This whole thread by @Jack should be read. He's clearly the Silicon Valley executive who engages most, listen most to feedback, and is clearly torn about the power foisted on them.
One key point: Apple, Google & Amazon banned Parler only after major Dem politicians demanded it.
That's one point I think has been lost. Dems are about to take over the Exec Branch & Congress.
Some of their most powerful & famous politicians used social media to demand the monopolies they're about to regulate silence adversaries & remove from the internet an entire platform
The fact that Silicon Valley overwhelmingly supports the Dem Party, and the Dem Party is now about to be responsible for regulating (or not regulating) these tech giants, makes it chilling when the demands for censorship from Dem politicians are honored.
When the internet and encryption proliferated in the 1990s, the Clinton Admin seized on the Oklahoma City bombing to demand back-door access to all encryption. Bush & Obama used 9/11 to radically expand internet surveillance.
Now it's CNN/NBC/NYT journalists who take the lead.
Three events in the last 3 months have been major attacks on a free internet: FB & Twitter uniting to censor NY Post pre-election reporting on the Bidens (a shocking breach); the removal of POTUS from the internet; the monopolistic destruction of Parler. A huge escalation.
Amazingly this article hypes the new Domestic Terrorism Law authored by Adam Schiff, easily one of the most authoritarian and militarist members of Congress.
Even if you're happy for news laws to punish your right-wing enemies, this will be used against all protest movements.
Anyway, I genuinely recommend reading the article. @billscher is one of those earnest liberals who takes the time to calmly and rationally lay out his thinking as clearly as he can, so it will give insight into the authoritarian liberal mentality of the moment.
This @washingtonpost article today on Laura Poitras' firing from First Look Media (parent company of @theintercept) again notes that Intercept editors *still* refuse to provide any public accounting of the newsroom fuck-up on the Reality Winner story.
Many people (including myself & Laura) spent months demanding that accounting. Their original excuse was they didn't want to help DOJ in its prosecution. But that prosecution has been over for 2 1/2 years. Where is that accounting? Provide the transparency you demand of others.
The reality is top Intercept editors never provided any accounting of what happened in the Winner case - who fucked that up and why? - because they knew I was being widely blamed, despite having *zero involvement in the story and were happy about that & didn't want to come clean.
I really enjoyed this discussion about Silicon Valley monopoly & censorship power on @briebriejoy & @virgiltexas's podcast. I didn't agree with @ZephyrTeachout on everything but did on most. There are few people as informed about the dangers of SV monopolies & how to combat them.
As a side note, every time I appear on a podcast like this I hear it means you're "reduced" to using platforms like this. One day, compare the audience for the top podcasts to your favorite cable shows, or how many people read a Substack article v. your favorite liberal website.
It's true that if you go on MSNBC or CNN, you get to talk to 2 million geriatric liberals with Biden2020 on their car bumper, or wine moms with pictures of Joe&Kamala in their Twitter bios. But corporate media is not the main way you get heard. Independent platforms are thriving.
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?
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?
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: