Time To Break Up Big Tech

 I haven't really tackled the problems produced by the fact that 'Big Tech' is biased and uses biased search results to influence what you see and what you don't.  This, unfortunately makes platforms like Google publishers instead of utilities.  Think of a utility like the telephone providers.  They do not censor what speech goes over their systems, and therefore they are not held liable for such speech.  Rather, the person who may make offensive speech is the one held liable.  This is how it should be.  But a publisher determines who can speak through them, and who can not, and they can even edit what people may say.  Think of the letters to the editor of a newspaper.  The editors of a such a site are indeed liable for what appears on their site.

Google, Twitter, facebook and other so called 'Big Tech' have been waging a war on conservative speech and conservative sites such as for instance The Daily Caller Jordan Davidson at The Federalist has the story. 

This fits a long and growing trend of corporate media and big tech deciding what content users can see, with big implications for elections and even just political discourse, as studies have found that what information you know affects your views.

As always, go read The Federalist article for more information. At the same time as the Daily Caller article came out, there was an article at Townhall.com by Nicholas Waddy entitled Containing The Fearsome Power of Big Tech Is The Defining Challenge Of Our Times.

President Trump realizes the danger that Big Tech poses. He wants to crack down on the unhealthy market domination that companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube enjoy — and which officials in these companies readily admit when they critique one another. Furthermore, Trump has taken them to task for their unfair and illegal persecution of conservatives, even while giving aid and comfort to the most violent and extreme leftists. The social media thought police have targeted President Trump personally, so he knows what he's talking about.

The question is why? Why do they want to censor conservatives, and nudge society along in the direction of (take your pick) socialism, communism, facsism, or collectively Marxism? For all these "isms" are various flavors of Marxism.  The answer, I think, is that all of these people, having made a kings ransom in monetary terms, are convinced that they are smarter than the average bear.  Truth be told, they probably are.  But so what.  Does being smarter than I am give them a right to determine how I live?  The answer is no, it does not.  Each of us will have to answer for how we lived at the final judgement.  If I don't seek the facts, that is my problem, but if the some of the facts are deliberately kept from my site, then that is on the censors.  

The problem we are facting today goes back millennia, to the notion of the Divine Rights of Kings.  That notion was overthrown by the American Revolution. Neither Bloomberg, nor Sundar Pichai, nor Jack Dorsey, or Mark Zuckerberg have the right to censor in any way what we can see or hear.   As long as they provide a useful service to all, they deserve the great wealth they have earned.  But when they begin to use it to change the way people think, they no longer deserve anything at all.  It is why the NY Times, the Washington Post, and other newspapers are held in such low regard.  Once Google abandoned is motto of ''Don't be evil" it became what it didn't want to be.