Amid regular reports of their censorship of conservative voices, representatives of major tech companies, including Google, Facebook and Microsoft, met privately Friday at Twitter’s headquarters in downtown San Francisco to discuss their tactics in preparation for the 2018 midterm elections, according to an email.
Buzzfeed, which obtained a copy of the email, reported Facebook’s head of cybersecurity policy, Nathaniel Gleicher, invited employees from a dozen companies for a “follow-on discussion to our industry conversation about information operations, election protection, and the work we are all doing to tackle these challenges.”
The meeting comes amid mounting complaints by conservative media outlets, organizations and personalities of politically and ideologically motivated censorship by Facebook, Twitter and others, particularly since the 2016 election.
The San Francisco meeting, according to Buzzfeed, centered on efforts to combat “fake news,” a concern that arose because of Russian propaganda schemes during the 2016 campaign. But it’s the measures by Facebook and others, such as algorithms and “news checkers,” to eliminate fake news that have become tools to censor conservative voices.
As one congressman observed in a hearing on social-media censorship, one man’s “fake news” is another’s “gospel truth.”
And this week, as WND reported, a confidential memo by Media Matters founder David Brock issued in January 2017 outlined a collaborative scheme between George Soros-funded progressive groups and social-media companies to remove President Trump from office that mirrored the recent moves by Silicon Valley tech giants to “shadow ban” conservative political candidates and pundits and remove content.
Media Matters met with Facebook after the 2016 election to discuss how to crack down on fake news, according to the memo. The social media giant was provided with “a detailed map of the constellation of right-wing Facebook pages that had been the biggest purveyors of fake news.” Brock’s memo also said Media Matters gave Google “the information necessary to identify 40 of the worst fake new sites” so they could be banned from Google’s advertising network.
An upcoming documentary called “The Creepy Line” asks, “What if your whole life was taken over, analyzed and exploited, and you signed up for it?”
“Google and Facebook, they’ll sell you anything. They’ll sell you,” says a voiceover in a trailer for the film.
Jordan Peterson, the psychologist who has become wildly popular via social media and his stand against politically correct speech, comments in the film that the “free services” offered by the tech giants are not really free.
It’s the point made by tech icon George Gilder in his new book “Life After Google,” which contends that amid daily news of censorship, privacy violations and market monopolization, the age of the tech giants and their centralized, top-down hierarchical world is about to end, largely because their “neo-Marxist, deterministic” worldview is “fundamentally flawed.”
Google’s products are free because a price of zero, he told WND in an interview, signifies a return to the ancient barter system, and what is exchanged for the goods is a person’s attention and ultimately their time, which, Gilder points out, “is actually your life.”
The digital world after Google, says Gilder, who provided the blueprint for Reagan’s economic revolution and predicted the iPhone among other innovations, will be a new frontier of free enterprise that will look more like the original internet of limitless possibilities but be bolstered by a new architecture rooted in security and private property.
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