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Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
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12 Jan, 9 tweets, 3 min read
How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler

greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-…
In the last three months, tech giants have censored political speech and journalism to manipulate U.S. politics -- banning reporting on the Bidens, removing the President, destroying a new competitor -- while US liberals, with virtual unanimity, have cheered.
The ACLU said the unity of Silicon Valley monopoly power to destroy Parler was deeply troubling. Leaders from Germany, France and Mexico protested. Only US liberals support it, because the dominant strain of US liberalism is not economic socialism but political authoritarianism.
greenwald.substack.com/p/how-silicon-…
Just three months ago, a Dem-led House Committee issued a major report warning of the dangers of the anti-trust power of Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook. Left-wing scholars have been sounding the alarm for years. Now it's here, and liberals cheer:

Probably the worst discourse tactic liberals are using is to accuse you of being pro-Terrorist or sympathizing with white supremacy if you question or are concerned about any of the powers they're seizing & wielding for their new War on Terror - taken right from Cheney and Rove.
Social media monopolies have been censoring to please powerful factions for years, signalling that this moment was coming. Few cared when Palestinian journalists & activists were banned at Israel's behest. You have to object to this as a principle:

theintercept.com/2017/12/30/fac…
I still think the most ominous and consequential moment was when FB and Twitter united to ban reporting about the Bidens in the weeks before the election. Twitter mostly expressed regret. FB did not. Liberals & **journalists** overwhelmingly cheered. That showed what was coming.
What was just done with Parler can't be overstated. They created a system where they can not only ban and silence whoever they want from their monopolistic platforms, but also remove entire platforms, their competitors, from the internet. New weapons don't get used only once.

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Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
13 Jan
Some deceitful idiot from the New York Times yesterday posted a screen shot of my tweet, out of context, to imply I said no Parler users were involved in the protest.

Anyone literate could see my point: FB & YouTube were used far more, exactly what this new reporting shows:
WPost: "A growing body of evidence shows Facebook played a much larger role than Sandberg suggested.

The #StopTheSteal hashtag was widely used on the service ...when a search on Facebook reported 128,000 people were talking about it and ... using it to coordinate for the rally."
That prompts again the same question I asked in my article and tweets (that the NYT reporter blatantly distorted):

Why didn't Dem politicians, and journalists, demand that Apple & Google remove *FB* from their stores given the much larger role it played than Parler?
Read 6 tweets
Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
13 Jan
The @ACLU spent years suing over the no-fly list, insisting it was a grave abuse of power.

Does ACLU have a position on Schumer's call for Americans to be put on that list with no trial, and the Chair of the House Homeland Security Comm calling for 2 Senators to be put on it?
I spent years reporting on the no-fly list, including @ACLU's lawsuits. It's monstrous. But in the War on Terror, the argument was: it prevents terrorists from coming to US or boarding planes to blow them up. Does anyone think Cruz & Hawley will do this?

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Here's the @ACLU's summary of the evils of the no-fly list, and why they spent so many years suing to end it. Kind of amazing to see Dems not demanding it be *expanded*, to include people not yet convicted as well as sitting US Senators:

aclu.org/issues/nationa…
Read 4 tweets
Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
12 Jan
Look at what this liberal NYT columnist is saying.

She's saying she's "disturbed" at how "dangerous" it is "to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge of who has a megaphone," but as long as they use that power to censor her adversaries, not her allies, she's happy:
That is the authoritarian mindset in its purest expression, right there:☝️

As long as Silicon Valley monopoly power is harnessed to silence those who think differently than I, I support it.

Not a single major USN left-liberal politician has objected to this. Many have cheered.
For those who didn't see, leaders of democracies around the world -- Germany, France, Mexico -- are warning that this Silicon Valley censorship poses a grave threat to democracy. They oppose monopoly power over politics.

Only US liberals support this:

Read 4 tweets
Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
11 Jan
"German Chancellor Angela Merkel blasted Twitter’s decision to ban U.S. President Donald Trump.

'The right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance,' Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s chief spokesman, told reporters in Berlin on Monday."
What makes Merkel's comments particularly striking -- apart from her well-reported acrimony with Trump -- is, as @AliceFromQueens noted, Europe generally and Germany specifically have far less permissive free speech traditions than the US. Yet even Merkel finds this alarming.
A related reminder: during the Snowden reporting in 2013, Merkel called Obama, furious when it was revealed that the NSA had spied on her personal calls, and reminded him that she grew up in East Germany and explicitly compared NSA spying to the Stasi:

theguardian.com/world/2013/dec…
Read 8 tweets
Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
11 Jan
In any other moment, it would not be hard to understand why it's incredibly menacing to have elected officials supported by Silicon Valley publicly demanding that those mega-corporations use their monopoly power to silence adversaries. But as was true after 9/11, anything goes:
The way @FreedomofPress began was when Sen. Joe Lieberman abused his power as Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee to demand that banks & credit card companies terminate WikiLeaks' accounts. We created FPF to collect for WL & destroy that blockade:

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…
Having elected officials with power over tech companies direct those companies to censor those with different ideologies is despotic: a merger of state and corporate/monopolistic power.

But the 9/11 framework is in play: if you dissent from any of this, you're pro-Terrorist.
Read 6 tweets
Glenn Greenwald Profile picture
11 Jan
The ACLU in NYT on why the union of Silicon Valley monopolies -- Apple, Google and Amazon -- to remove Parler from the internet is so problematic. While ACLU is largely just a liberal pressure group now, they still have some real civil liberties lawyers:

nytimes.com/2021/01/10/tec… Image
Tech monopolies -- FB, Google, Apple, Amazon -- have more concentrated wealth & power than any in history. They have used brute force 3 times in 3 months to manipulate US politics: censoring NY Post, banning Trump, destroying Parler.

And liberals are overwhelmingly supportive.
That these Silicon Valley monopolies are grave menaces to political freedom & economic well-being is *not* a right-wing view.

The most comprehensive report warning of these dangers was issued 3 months ago by a Democratic House Sub-Committee. Read this:

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
Read 9 tweets

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