‘1984’ turning into reality?
Have decision-makers at Google and Facebook overplayed their hand? The first step in the road to “Make ‘1984’ Fiction Again” is to start neutralizing the contrivers responsible for deplatforming InfoWars personality Alex Jones.
The problem with these monopolists is they’re effectively utilities, implied in the 8-0 Supreme Court of the United States decision Packingham v. North Carolina, which ruled, effectively, that social media is the town square. Big Tech enjoys big largesse: Google’s startup was funded with DARPA and NASA grants. 2004: Microsoft received $305M in “exemptions.” Facebook got a $42-million “tax holiday” in 2011. Apple accepted an $89-million tax break in 2012. Big Tech’s made back billions more by commodifying subscriber information. Against this vast spread of public funding and use of their users, the recent justification that “they’re private companies” comes off as sanctimonious.
To further underscore how false it is, the offending companies are publicly traded. (Facebook tumbled in the markets recently and lost $120 billion.)
Without such support, Alex Jones went online and grew his brand, a path followed by hundreds of thousands of content creators developing the “You” in YouTube. Banning him casts a shadow across them, across everyone else.
The problem is, there are people who feel silencing is the only acceptable response to an opinion they don’t agree with. U.S. Democrat Chris Murphy tweets that Big Tech companies “must do more than take down one website.” He added this howler: “The survival of our democracy depends on it”! (Does he truly mean the American republic?) This misbegotten attitude is a problem — perhaps THE problem of our times, driving the split in public discourse.
Jones himself appears unruffled: it vindicates his theorizing about how low they’ll go. He’s the test case, and believes it’s an attempt to throw the U.S. November elections to the Democrats. As we see with Chris Murphy, they openly declare they’ll go after other dissenters (Wikileaks) — as though such suppressions could make #WalkAway go away. There’s a deep undercurrent of globalist fear about the direction the vote could go. And, hopefully, critical error.
Tom Yeoman
Lethbridge