The elephant in the room with the US government demanding increasing amounts of censorship from online platforms is that the platforms understand the government can easily bring antitrust cases against them and break them up if they don't obey.
Antitrust laws were made to protect the people from corporate power. Now they're being used to merge corporate power and state power.
"The Roosevelt administration sued successfully to break up such monopolies as John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Co. and J.P. Morgan’s Northern Securities Co., a railroad conglomerate that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, dissolved."
politico.com/story/2018/12/…
politico.com/story/2018/12/…
House: Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Google have “monopoly power,” should be split
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20…
So now we've got worldwide online speech being herded onto a few monopolistic platforms, and the government forcing those platforms with increasing brazenness to censor that speech in alignment with its dictates under threat of antitrust cases.
The effect being, of course, US government control of a vast swathe of public speech, not just within the US but around the world. Which means an ungodly amount of narrative control, the ultimate prize for anyone who understands real power.
This threat isn't even a veiled one, by the way. In 2017 Senator Dianne Feinstein threatened social media platforms that alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election means they need to start utilizing more censorship, or else:
vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/f…
vanityfair.com/news/2017/11/f…
This is just one of the many, many types of glue that keeps power structures aligned with one another's interests. If you want to be a billionaire and control massive amounts of wealth, you have to collaborate with existing power structures. Otherwise you won't be allowed in.
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