Do not underestimate the power of propaganda promulgated by right-wing “news” sources. As Sorensen says in her commentary to this comic, “The fact that Facebook is bending the knee and promoting Breitbart as a legitimate news source should send chills down everyone’s spine.”
Facebook has also decided that they will run any ad from a politician, no matter how clearly false it is. This will clearly help Donald Trump and the GOP. I guess ad revenue is more important to Facebook than avoiding spreading lies and destroying our democracy.
This would not be the first time that overconfidence backfired. We must remember that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.
5 Comments
OT: Margaret finally wrote another column. Must have been since March she hasn’t written on. HIlarious
Perhaps revenue at the end of day, but many large tech companies are scared (legitimately) of what Elizabeth Warren wants to do with them. Even wall street democrats are saying they will vote trump or sit out if she becomes nominee.
Hassan, here are some links for you to read (or for anyone else who is worried about Warren).
I have to say that the saber rattling coming from Wall Street is bullshit. The greediest fat cats say this every election, and yet Wall Street always does better under Democrats. Hell, Obama had to save them from the biggest recession since the Great Depression. Trump is driving this country toward an economic meltdown, and they say they are going to vote for him to spite Warren? They can go f*ck themselves.
Warren is no socialist, she is a pragmatist. She just wants to cut out excessive greed. If Wall Street can’t stomach that, then who cares who they vote for?
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/10/23/20916138/wall-street-elizabeth-warren-supporters-donald-trump
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/11/investing/elizabeth-warren-stock-market-economy/index.html
https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-warren-wall-street-respect-20190705-story.html
https://thehill.com/hilltv/rising/463440-krystal-ball-wall-street-has-no-place-in-democratic-party
Iron Knee, I am not much concerned about Wall Street, but I really like technology companies and how they have been extremely innovative. To that point I really like Andrew Yang’s grasp of automation and Universal Basic Income to balance that.
Yes, and I really liked the old Bell Telephone system, which was the best telephone system in the world and — though Bell Labs — gave us tremendous innovations like the Unix operating system and the C language.
But in 1982 the US broke up the Ma Bell monopoly. At the time, Bell (and others) claimed that would destroy our phone system. It didn’t. In fact, it did the opposite. Innovation exploded — resulting in cell phones, VoIP, smart phones, and much more — while prices went down dramatically.
Hassan, competition is a good thing. Free markets are a good thing. Monopolies are a very bad thing. Facebook is a monopolistic social media site, and they are not particularly innovative. They need to be split up to increase competition. I for one would love more alternatives to Facebook. And I think the other tech giants would benefit from being broken up.
In fact, I’m giving a talk in San Francisco next week about a way to break up social media sites in a way that would dramatically increase competition and innovation. Unfortunately, it is a private talk, or I would invite you!