“Big Tech Oligopoly”

The PayPal co-founder predicts that Elon Musk has started a great reckoning

As the cheap money era draws to a close, perhaps no industry has been worse affected than the tech sector. Last year, there were nearly 100,000 job cuts — an astonishing 649% increase from the nearly 13,000 tech jobs that were cut in 2021. And this year the picture doesn’t look much rosier: from Apple to Amazon (which cut a further 18,000 employees this week), job cuts are happening across the board.

So where does this leave Twitter’s new chief, Elon Musk? Like other tech CEOs, the entrepreneur has announced a significant reduction to his new workforce, with reports suggesting that as much as 75% of employees are leaving. But astonishing as this figure may seem, Twitter has actually grown in activity and downloads under its new leadership. What could explain this?

The ongoing ‘Twitter Files’ revelations show that Republicans’ first order of business this coming 118^th Congress must be to introduce a legislative firewall between the White House — and its offshoot federal law enforcement agencies such as the Department of Justice and its offshoot, the FBI — and private social media companies. Last summer’s revelations of government pressuring social media executives into blocking users not toeing the official line on COVID was as clear an example of unconstitutional “state action” as any. Courts have long ruled the government cannot pressure private entities, as an “agent of government,” into censoring what itself cannot.

There is perhaps no better case study on the dangers of using censorship to combat misinformation than the Hunter Biden laptop story, as detailed in the recently released tranche of correspondence from employees of one of the largest social media companies, dubbed the “Twitter Files.”

Twitter CEO Elon Musk signaled Monday that he might be preparing to “go to war” with Apple after the company has largely stopped advertising on Twitter and has reportedly threatened to boot the social media platform from its App Store.

Musk specifically called out Apple CEO Tim Cook in a series of tweets where he also raised the issue of censorship.

As the 2022 midterm elections approached, social media platforms aggressively championed political ideas benefiting left-wing candidates while silencing dissenting opinions that don’t fit the liberal worldview in the third quarter.

During the first three quarters of 2022, MRC Free Speech America counted a total of 435 individual censorship cases that translated to no fewer than 251,399,696 times that Big Tech kept information from social media users through secondhand censorship.

The Department of Homeland Security has left open a special feature that allows government officials to flag Facebook posts for misinformation after scrapping a controversial advisory board tasked with developing guidelines for social media censorship, the Intercept reported Monday.

It is an evil world.

America has been sold a lucrative myth

We are, if you believe the headlines, living in the midst of an unprecedented mental health crisis, exacerbated by the stress and isolation of the pandemic. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, at the end of May, nearly 40% of American adults had experienced symptoms of depression and anxiety during the past month, with nearly a quarter filling a prescription for an antidepressant or other psychiatric drug. The rise in mental health problems has been particularly dramatic among the young: the New York Times reported in July that between 2017 and 2021, antidepressant use rose by 41% among American teenagers.