Water Cooler 12/06/18 Open Thread; Time To Un Friend Big Tech ?

Social Media Or Social Disease ?

It’s no secret that social media companies lean left.  When you see the CEO of Mozilla (The company that makes the Firefox browser) ousted for making a $500 donation to a conservative ballot initiative, or Google’s then CEO (Eric Schmidt) go full in to the point of creating a tech company (Ground Game) to put Hillary in the White House,  Apple making the state of Indiana back off on its religious freedom law all make it very hard to hide. It’s certainly well past the point of debate and in the realm of accepted fact. Unfortunately now that they can’t hide they are becoming much more brazen in their actions.

Don’t believe this is happening let’s take a look at what the companies are doing. First up lets look at Google which still claims that it doesn’t play games with it’s searches. About a month ago Nic Lewis a mathematician from the U.K. debunked a “Peer Reviewed*” in Nature no less claiming the seas were rising at twice the already alarming rate. The details of the material aren’t important, what is important is this was accepted and published in Nature, the premiere journal for disseminating scientific works, it passed their review, Mr. Lewis destroyed it by just reading the first few pages, the authors were forced to retract, and most importantly it was big news less than a month ago.

Now go to google search for “Ocean Rise Wrong”,(doing this in order is important google adapts itself by what you search for) take a look at your results, Now try “Ocean Rise Study Wrong”,  one more “Ocean rise prediction wrong”, Not much you get a fair bit of climate alarmism front loaded onto the searches nothing about the debunked false alarm. Now lets take the next step search Nic Lewis. What do you get as the top result ? an article calling him a “Denier”.  The rest is mostly attacks on him a little about his older articles, but there is nothing about him discrediting the paper in Nature. You can even try “prediction oceans rising faster discredited” as a search you won’t get it, but you will get newspaper reports that detail the wrong paper without noting the changes. You want to find information about this try “Nic Lewis Major Math Error Debunked”. Funny enough of the results it turned up for me one was here on Red State.

The moral of this  ? Remember Google’s business isn’t finding things for you, it’s pointing you at things people want you to see.

Ok so Google is a little sketchy, there’s still Facebook and Twitter. Well lets look at what Facebook is up to at the moment, then we can have fun with Twitter. Facebook started coming out after the 2016 election presumably because their support for Hillary didn’t have the desired effect and they needed stronger methods to tilt the scales the way they wanted them. Their first move was their Orwellian move to censor “Fake News”,  which when they say it means news that disagrees with or isn’t reported by the Mainstream Media. By their standards stories about how the Paris riots were the result of France not paying attention to concerns of it’s native lower and lower middle classes, especially people in rural areas, could be classified as fake news, while stories about how it is just crazy people upset about a small gas tax increase would get a pass. This is pretty disturbing if you have followed how the MSM has been behaving, but as bad as it is it’s just the start.

Facebook was already thought to play fast and loose with user information and now we have proof of it.

Facebook Inc. wielded user data like a bargaining chip, providing access when that sharing might encourage people to spend more time on the social network — and imposing strict limits on partners in cases where it saw a potential competitive threat, emails show.

A trove of internal correspondence, published online Wednesday by U.K. lawmakers, provides a look into the ways Facebook bosses, including Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, treated information posted by users like a commodity that could be harnessed in service of business goals. Apps were invited to use Facebook’s network to grow, as long as that increased usage of Facebook. Certain competitors, in a list reviewed by Zuckerberg himself, were not allowed to use Facebook’s tools and data without his personal sign-off.

–Bloomberg

What is even worse is Facebook’s willingness to censor and cooperate with governments seeking to repress their citizens. The latest being France.

PARIS • Facebook will allow French regulators to “embed” inside the company to examine how it combats online hate speech, the first time the wary tech giant has opened its doors in such a way, President Emmanuel Macron said.

From January, Mr Macron’s administration will send a small team of senior civil servants to Facebook for six months to verify its goodwill and determine whether its checks on racist, sexist or hate-fuelled speech could be improved.

–The Straits Times

The picture we are seeing is one of Huxley meets Orwell where reality is whatever Facebook finds it convenient for it’s users to think it is.

Moral: Why can’t the left and right agree on anything these days ? The Left is living in a digital fantasy world ala Facebook while the right still hasn’t fully bought into it.

Twitter  the last of social/networked media big three, really doesn’t need much said. They regularly ban conservatives for things that leave you scratching your head, while allowing lefties to call for the death of their foes, and violent groups like Antifa to organize using the service.

Alone any of these would just be annoying but now you also have Apple joining in and all three colluding in joint action to implement these.

Apple CEO Tim Cook: Banning ‘Hate, Division’ Is ‘Right Thing to Do’

Apple CEO Tim Cook advocated for censorship of “those who push hate [and] division” across his company’s digital platforms during an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) event on Monday in New York City, NY.

–Breitbart

Not just joining in these companies are all collaborating to shape the political landscape. The simultaneous Take Down of Alex Jones, who I would not call a conservative, but someone the companies felt was an easy target demonstrates the techniques being employed.

Overall Moral: Big Tech isn’t your friend maybe it’s time to stop being theirs.

Drink up That’s it for the Watercooler today. As always it’s an open thread

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