Time to ban the collusion conspiracy theorists

Just when you thought the media’s credibility was hanging by a thread, along comes special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report — finding no Russia collusion with Trump’s 2016 campaign, shredding all the conspiracy theories and false accusations to smithereens.

After all, it was the left-wing media and countless Democrats, including chief conspiracy theorist Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), among others, who relentlessly trafficked Russian collusion propaganda the past few years to derail the Trump administration in an attempt to remove a duly elected president from office. But now, after multiple congressional investigations and the latest 22-month Mueller probe, all of which found no evidence of collusion, the verdict is in — #RussiaGate was a hoax.

A five-alarm disinformation campaign waged by complicit Hate-Trump media, corrupt deep state officials and hysterical Democrats that misled the American people by telling us day in and day out the president, his family and former campaign associates were in cahoots with Putin to steal the 2016 election from Hillary Clinton.

None of which turned out to be true, evidenced by Mueller’s report submitted on Friday to the attorney general that, after an exhaustive investigation led by an adversarial and aggressive prosecutor, didn’t recommend charging a single person in Trump’s orbit with collusion. Why? Because there was none — blowing an irreparable hole in the media’s credibility.

On Sunday a vindicated president tweeted “No Collusion, No Obstruction, Complete and Total EXONERATION. KEEP AMERICA GREAT!”

So now what?

For starters, Twitter, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley tech companies should remove all Russian collusion conspiracy theorists from their platforms.

After all, social media networks didn’t hesitate to ban Alex Jones of Infowars and others for spreading misinformation and/or conspiracy theories, so why not ban House Majority Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Schiff, Eric Swalwell, John Brennan, Beto O’ Rourke and scores of media hacks who’ve all done the same?

And what about Google? Will it continue to allow search results that yield now-debunked conspiracy theories surrounding Russian collusion and the Trump campaign? Or will they do the right thing and scrub misinformation and lies to stop the hoax from perpetuating?

Despite overhelming evidence, the MSM insists that Facebook, Google and Twitter are not biased

Evergreen line from my story last week: “With his tweet...Trump has signaled that he and his Republican allies would continue to paint tech giants like Facebook and Twitter as villains in a longstanding culture war used to excite the conservative base.” https://t.co/iAKwBt2tdd https://t.co/1QKeFKNPRJ

— Oliver Darcy (@oliverdarcy) August 28, 2018

CNN's Oliver Darcy was responding to this tweet in his article attacking Trump for painting "tech giants like Facebook and Twitter as villains in a longstanding culture war used to excite the conservative base." Tellingly, his article did not once mention Facebook silencing conservative articles based on the premise they "look like spam," which took place the day before Trump's tweet.

CNN rushed to "debunk" the claims of Google's bias against conservatives, without mentioning the many lawsuits against Google! James Damore, the former senior software engineer who was fired after spreading a document asking questions about the tech gender gap, is suing Google for discrimination against conservatives. Prager University is suing Google and YouTube for discrimination against conservative content. YouTube continues to restrict access to PragerU videos.

Facebook recently "shadow banned" PragerU, preventing at least nine PragerU Facebook posts from reaching any of their 3 million followers. For good measure, Facebook also deleted some of their videos.

A survey early this year found that conservative employees in Silicon Valley tech companies live in fear that their political beliefs would be found out. James Damore said conservatives at Google are "in the closet" and that Google executives are digging through a secret mailing list in order to out them.

Tech companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter have relied on the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a far-left smear factory that brands conservative and Christian organizations "hate groups," listing them along with the Ku Klux Klan. In June, the SPLC had to pay $3.375 million to settle a defamation lawsuit against a Muslim reformer. About 60 organizations are considering separate defamation lawsuits against the group.

Amazon.com has excluded SPLC-designated "hate groups" from its charity program, Amazon Smile. The company exiled D. James Kennedy Ministries and Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), a Christian legal nonprofit that has won 9 Supreme Court cases in seven years. D. James Kennedy Ministries is suing Amazon and the SPLC over this action.

More recently, the SPLC-designated "hate group" Jihad Watch and its founder Robert Spencer were de-platformed by Patreon, and then the crowdfunding site GoFundMe effectively stole thousands from Spencer.

Oftentimes, social media companies like Facebook and Twitter will temporarily ban conservatives for "hate speech," when the posts in question did not violate their safety standards. Christian scholar Robert Gagnon has been repeatedly suspended on Facebook, and in April the social media platform suspended a German history professor for saying that "Islam is not a part of German history."

Like the SPLC's "hate group" labels, these "hate speech" bans target conservatives, not liberals. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has "fully" admitted that "our bias is more left-leaning." Is it really that much of a conspiracy theory — considering the lawsuits, the partnership with the SPLC, and the many isolated instances of conservatives finding themselves singled out — to suggest that tech companies have systematically targeted conservatives?

All this context and more gives important weight to Trump's claims that Google is biased against conservatives. Rather than address the mainstream conservatives attacked in these isolated incidents, however, mainstream media reporters continue to cite the bans on InfoWars as if they were the main issue.

Cunningly, Darcy ignored the de-platforming of Jihad Watch and the silencing of conservative articles as "spam." He wrote, "It was unclear what precisely the President's Friday tweet was referencing, but it came just weeks after Facebook, YouTube, and Apple removed content from far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and his fringe media organization InfoWars from their platforms."

Neither Trump's tweet last week nor his tweets Tuesday morning were about InfoWars. By mentioning InfoWars, however, Darcy associated the "conspiracy theory" of tech anti-conservative bias with a truly conspiratorial website.

PragerU, James Damore, Salena Zito, Jihad Watch, D. James Kennedy Ministries, and Alliance Defending Freedom are not InfoWars. Their experiences are real, and pending litigation against Google cannot be ignored in the discussion of whether or not Trump's tweets support a "conspiracy theory."

Here Are All the Reasons It’s a Bad Idea to Let a Few Tech Companies Monopolize Our Data.

From Glenn  Reynolds:

That influence comes in part from data. Facebook, Google, Amazon, and similar companies are “data-opolies.” By that I mean companies that control a key platform which, like a coral reef, attracts to its ecosystem users, sellers, advertisers, software developers, apps, and accessory makers. Apple and Google, for example, each control a popular mobile phone operating system platform (and key apps on that platform), Amazon controls the largest online merchant platform, and Facebook controls the largest social network platform. Through their leading platforms, a significant volume and variety of personal data flows. The velocity in acquiring and exploiting this personal data can help these companies obtain significant market power.

Is it OK for a few firms to possess so much data and thereby wield so much power? In the U.S., at least, antitrust officials so far seem ambivalent about these data-opolies. They’re free, the thinking goes, so what’s the harm? But that reasoning is misguided. Data-opolies pose tremendous risks, for consumers, workers, competition, and the overall health of our democracy. Here’s why.

And from the article, this is the issue that is the most concern:

Economic power often translates into political power. Unlike earlier monopolies, data-opolies, given how they interact with individuals, possess a more powerful tool: namely, the ability to affect the public debate and our perception of right and wrong.

Many people now receive their news from social media platforms. But the news isn’t just passively transmitted. Data-opolies can affect how we feel and think. Facebook, for example, in an “emotional contagion” study, manipulated 689,003 users’ emotions by altering their news feed. Other risks of this sort include:

Bias. In filtering the information we receive based on our preferences, data-opolies can reduce the viewpoints we receive, thereby leading to “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles.”
Censorship. Data-opolies, through their platform, can control or block content that users receive, and enforce governmental censorship of political or religious information.
Manipulation. Data-opolies can promote stories that further their particular business or political interests, instead of their relevance or quality.

Let’s Bust Some 21st Century Trusts

Time to break up the tech industry monopolies.  The Trump administration is the right vehicle for this.  Read the whole thing.

In terms of stock market value, the top five companies worldwide are the technology giants Apple, Alphabet (Google’s corporate parent), Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon. In the technology industry, these firms—although hardly interchangeable—are the new Robber Barons.

Apple’s famously based its business model on a “closed platform,” compelling users to accede to its vertical integration of software, parts, apps, and iTunes inventory. Amazon, with sales exceeding its 12 largest online competitors combined, captures 46 percent of all online shopping. Aggressive pricing—to the extent of consistently sacrificing profitability—and sharp competitive practices such as below-cost pricing of ebooks to promote its Kindle sales have enabled Amazon to swamp its competitors in an expanding array of product lines.

Regardless of profitability, investors value these firms primarily because of their sheer scale—market dominance within the relevant segments. Uber and Tesla, each with a market capitalization exceeding General Motors, have never earned even a single penny of profit, defying traditional models of valuation. Investors presumably anticipate that monopoly (or near-monopoly) status will eventually yield monopoly profits.

And how have the new Robber Barons been behaving with their sky-high market valuations, overwhelming market shares, and hoards of cash? In a word, poorly. If actions were words, they would be parroting Vanderbilt’s infamous declaration.

Amid great controversy, Google summarily fired an engineer, James Damore, for thoughtfully questioning the assumptions of the company’s diversity policies. More recently, Google appeared to direct the dismissal of a scholar from the New America Foundation, a progressive Washington think tank backed by Google, for praising fines levied against the company by European regulators for antitrust violations. These are the actions of an intolerant bully.

In our digital world, the Internet and websites have become the indispensable medium for both commerce and political expression, serving as the modern equivalent of the printing press, Yellow Pages, mail delivery, checking account, and public library—combined. Companies servicing the Internet—and especially search engines—are de facto public utilities, with an obligation to operate fairly, responsibly, and without viewpoint discrimination. Unfortunately, the new Robber Barons have fallen appallingly short of this ideal.

For example, social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have been accused of censoring users’ posts; Google (through its ad placement service) has bullied conservative websites to alter their content or face financial retribution; online payment facilitator PayPal and domain administrator GoDaddy have banished or withdrawn funding services for websites whose content they disapprove of; and Google has reportedly skewed search results to omit references objectionable to certain Islamic organizations.

Most ominously of all, as reported by Paula Bolyard in PJ Media, Google is working with a coalition of liberal groups—including the discredited Southern Poverty Law Center—to monitor conservative websites for “hate events.” In reality, they’re policing expression of views they find disagreeable, such as opposition to the LGBT agenda, criticism of radical Islam, or support for more stringent immigration controls. The goal is to blacklist “offensive” sites, smear them as “hate groups,” and ultimately to deny them access to digital advertisers, online donations, domain registrars, or similar tech support necessary for sites to function. In other words, Google is conspiring with Left-wing activists to suppress their political opponents.

‘Regulate Them Into Submission’

With the unprecedented ability to control the content and operation of websites, a handful of tech companies wield greater power than governments do, with little transparency and no accountability. This astonishing concentration of power should concern all citizens, regardless of political persuasion. Yet, with a few exceptions, liberals have been strangely quiet. The reason is obvious: The Left has given the new Robber Barons a pass, because they share a Progressive political agenda, as reflected by Apple’s $1 million donation to the SPLC, and the hyper-partisan direction of the Washington Post since its purchase by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

Should conservatives, blinded by their allegiance to the free market, condone this partisan perfidy? Increasingly, commentators on the Right recommend treating Silicon Valley behemoths as the monopolies they are and, in Kurt Schlichter’s words, either break them up or “regulate them into submission.” President Theodore Roosevelt earned the nickname “trustbuster” for breaking up James J. Hill’s and J. P. Morgan’s notorious railroad monopoly, the Northern Securities Company. In the same vein, Attorney General Jeff Sessions should investigate the nefarious conduct of the new Robber Barons.

Silicon Valley’s leftist business leaders have a peculiar notion of “creative destruction”; rather than rendering prior paradigms obsolete, they apparently seek to eliminate free speech instead.

Faster, please.

Google Bad

EU CHARGES GOOGLE

A N T I T R U S T

Google Jet Fleet Loses a Pentagon Fuel Perk

Google has been buying jet fuel for it's fleet from the government at ultra-low government prices, enriching the founders while cheating the taxpayers.

Google Inc. GOOG -0.35% founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin may have to dig deeper to operate their fleet of private jets, after the U.S. Department of Defense ended a little-known arrangement that for years allowed the tech billionaires to travel on sharply discounted jet fuel bought from the Pentagon.

That's how crony capitalism works.