American Elephants

Corporate leaders used to rise through the ranks, much like the military, through gradually getting promoted to higher responsibility, if you were worthy. The first mass produced personal computers didn’t appear until 1977, and I imagine it took quite a few years before they were common. Jack Dorsey sent the first message on Twitter on March 21, 2006, and it was 2010 when they unveiled “promoted Tweets,” ads that would appear in search results as a revenue source. So there’s not a long history of learning how to behave in the American corporate world. Heretofore corporations went to great lengths to stay out of politics, partly presumably, because it was assumed that their employees would have differing allegiances and party preferences.

As Josh Hammer wrote at American Greatness this week:

The increasing brazenness with which the various Big Tech behemoths distort their search algorithms to hide conservative viewpoints, undermine conservatives through “shadow banning” and weaponize the sanctimonious and self-serving “fact-checking” cottage industry to suppress conservative voices has long been clear to those of us who, to use the parlance of the day, are “very online.”That kind of common sense is no longer the case.

The American people are becoming aware of the Big Tech efforts to control conservative viewpoints, and they are not happy. The demands for the federal government to step in and break up these companies is growing increasingly common. Facebook and Twitter ganged up against “the New York Post, founded by Alexander Hamilton, and is today the nation’s oldest continually operating daily broadsheet in galling fashion.” They broke an important story about Hunter Biden’s dealings with the Ukrainian energy company Burisma, and his efforts to get Burisma people in contact with the “right” people in Washington DC through his connections with his father. The Post is one of the nation’s largest daily newspapers by circulation, and no one actually seems to be denying the Post’s reporting.

The Senate prepared to subpoena Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, but they hastily responded that they would be happy to be there without being subpoenaed. Our Constitution usually deals with what the government may or may not do, and only the 13th amendment deals with the private sector at all. There are quite a few of our representatives in Congress who have already spoken out on this matter, and they are well aware that they have the responsibility of dealing with threats to our liberty. Suppressing the views of one of America’s political parties in the run-up to an election isn’t going to work. If they were paying attention, they might have noticed that as a whole, America’s responsible corporate leaders were not out playing politics. There is a reason for that.

ADDENDUM: They also seem to have a major problem with their “fact=checking”. I don’t know how they have arranged it, but they might start with someone who is highly literate and widely read. The current office holders don’t know the difference between a “trusted source” and someone of the correct (in their minds) political persuasion. In short, the fact-checking is embarrassing.

I apparently misspoke. They still may be subpoenaed. That remains to be seen. It’s clear that there is a lot of anger out there at Big Tech, and they might do well to be very cooperative. Apparently many of their employees really hate Trump, so they’re stuck between the proverbial rock and…Did you ever hear, ever? of employees demanding that management conform to their political preferences? We have a lot of ignorance of history, of the Constitution, and ordinary good manners there.