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GOP to Silicon Valley: Promote the Far Right or Else
GOP to Silicon Valley: Promote the Far Right or Else
Several members of the powerful House Judiciary Committee are threatening to regulate tech companies if they don’t promote conservative content to their satisfaction.
Matt Laslo
07.23.18 4:58 AM ET
When an average American’s social-media posts don’t go viral, it’s often understood the problem is with the content. But when that happens to a conservative pundit, it’s a left-wing conspiracy, at least according to a growing number of Republicans in the House.
Several vocal lawmakers on the powerful House Judiciary Committee are threatening to clamp down on Silicon Valley unless companies like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube can prove they’re treating conservative—even the alt-right trolls—content the same as they treat liberal, progressive, and mainstream material.
While traditional GOP orthodoxy rejects regulation out of hand, not to mention that this Congress has been the most anti-regulation in recent memory, these lawmakers are flipping that script on its head when it comes to what they see as an assault on conservative talking heads.
As a result, they are already dangling a number of sharp proposals over the necks of these social-media behemoths that are intended to make them fall in line with the GOP worldview, including one that would end, or even tweak, special protections Congress gave to websites who host outside content—a move that would open the companies up to litigation.
“One of the versions would be to require that they publish the algorithms. Another one would be to go back to that section in the code that gives them that protection [and] tweak that so that they become publicly liable and then let the lawyers fix it,” Rep. Steve King (R-IA) told The Daily Beast. “I don’t like that solution either, but it seems to be the one this Congress is more likely to accept.”
King argues these big tech firms are, like his Democratic colleagues—and unlike himself, of course—blinded by their ideologies.
“When I talk to leftists, they really just, some of them just do not have, even though they’ve got a lot of cognitive ability, they’re wired so differently that they can’t rationally put themselves in the mind-set of a conservative,” King lectured just off the House floor. “So, therefore, their reasoning ability just doesn’t have the circuits to make an objective judgement.”
Conservatives like King point to what they say was unfair censoring of Trump fanatics Diamond and Silk, when Google algorithms linked the California GOP to Nazis and the likes of Gateway Pundit. That site regularly peddles conspiracy theories as news, like when it accused Parkland, Florida, shooting survivors of being paid actors, or even Pizzagate, which lead to a family-friendly restaurant in Washington, D.C. being shot up by a deranged conservative. Even so, King wants Gateway Pundit to be treated the same by Silicon Valley algorithms as the nation’s traditional publications.
more...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/gop-to-silicon-valley-promote-the-far-right-or-else
8 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Exactly
