The most dramatic change in American capitalism over the last half century has been the emergence of corporate behemoths like Amazon and the simultaneous shrinkage of organized labor. The resulting imbalance has spawned near-record inequalities of income and wealth, corruption of democracy by big money, and the abandonment of the working class.
All this is coming to a head in several ways.
Seriously? Progressives don’t give a damn about the working class.
Big Tech companies such as Facebook, Google, and Amazon collect personal user data from many different sources to create “secret identities” of people in order to understand users’ personality traits, predict purchasing behavior, and ultimately sell these profiles to advertisers and sometimes the government.
Most often, users don’t even realize that their data is being collected and exploited by tech companies. Besides advertisers, millions of people’s personal user data has also been sold to U.S. federal agencies for border control purposes as well as to the military for counterterrorism purposes.
Justin Lane is an Oxford University-trained artificial intelligence (AI) expert and entrepreneur with no patience for fluffy theories. His research spans the field of cognition — both human and artificial — as well as religion and conflict.
That led to some fascinating fieldwork in Northern Ireland, where he studied Irish Republican Army and Ulster Defence Association extremists up close. Ultimately, he applied his humanities research to AI programming and agent-based computer simulations.
“Digital giants have been playing an increasingly significant role in wider society… how well does this monopolism correlate with the public interest?,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said on January 27, 2021.
“Where is the distinction between successful global businesses, sought-after services and big data consolidation on the one hand, and the efforts to rule society[…] by substituting legitimate democratic institutions, by restricting the natural right for people to decide how to live and what view to express freely on the other hand?”
Was Mr. Putin defending democracy? Hardly. What apparently worries him is that the Big Tech might gain the power to control society at the expense of his government. What must be a nightmare for him — as for many Americans — is that the Tech giants were able to censor news favorable to Trump and then censor Trump himself. How could the U.S. do this to the president of a great and free country?
China’s ‘Sharp Eyes’ Program Aims to Surveil 100% of Public Space
The program turns neighbors into agents of the surveillance state
Who knew years ago that the United States would be lagging far behind countries like Poland and Hungary in free speech?
They evidently learned something from years under the iron fist of the Soviet Union.
The Poles are proposing new laws that would impose fines of $13.5 million on Big Tech social media companies that censor users or remove posts for ideological reasons.
In their zeal for control over online speech, House Democrats are getting closer and closer to the constitutional line, if they have not already crossed it.
For the third time in less than five months, the U.S. Congress has summoned the CEOs of social media companies to appear before them, with the explicit intent to pressure and coerce them to censor more content from their platforms. On March 25, the House Energy and Commerce Committee will interrogate Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Facebooks’s Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Sundar Pichai at a hearing which the Committee announced will focus “on misinformation and disinformation plaguing online platforms.”
With Donald Trump out of office and de-platformed, you’d think mainstream media gatekeepers would be happy. You’d think wrong.
Though the media-Big Tech regime is doing its best to silence opponents and seize control of the high ground, the news from within is grim. They aren’t happy with how things are going.
That’s because they know they’re losing. Some are losing audiences and revenues. But more important, they’re losing control of the narrative.
For years, Facebook has been in a defensive crouch amid a slew of privacy scandals, antitrust lawsuits and charges that it was letting hate speech and extremism destroy democracy. Early Thursday, though, it abruptly pivoted to take the offensive in Australia, where it lowered the boom on publishers and the government with a sudden decision to block news on its platform across the entire country.
That power play — a response to an Australian law that would compel Facebook to pay publishers for using their news stories — might easily backfire, given how concerned many governments have grown about the company’s unchecked influence over society, democracy and political discourse. But it’s still a startling reminder of just how much power CEO Mark Zuckerberg can wield at the touch of a figurative button.
Topple the oligarchs.
OTTAWA (Reuters) – Canada vowed on Thursday to make Facebook Inc pay for news content, seeking allies in the media battle with tech giants and pledging not to back down if the social media platform shuts off the country’s news as it did in Australia.
Facebook blocked all Australian news content on its service over proposed legislation requiring it and Alphabet Inc’s Google to pay fees to Australian publishers for news links.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has labelled Facebook’s decision to ban Australian users from viewing news content as “arrogant” and warned that he is in regular contact with world leaders, who are all contending with how to better regulate Big Tech.
“Facebook’s actions to unfriend Australia today, cutting off essential information services on health and emergency services, were as arrogant as they were disappointing,” he said in a statement posted on Facebook.
Google has been cutting deals with publishers such as News Corp, and now also is in talks with Canadian publishers but I suspect Facebook isn’t acting independently of their brethren in the Oligopoly.
This seems a suicidal position for FB to take. Or is it?
#DeleteFacebook! Campaign to ditch the social media giant surges on Twitter as US politician says blocking all news from Australians ‘wasn’t compatible with democracy’
Facebook has followed through on its threat to ban Australians from seeing or posting news content on its site in response to the federal government’s news media code.
The tech giant’s Australian and New Zealand managing director Will Easton said that it would prevent links posted from Australian publishers, while all Australian users would not be able to share or see content from any news outlets both Australian or internationally as a result of the ban.
News Corp., the parent company of the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal, said it has reached a three-year agreement to provide content from its news sites around the globe to Google in exchange for “significant payments” from the search giant.
The deal appears to resolve a long-simmering standoff between News Corp. and Google that has spilled across multiple continents and spurred government efforts worldwide to curb Google’s growing dominance over online advertising, most prominently in Australia.
The wildly popular free speech platform Parler has made a sudden return after being nuked from the internet by Amazon Web Services back in January.
“Parler, the world’s #1 free speech social media platform with over 20 million users, is announcing its official relaunch today, built on sustainable, independent technology and not reliant on so-called ‘Big Tech’ for its operations,” the social media platform revealed on Monday in a press release. “Parler’s relaunch—open to Americans of all viewpoints—is available immediately.”
The demand by Australia’s conservative coalition government that Google and Facebook pay for content is drawing results, with the tech giants revealing Monday they are close to deals with major news providers.
So if Big Tech works out a similar deal with Canadian media does that mean the Trudeau subsidy will be halted?
The EU is looking into plans to make big tech companies such as Google and Facebook pay for news in a push similar to reforms in Australia.
MEPs are working on two draft European digital regulations that could be amended to include proposals akin to those in Australia, the Financial Times reported.
The plans could require big tech companies to pay for news content as well as inform publishers about changes to how they rank news stories on their sites.
I am very curious to see how all this ends.
