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American Thinker, by David Solway — July 8, 2019

Excerpt:

Should First Amendment rights be extended to Big Tech corporations to publish and censor as they please?  This is a question that has agitated the discussion on whether antitrust legislation should be applied to infogiants such as Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, Pinterest and many others that have cornered the market on a public resource, information, and an essential human activity, the consumption of information. A solution to the problem of data sequestration and restricted access practiced by these companies is to rebadge them either as publishers or, alternatively, as public utilities.

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Wishing to establish fairness in information exchange — the lifeblood of a democratic nation — is the very opposite of fascism. The fact is that suppressing users on political grounds is itself a fascist — or, more accurately, Marxist — strategy that is now the name of the game. Google executive Jen Gennai makes it clear that Google is bent on sidelining supporters of Donald Trump, a practice nothing short of electoral tampering. The great purge against conservatives and free speech advocates is proceeding via tactics like demonetization, shadow banning, the rigging of algorithms, the employment of waffle terms in enforcing company policy (e.g., “community standards”) and outright segregation. This just in from a correspondent:

“On Twitter, a great many right wing accounts are anonymous, and must use certain themes in order to convey our politics. This is necessary because so many of us get suspended or banned. Thus there are code words people use in their tweets and profiles in order to find (or re-find) friends. The lack of identity creates disconnect and loneliness. The result is people mourning banned accounts almost like fallen comrades. Every day new screenshots make the rounds and are shared by those who knew the pseudonymous account in question, the next person whose account has been killed off: an image of their profile with all their tweets gone.”

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View the complete article including links and comments at:

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/why_big_tech_should_not_be_viewed_as_a_private_business.html