Conservatives Must Fight Big Tech or Lose
Article subtitle:
The problem isn’t simply radicalism. It’s power.
Article publisher:
FrontPage Mag
Article date:
16 October 2020
Article category:
National News
Medium
Article Body:
... Facebook and Twitter’s desperate attempts to block a damaging story about Joe and Hunter Biden is the culmination of four years of work to transform social media into the media. Under the guise of false claims about disinformation, foreign election interference, bots, networks, deepfakes, public health risks, and assorted tech paranoia, free speech died on the internet.
The moment when the White House Press Secretary had her account locked for tweeting a damaging news story about Joe Biden brought home the Big Tech reality to most Republicans....
Facebook controls 80% of social media and Google controls 80% of internet search traffic....
That Democrats, who once championed a free internet, now view it the same way all totalitarians do, speaks volumes not only about the death of liberalism but also about the transformation of the internet from a vox populi to a walled garden controlled by a handful of Big Tech monopolies whose cultural views and politics closely align with those of the Democrats....
Politics is being reduced to naked power....
The internet, like any society’s marketplace of ideas, is a symptom. Free countries have a robust marketplace of ideas. Unfree ones are obsessed with censoring speech and monitoring their citizens, all the while spinning paranoid fantasies about foreign interference, the threat of dangerous ideas, and the risk to political stability from speech....
The problem isn’t simply radicalism. It’s power....
Big Tech’s power is growing exponentially, but it’s still vulnerable. The companies that will become immovable oligarchies in a decade can still be brought down and broken up. The internet and the marketplace of ideas can rise again from the ruins of those monopolies.
Related
Twitter Operates as Biden’s Censorship Arm - A sordid tale of tech giants’ election interference, by Joseph Klein, FrontPage Mag, October 16, 2020