Matt Taibbi: They are Essentially Controlling the Flow of Information

Screenshot by Dandelion Salad via Flickr
Watch the video below

Dandelion Salad

TheRealNews on Aug 28, 2018

Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi joins us to examine the dangerous juncture our freedom finds itself in when Facebook, Twitter, and Google work with the government and its intelligence services to control what we see and hear.

Transcript

Excerpt:

[…] “MATT TAIBBI: It’s really, it’s kind of an amazing moment in the history of media in this country, and it seems to have kind of slipped past the attention of elected officials and the media. We’ve never really had an aggressive media regulator in the United States. Of course we’ve had the FCC, but they’ve never really been intrusive to an enormous degree. Certainly not on the level of political content.

“And what we have here is a sort of two-stage story. The first stage of the story happened over the course of the past few decades, when Google and Facebook essentially became a duopoly in terms of media distribution in this country. They control somewhere between 70 and 75 percent of the media distribution. That means most people get their news from one of those two sources. So if you control Google and Facebook, and they’re allowed to decide who gets in the feed and who gets deemphasized, then you can really control the media. And so the idea that they’re working with governmental bodies to push some content down and push others up is unbelievable. It’s a situation that we’ve never had a parallel to in this country before.” […]

See also:

Can We Be Saved From Facebook? by Matt Taibbi, April 3, 2018

Beware the Slippery Slope of Facebook Censorship by Matt Taibbi, Aug. 2, 2018

Censorship Does Not End Well by Matt Taibbi, Aug. 13, 2018

Suggested Alternatives:

Private search engine: OneSearch

Browser: Epic Privacy

From the archives:

Chris Hedges and Matt Taibbi: The Deep Rot That Infects American Journalism

Meet the One Percent: Peter Phillips’ Giants: The Global Power Elite by Marc Eliot Stein

US Sanctions on Venezuela Shut Down Abby Martin’s “The Empire Files” + Insurgency and US Threats in Venezuela + Abby Martin On the Deadly Front Lines of the Anti-Government Protests (Updated: Aug. 29, 2018)

Max Blumenthal on the Merger of the National Security State and Silicon Valley + Russiagate Frenzy Targets Leftist Sites + US Policy Toward Global Internet Governance Is Misguided

Chris Hedges and Barrett Brown: The War on Journalism, WikiLeaks, Julian Assange and Others

Stephen F. Cohen: The Russia “National Security Crisis” is a U.S. Creation + Debunking the Putin Panic + Trump: A Symptom of a System in Decay

Chris Hedges, David Swanson, et al Interviews in Support of Julian Assange and WikiLeaks (#Unity4J)

Silicon Valley Will Not Save You from the Surveillance State by David Swanson

Paul Street, Glen Ford, Chris Hedges, Bruce Dixon: Imagining an Authentic 21st Century U.S. Left (Left Forum 2018) (Both Hedges (46:24) and Dixon (1:05:04) mention the current censorship in their talks on this video.)

US Homeland Security Wants to Track Journalists Worldwide

Chris Hedges and David North: Organizing Resistance To Internet Censorship

Censorship: The Death Knell of Democracy

Chris Hedges and Robert Scheer: The Silencing of the Left