Social Media Companies the Most Dangerous Monopolies Ever
Social Media Companies the Most
Dangerous Monopolies Ever
Facebook, Twitter, and Google
are far worse than the original monopolies like International Harvester and
Standard Oil and far more dangerous because they monopolize not just our
industries but our brains. They control, or at least inordinately influence,
how Americans and even much of the world think.
The news that Facebook has
"trust" scores for users but will not reveal them to
those same users is, to put it mildly, distressing. One wonders what the trust
score of, say, George Orwell might have been. That Animal Farm was
inflammatory stuff. And how about Aldous Huxley, the drug abuser who wrote Brave New World?
And what about you and me? How does that make you feel
when your random comments and opinions
are being cataloged for future use as they would be in a Stalinist police state? It's one thing for the government to do that — and they do — but another for media that are so pervasive their reach dwarfs government.
are being cataloged for future use as they would be in a Stalinist police state? It's one thing for the government to do that — and they do — but another for media that are so pervasive their reach dwarfs government.
Oh, but these people are liberals. They are
"good."
But before we discuss a cure, let's examine how this
can of digital worms came to be. The titans of social media are all relatively
the same age. They and most of those who work for them are products of the same
pervasively liberal educational system of rigidly enforced political
correctness that begins at a very young age and accelerates through college.
It's no wonder that they think within those
constrained boundaries and almost inevitable that these same values would be
reflected in the algorithms they construct to monitor their sites. Garbage
in/garbage out. It should not be in the least surprising that the mildest of
rebellions at Google — a tentative, almost circumspect
questioning of whether gender had more influence on our lives than dictated by
PC culture — resulted in the expulsion of the rebel.
Further to this education, it's likely the leaders of
these companies and their many minions, including those who write the
algorithms, had little exposure to the principles of the founding fathers of
our country or the European thinkers — Locke, Montesquieu, etc. — who
influenced them. They are largely ignorant of concepts of freedom and liberty
that are glossed over in our schools, especially for young people whose studies
emphasized tech and business.
The Zuckerbergs of the world and their cronies act
like people who are so conventional in their thinking and so wedded to their
puerile version of "liberalism" (not to be confused with
"classical liberalism") that they don't seem to realize their
enforcement methods veer to the totalitarian (cf. the unconscionable censoring
— excuse me, "restricting
of access" — of PragerU by YouTube). Or they simply don't care
and will do anything to get their critics off their backs and continue their
quests for wealth and power.
The most obvious solutions are either to boycott them
or to start alternative institutions, both of which have been tried to some
extent. This approach, good as it sounds and consonant as it is with free
market ideals, is unfortunately naive and out of synch with the lives we are
living. The first mover advantage of the tech giants is tremendous. It is hard
to see how they will be replaced, at least in the short run.
So we are left with the uncomfortable spectre of
government regulation, something we "classical liberals" (read:
modern-day libertarians) decidedly dislike. Yet we seem to have no choice.
Social media have become a form of supra-government, more influential than the
government itself, infecting the world almost like a living organism.
We do, however, actually have a choice — government-enforced deregulation. Legislation
could be passed forbidding social media from keeping anybody out, censoring
anybody, excepting a very few people such as child pornographers, already
against the law.
Yes, I know these are private companies entitled to do
anything they wish, but a line has been crossed that few ever anticipated.
These entities have become the primary arenas of free expression in the world.
They can exercise more control than any government. This cannot and should not
be allowed to continue.
ENVOI: Evidently Facebook has a lot in common with
Communist China these days. From the Daily Mail: Communist
China will use a 'social credit score' to rank it citizens and give those with
the most favored behavior perks.
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