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posted by martyb on Saturday October 14 2017, @12:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the follow-the-money dept.

[...] tech companies are under fire for creating problems instead of solving them. At the top of the list is Russian interference in last year's presidential election. Social media might have originally promised liberation, but it proved an even more useful tool for stoking anger. The manipulation was so efficient and so lacking in transparency that the companies themselves barely noticed it was happening.

The election is far from the only area of concern. Tech companies have accrued a tremendous amount of power and influence. Amazon determines how people shop, Google how they acquire knowledge, Facebook how they communicate. All of them are making decisions about who gets a digital megaphone and who should be unplugged from the web.

Their amount of concentrated authority resembles the divine right of kings, and is sparking a backlash that is still gathering force.

Is it that the tech companies are creating problems for society as a whole, or merely disrupting the status quo for the old Powers-That-Be?


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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Monday October 16 2017, @12:53AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Monday October 16 2017, @12:53AM (#582849) Homepage Journal

    Again, you move the goalposts to an irrelevant set. You're also wrong but let's leave that for now. International definitions of right and left are the wrong measure for internal comparisons. Period. This means your entire argument is pointless.

    Now, back to you being wrong. You really, really need to study world levels of social spending if you believe even the right-wing of US politics is anywhere but solidly on the left of the international scale. Pay particular attention to us spending more on entitlements than anyone but Sweeden. Now if you were talking the liberty vs. authoritarian axis, that's an entirely different matter. Start listing off the nations of the world with freedom of speech, religion, the press, association, yadda-yadda-yadda enshrined in their constitution. It's going to be a very short list and it will include few if any of your favored European nations.

    So, no, despite what your extreme-left professors taught you in college, the US is not a poor-hating, authoritarian hell hole. Not by any rational standard.

    --
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