The head of Outkick the Coverage hammers Amazon, Google, and the rest of the corpocratic tech elite:
Amazon, a company founded to sell books and promote the free exchange of ideas more efficiently, effectively enacted the largest modern-day book burning in world history by shutting down Parler. Amazon’s message was clear: if we don’t like your political perspective, you have no right to reach an audience on the Internet.
This should terrify every American.
And how about Google here? Google’s pledge upon its founding was to organize all the information in the world and to do no harm. That was literally written into their corporate charter. And now they are selectively removing information they don’t like from the marketplace of ideas, which makes the information they cite less reliable. It’s a total refutation of their founders’ aims.
Apple may be even worse. Apple has specifically censored its own content to avoid offending China. The company literally said it would produce no content that upsets China. Now, they are selectively eliminating political opinions from the public discourse that they don’t like .
Honest question: how do Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook, and Google’s Sundar Pichal, the three leaders of these companies, sleep at night? The same is true of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey. Are they aware of what their companies are doing, or are they just sleepwalking our country into a Chinese-like Internet state? Are they really this afraid of people saying bad things about them online? How is there no billionaire tech champion for free speech in the country?
It’s not courageous to do what everyone else does in times of tumult and tempest. It’s courageous to stand up for the marketplace of ideas when everyone is screaming for censorship. That’s true courage. Is there no one out there in Big Tech who will stand up and say, “I disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it?” Or are they all cowards?
As a result of monopolistic collusion on the part of Big Tech, Parler can no longer be downloaded, and it may soon be removed from the Internet entirely. Again, this is a modern-day technological book-burning lit afire by three of the biggest American tech companies in the world.
Instead of the government restricting speech, you have three “different” trillion dollar companies — Amazon, Google, and Apple — colluding to reach the same exact view at the same exact time. They are using their monopolistic market clout to effectively tell Parler it can’t exist. They are using their marketplace dominance not only to destroy the marketplace of ideas but to destroy the marketplace, period.
American Big Tech has become our own Frankenstein version of China.
Those who claim these deplatformings and bannings are not censorship “because private corporations” are being disingenuous. A corporation is not an actual person, it is a government entity that is deemed “a juristic person” by the government. Corporations are not people, they have no unalienable rights, and it is long past time for the people to begin reining them in.
