand, have shown great enthusiasm for those kind of things. That said, I still think it makes the cleavage point easier. Saying "I think minority X sucks" is quite easily distinguishable from "I want to kill minority X".
Granted, I am not thrilled about harnessing the power of Land Sharks (Lawyers) since we already live in a highly litigious society, but on the other hand, it does harness the profit motive in a way that might cause those tech giants give thought to what they are doing.
If you get a chance, I would be interested to hear your views on the linked article. I think this is a very difficult issue, and I am still at the stage where I am cogitating on it and trying to absorb how other people feel about it.
I don't want to address the issue of an unnatural proliferation of the Spotted Blotworm (Internet censorship) by bringing in a foreign animal like the Striped Laxtrax Wasp (Government intrusion) that eats them, only to discover the Striped Laxtrax are much more destructive and harder to eradicate.
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