« The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition |
Main
|
"Wonder Woman 1984" Will be Released to HBO Max on the Same Day As Its (Obligatory) Release to Theaters;
Move May Mark The End of Movie Theaters »
November 19, 2020
Monopolies Google, FaceBook, and Twitter Are Coordinating Their Censorship Policies In An Illegal Cartel
One of the actions that a monopoly can take that will get it prosecuted for anti-trust violation is secret coordination with other monopolies to price-fix or otherwise rig the marketplace.
Monopolies acting in concert to determine what may be said, and which parties are allowed to win the White House, is obviously that sort of acting in concert.
Josh Hawley grilled Zuckerberg about whether FaceBook engages in this sort of illegal market-rigging.
Hawley said that his office was recently contacted by a former Facebook employee who claimed that an internal program called Tasks is used by the company "to coordinate projects including censorship."
"As I understand it, Facebook censorship teams communicate with their counterparts at Twitter and Google, and then enter those companies’ suggestions for censorship onto the Tasks platform so that Facebook can then follow-up with them and effectively coordinate their censorship efforts," Hawley said.
Zuckerberg acknowledged that it's not unusual for workers within Facebook to speak with their peers at other companies, but denied that there was any coordinated decision on what content should be unilaterally banned.
"Senator, we do not coordinate our policies," he said. "I think it would be probably pretty normal for people to talk to their peers and colleagues in the industry. … But that’s different from coordinating what our policies are, or our responses in specific instances."
Hawley's whistleblower says that Zuckerberg is lying, and that the companies do coordinate their censorship policies:
Update: Over the weekend, Twitter hate-mobs attacked a Star Wars voice actor over his Parler account. They threatened his career and claimed he was a racist until he deleted the Parler account.
Question: Given that Twitter is a monopoly, and is a huge censor, doesn't twitter's permissiveness about hate-mobs using Twitter to cripple Twitter's main competitor raise anti-trust flags?
It's not like Twitter can plead Free Speech. They can't say "We allow users to say whatever they want." They don't. They're absurdly controlling cenors.
And yet they allow Twitter wolf-packs to intimidate people away from using Twitter's competitor Parler.
Interesting. Legally interesting, I think.