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Donald Trump being banned from social media is a dangerous distraction (The Guardian)

Facebook, Google and Twitter peddle extremism for profit. They must be broken up – if not, worse is coming

In the wake of Donald Trump’s instigation of a shocking attack on the US Capitol, it’s easy to demand that Trump be barred from social media.

“These corporations should announce a permanent ban of his accounts,” said Representative Bennie Thompson, chair of the House homeland security committee. “Nothing short of that will meet this moment.”

Indeed, Facebook, Google and Twitter have taken action, suspending the president from their platforms or removing videos.

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The US government wants to break up Facebook. Good – it’s long overdue (The Guardian)

America broke up logging companies in the 1840s, Standard Oil in the 1910s, and AT&T in the 1980s. It’s time to take on big tech

This week the government filed a ground-breaking antitrust suit against Facebook, seeking to break up the corporation for monopolistic practices. The suit comes on the heels of a similar case against Google, as well as an aggressive Democrat-authored congressional report recommending taking apart not just Google and Facebook, but Apple and Amazon as well.

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Big Tech Reveals the Flaw in Citizens United (American Compass)

Last week, the House Antitrust Subcommittee grilled the CEOs of four large technology platforms – Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook – for five and a half hours, focusing on the market power these corporations have accumulated over the last fifteen to twenty years. Typically such hearings are superficial and partisan, with the Republicans and Democrats engaging in spats over annoying and largely irrelevant details. But this time, something unusual happened. The hearing was incredibly substantive, and members on both sides of the aisle focused on the market power wielded by these giants.

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Congress forced Silicon Valley to answer for its misdeeds. It was a glorious sight (The Guardian)

The four-hour hearing on Capitol Hill offered a stunning illustration of the extent of misdeeds by Big Tech

Our founders would not bow before a king, we should not bow before the emperors of the online economy.” That’s how Congressman David Cicilline started the remarkable hearing on Wednesday in the Antitrust Subcommittee, where four tech CEOs – Tim Cook of Apple, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, Sundar Pichai of Google, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon – finally had to answer questions about how their businesses operated. And the answers they gave weren’t pretty. The word both Republicans and Democrats used to describe their corporations was dominance, and as members unspooled the evidence they had collected in an investigation over the past year, it’s easy to see why.

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