When Big Government Gets Into Bed with Big Tech
By James Fitzgerald There can be no doubt any more that there exists a four-headed hydra that reaches into every facet of our digital lives — and which has been given our tacit permission to give or take our freedoms of expression as it sees fit. The Google-YouTube-Twitter-FaceBook axiom has risen to unprecedented power across the globe by providing the means to both disseminate and view content. There is an expression — power corrupts — but were these individuated cyber sentinels bad seeds to begin with, or did they gradually become drunk on the largesse of monopolized money? If the recent purge of Conservative “patriot” platforms, in many cases without notice or justification, is a gauge of the hydra’s character, then we might liken it to a sociopathic dictator. SGT Report, and 14 of the other casualties, wasted no time in pursuing a federal lawsuit against Google and YouTube. On…