They also blocked navalny s you tube videos, videos that navalny and his allies posted, the smart voting strategy. google blocked the videos at the demand of putin s government. today the washington post published an eerily resonant story, along those same lines, except this time it involves the ceo of facebook mark zuckerberg, and the nation of vietnam. here s how they put it, late last year, mark zuckerberg faced a choice, comply with demands from vietnam s ruling communist party to center antigovernment dissidence or risk getting knocked offline in one of facebook s most lucrative markets, in the months leading up to vietnam s process in january, facebook increased censorship of anti-state posts giving the government in vietnam near total control over the
Recommendations to join the qanon groups, within a week, carol smith s feed was filled with hate speech, and disinformation. that researcher published the story of that dummy account s journey in a 2019 internal report of facebook called carol s journey to qanon. but even after that was found and reported inside facebook by their own researchers, nothing happened. at least not a lot happened that we can tell, and that was not a stand alone incident. an incredibly similar thing happened with the dummy account in india this 2019. instead of a conservative mom being told to go full qanon, though, in this piece, the dummy account was a 21-year-old indian woman set up as a generic account set up without expressing much interest in anything, quickly flooded with quite disgusting, lurid, antimuslim hate speech and propaganda. the facebook researcher said the
Because they have made it clear what they care about first, second and third is profits, profits, profits, and if that means doing the dance with dictators, if that means telling donald trump or elizabeth warren you could run ads that lie about your opponents, then they re fine with that as long as they keep raking the bucks in. and they re so damn good at it because they have so much information about everyone. so my view on this is it is time to break up facebook now. is it any more likely that that will happen now than it was in 2019 when you were so vocal about it just a couple of years ago? yes. we now have ahead of the ftc who has written about the dangerous that this kind of monopoly poses to our country and understand, it s an economic monopoly, you
Out of the marketplace, it s what they re doing to washington: it s how much power facebook and its lobbyists have in washington. and they re the ones who keep congress from acting. you know, the reason congress doesn t act is because millions of users across the country are saying, oh, please, you know, don t make life a little tougher for facebook. i don t want to have the option of picking from eight or ten or 20 different companies that are competing for my business. i only want to go to facebook. that s not the reason at all. it s the concentrated power. remember, that when teddy roosevelt, remember the famous trust buster, came in and started breaking up those giant companies around the turn of the last century, the reason he gave was not just about economic power. it was concentrated political power. he did it, he said, to save our democracy. well, it s come to us again.
Happens, and i hear you do when you describe why it s more likely than it previously was, is there room for the congress essentially to establish regulation in this field around human rights and around the protections for pluralistic democracies. i mean, if facebook had been compelled by u.s. law to not respond to a dictator, to not respond to the putin regime in russia, and take actions to disadvantage opposition political candidates, if they were constrained by u.s. law in terms of how they were able to answer demands like that, would that make a difference? sure. we could have written much better laws over the last decade to be able to constrain. now, it s tough, you know, we ve got lots of free speech issues, and the regulation would be difficult. there s no doubt about it. but, yes, we could have done better, but rachel, that s the reminder about what s wrong with monopolies. it s not only what they re doing